PERSPECTIVE ON TERRORISM : What Price Honor? A Barrel of Oil : Our government’s cozying up to the butcher Assad is a perversion of our real national interests.

Hafez Assad finds humor in my wife’s murder. He can do this, with impunity, because he thinks that her memory, that justice for her death, vanished in the back rooms of Washington. He may be right.

Assad is the dictator of Syria. He is also the Bush Administration’s new friend in the Middle East. My wife, Hanne-Maria, was a victim of state-sponsored terrorism. She was killed at the age of 26 when a bomb blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988. Including victims on the ground, the toll was 270 men, women and children murdered.

The bombing has been widely attributed to a Syrian-based terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine--General Command. The PFLP-GC is headed by Ahmed Jebril, supposedly an “ex-officer” in the Syrian army and a close associate of Hafez Assad.

Yet Syrian fingerprints on the Pan Am 103 bomb did not deter President Bush from meeting with Assad last November in Geneva. A Western diplomat quoted in the Washington Post described the meeting as a “real turning point” between Bush and Assad because of the “chemistry between the two of them.” Assad, the article continued, “displayed his fabled sardonic wit to Bush when the subject of terrorism came up . . . (launching) into a tongue-in-cheek speech about the complications for Bush if Jebril were ever extradited. He would, no doubt, be let out on bail, would hire a high-priced defense lawyer, and, if acquitted, would ‘ask for a green card,’ the Syrian reportedly joked.”

President Bush’s response was not reported, but his Administration has seemed most cordial in its campaign to court Assad, especially since Saddam Hussein became its arch villain.

Yet Assad has been responsible for more American deaths than Hussein. Just one example: The truck loaded with explosives that blew up the Marines barracks in Beirut in 1983 passed through not one but two Syrian army checkpoints.

No wonder the “Butcher of Hama” enjoys the good vibrations emanating from Washington: He has literally gotten away with murder. Hundreds of times over.

The Bush Administration will try to throw a sop to public opinion by pursuing terrorist operatives. The creaking Justice Department may, decades from now, succeed in having a few small fry extradited. The department’s record is, however, dismal. And, of course, the sacrifice of a few hit men won’t stop the Administration from smoothing the way for its oil cronies and armaments pals to do business as usual with terrorist nations. The message is painfully clear: a barrel of Middle Eastern crude is worth buckets of American blood.

Another Bush Administration ploy is to hem and haw about which country actually built the Pan Am 103 bomb, as if a Libyan timing device establishes greater culpability than Syrian training or Iranian money. Does the President take us for fools? Syria and Iran and Libya conspired together to murder American citizens; they wanted to take down a plane with an American flag on its tail, and Pan Am 103 was the one. Looking for a convenient fall guy isn’t leadership; it’s a failure to confront terrorism sponsored by all three states.

Now our diplomats shuttle to Damascus, just as they used to shuttle to Baghdad. Overtures are made to Iran. Assets are unfrozen. Winks and nods are exchanged. The State Department finds a “strategic” common ground with Middle East tyrants and veils their crimes in grandiose language about “peace-seeking” being a pragmatic business.

Will we ever learn? All the shuttle diplomacy, all the blind worship at the altar of “negotiations,” all the “chemistry,” obscures the real issue: dangerous men acquiring astounding quantities of dangerous weapons--often with our assistance.

This widower cannot comprehend that our secretary of state, James A. Baker III, blames Israel’s housing policy for being “the major obstacle to peace” in the Middle East. Not Hafez Assad and his rape and subjugation of Lebanon. Not Hafez Assad and his murders and hostage-grabbing. Not Hafez Assad and his drug-trafficking. Not Hafez Assad and his sheltering of Nazi war criminals like Alois Brunner, inventor of the mobile extermination van. Not Hafez Assad and his Scud missiles, which, we can be sure, are more accurate than those of Saddam Hussein. Instead, Baker chooses to vent his spleen at Israel when it tries to house a wave of immigrants that we encouraged in the first place.

My wife was also a poor immigrant who was refused admission to our country. Canada welcomed her, but it, too, seems to care little about her death. The State Department bestirred itself about as much for a little Christian girl from Finland and her family as it does now for the Jews from the Diaspora. Some things never change.

Our leaders will always include deal-makers eager to step across a room of corpses to negotiate a piece of the action with the undertaker. Unfortunately for the good ol’ boys in Washington and Damascus, murder is murder. Blood will find a way to seep through all the lies, the “pragmatism,” the spin control and the public-relations smoke. My voice is small in the roar of self-congratulation that Washington so loves. James Baker’s Rolodex is mightier than my pen. I don’t have rich oil buddies and the ear of the President. I have only the hurt of a man who has watched his country’s leaders develop “good chemistry” with his wife’s murderers. My memories of Hanne-Maria and my tears aren’t part of the calculation.

God sees the shame of our leaders, hears their lies. The Almighty is the refuge of the weak and afflicted, the widows and orphans; he comforts and keeps us. His will be done. I forgive the murderers and those who look the other way when their crimes are held up for all the world to see. I cannot do otherwise, as a Christian. I have also prayed for the wretches. Even a grieving widower can tremble at the fate that awaits unrepentant liars on the Day of Judgment.