Middle East One Home, 21 to Go

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Iran eager to patch things up with the Great Satan? Syria, the pre-eminent Soviet client state in the Middle East, avid for U.S. approval? Those developments sound as unlikely as . . . well, as the release of an American hostage by Lebanese kidnapers who apparently got nothing whatsoever in return from Washington. But Robert Polhill, 55, a professor at Beirut University College who had been abducted and held for three years and three months, was in fact turned loose on the streets of Beirut at the start of last week. His freedom did result from a combination of arm twisting and blandishments by Iran and Syria. And these surprising turns point to a new constellation of forces gathering in the Middle East, potentially favorable to U.S. interests -- above all, to the return of the seven Americans and 14 citizens of other Western nations still held captive.

Not that freedom for the rest can be expected immediately. The fate of each prisoner is subject to tortuous maneuvering among Iran, Syria and one of the terrorist groups that hold the hostages. Their interlocking self-interests bred a culture of kidnaping in the 1980s; now the question is whether they can each serve themselves best by giving up their captives. Clearly none is in a position to deliver all the hostages independently.

The U.S. has little leverage on this process, which can break down abruptly for no obvious reason, as was also demonstrated last week. Early on, the air was filled with predictions that another hostage would be freed. But at midweek the movement suddenly stopped dead. Hussein Musawi, a Lebanese Shi'ite leader who was instrumental in Polhill's release, blamed the breakdown on the U.S. House of Representatives for passing a nonbinding resolution urging that a united Jerusalem become the capital of Israel. "The Muslims in Lebanon offered a rose only to get a stone thrown on them," said the bearded cleric. The resolution was ill timed as well as contrary to long-standing U.S. policy; it gave Musawi a handy excuse for failing to produce the second hostage release he had forecast.

So Polhill spent most of the week alone in the VIP suite at the U.S. Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden, West Germany, where freed hostages first go. The professor was severely undernourished, and his muscles were wasted from lack of exercise. On the flight to Wiesbaden, Polhill exulted at seeing the sun for the first time after 1,182 days in windowless rooms, and he spoke in a hoarse whisper; doctors in the U.S., where he arrived at week's end, found a growth on his vocal cords. Still he displayed a lively wit and undiminished anger at his captors, which he said he had kept hot in order to avoid turning into "a vegetable."

The Bush Administration has kept a cooler head in its campaign of silence to encourage freedom for the others. Press and government frenzy over hostages during the Carter and Reagan administrations probably encouraged kidnaping. It seemed to pay -- and handsomely. George Bush's policy of waiting out the kidnapers may at last be convincing some of the state sponsors, if not yet the captors, that the hostages have become a liability rather than an asset. There is nothing to be gained by holding them longer and perhaps some profit in letting them go. Fundamentally, though, the hostages' fate depends less on anything the U.S. does than on the changing dynamics of Middle Eastern politics.

Iran, the patron and spiritual leader of the Shi'ite Muslim kidnapers, is in an economic slide brought on by slumping oil prices, eight years of war with Iraq, Western economic sanctions and the inefficiencies of nationalized industries. Inflation is running at 60%, and the unemployment rate has hit 25%. To rebuild the economy, President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani needs Western help. He is seeking no less than $27 billion in Western credits. Return of the $1 billion or so remaining assets frozen in the U.S. in 1979, when zealots seized the American embassy, would help too. Rafsanjani knows he has no chance of getting such assistance as long as he appears to be the hostages' head jailer. So he has turned into the foremost advocate of letting the captives go.

The President, however, must move cautiously. The Iranian Parliament is still dominated by anti-American radicals like Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, who last week marked the tenth anniversary of Jimmy Carter's failure to rescue the embassy hostages by declaring that U.S. "spite against Iran's Islamic establishment has increased" during the past decade. Polhill's release proves that Rafsanjani can prevail, but he cannot yet take on the radicals too openly. Last week he apparently felt constrained to advocate the unconditional ; release of a second hostage not in his own voice but through an editorial in the English-language Tehran Times, which often reflects his views.

Syria, whose troops occupy many of the Lebanese areas where the hostage takers operate, is suffering keenly from a reduction in support from its longtime Soviet ally. Moscow has bluntly informed Damascus that it can no longer afford to underwrite Syria's efforts to achieve military parity with Israel. Western experts say Soviet deliveries of arms and equipment are already being significantly reduced. Syrian President Hafez Assad is scheduled to visit Moscow this week. But he has little chance of coaxing more aid out of a Kremlin struggling to avoid chaos, even though Syria faces the menace of Iraq, which is seeking nuclear capability to go with its poison gas and long- range missiles. Assad and Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein share a deep mutual hatred and a fierce rivalry for dominance in the region.

Syria seems to be following an obvious strategy: if one superpower lets you down, start making overtures to the other. Assad has significantly moderated Syria's once radical politics in an effort to restore its standing in the West and its influence in the Arab world. The country's strapped economy needs Western help. And Syria must have U.S. acquiescence to join in if any Mideast peace negotiations ever start. So Assad swallowed his resentment over Egypt's peace treaty with Israel and resumed diplomatic relations with Cairo after an eleven-year lapse. He has been urging radical terrorist groups he once supported to cease their operations. And Syria actively helped secure Polhill's freedom -- enough to win Assad a personal thank-you from Bush.

Such internal pressures brought Iran and Syria together to intrigue for Polhill's release, but even acting in concert, they cannot simply order the hostage holders to give up their captives. The kidnapers, mainly clandestine factions of the Lebanese Hizballah, or Party of God, do not necessarily care very much what happens to the Iranian economy or which superpower backs Syria; they have their own fish to fry. Few diplomats hold out much hope of freedom for Americans Terry Anderson and Thomas Sutherland, captives of Islamic Jihad. This tightly knit tribal group has never wavered from its demand that 15 Shi'ites imprisoned for a bombing in Kuwait, some of whom are relatives and friends, be released in exchange. Neither Kuwait nor the U.S. will consent to such an outright capitulation to terrorism.

Other kidnapers, like the Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, the Revolutionary Justice Organization and the Arab Revolutionary Cells, seek primarily the return of hundreds of prisoners held by Israel or its allies in Southern Lebanon, notably the Shi'ite sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, kidnaped by Israel as a bargaining chip last July. Though these groups are more amenable to Iranian and Syrian influence, it took another arms-for-hostage deal to win Polhill's release. This time -- sweet irony! -- it was Iran that provided the tanks and rocket launchers turned over to Hizballah just before the professor was freed.

The goals of these groups bring another player into the circle: Israel. In the past the Israelis have been perfectly willing to release hundreds of Arab prisoners in return for a handful of their own or Western captives. But Israel has been immobilized by an endless political stalemate. In addition, Israel insists that three of its servicemen lost in Lebanon be part of any exchange. And Jerusalem's eagerness to swap is a problem for Washington, because it undercuts the U.S. policy of no deals.

For Americans, all this subtle maneuvering is immensely frustrating, the more so because any U.S. attempt to influence it is likely to backfire. But the West can take considerable comfort in the thought that the internal dynamics of Middle Eastern politics, so often conducive in the past to rabid anti-Americanism, are now beginning to work in the opposite direction.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Christopher Ogden/Washington