WHAT PRICE ADULTERY?

In Libya, 100 lashes of the whip; for pregnant women, execution is postponed to two months after birth. That is what Libya's crazy dictator Gadaffi has decreed. He has also decreed nationalization of all remaining oil companies as a counterstroke to Washington's "aggressive provocation" of holding a conference of oil-consuming countries. (The conference produced a communique in which all but France express their unswerving determination to produce more such communiques.) When Gadaffi is not raving about the destruction of Israel, or looking for some country to join Libya in a union, or berating it for not joining, he uses his fantastic oil revenues to write fat checks to all kinds of groups after his own heart, such as guerilla terrorists, the Irish Revolutionary Army and the US Black Muslims.

That is the type of unstable Arab dictator who, naive politicians think, can be coaxed into lifting the embargo. Actually, Gadaffi himself needs no coaxing; he accuses his fellow Arab dictators of treachery because the embargo is allegedly not enough, and with superb logic, he is merrily selling his oil. (Iraq has taken the same attitude.) Most of the oil goes to Europe, and much of it, as he well knows, ends up in the United States.

As for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms, pressure on Israel will not lift the embargo, because the two are simply unrelated. Israel, we hope, will never give up the Golan Heights which in the past have been put to no other use than shelling Israeli settlements, and the sheiks have no reason to deplete their oil reserves when they can get more money for less production.

Meanwhile, the continued embargo is heading for quite different and ominous consequences. It is neither Israel nor the other industrialized countries who are primarily being hurt, but the underdeveloped countries which cannot afford the sheiks' astronomical prices for oil; and worse, the resulting skyrocketing prices of fertilizer may ruin the Green Revolution, exposing these countries to a very real threat of starvation.

There has also been much speculation as to how the sheiks will use their accumulating billions of gold and other exchange to buy into the American economy, and some analysts have raised the specter of Colonel Gadaffi sitting on IBM's board of directors. But think a step further, and with the Arab mentality: Some American politicians have been known to succumb to pitiful bribes of a few thousand dollars. What will they do when offered a few hundred million?