Yes, I wrote last week’s column about the same subject. But there is so much more to say, and Susan and Dan, who sent me an e-mail about the case after they saw the column, say it as well as anyone I know. Both of them are writers, and they published a book four years ago, “Pan Am 103: The Bombing, the Betrayals, & a Bereaved Family’s Search for Justice,” hoping they could keep the case alive in the public eye. Now, says Susan, “the Bush administration doesn’t give a damn.”
Unlike some of the other bereaved relatives mentioned last week, the Cohens take the United States government’s investigation, and a Scottish court’s verdict and a document signed by Libyan officials, at face value. What those judgments and documents say is that at least one Libyan intelligence agent planted the bomb that killed all those innocent people headed home for Christmas on the long flight from London to New York.
So, if that’s the truth about this wholesale murder–and these are the hardest facts we’ve got–then what justice does that truth require? Is a backhanded apology enough? (The Libyan regime took responsibility for the actions of its agent, but not for ordering those actions.) Is blood money–some $10 million to each of the families who lost someone–enough? Is it OK for Muammar Kaddafi, the Libyan leader, to rejoin the community of nations as if he were a respectable member of the club? Does it make sense for British Prime Minister Tony Blair to be planning a visit to Tripoli? Is it morally acceptable for American oil companies to be flooding back into Libya while the regime that blasted all those people out of the sky is still in power? And what does all this say about the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror?
“It says that we don’t have one,” Susan Cohen told me on the phone from her home in the town of Cape May Court House, N.J. As Dan Cohen sees it, “other interests have trumped the ‘war on terror’ … It’s realpolitik.”
Now, even though some folks think this hard-edged German word is an epithet for cynical policies based on selfish, narrow views of national interest, “political realism” is not such a bad thing. In fact, we could use more of it these days, especially when the administration starts talking about “terrorism” and the means to fight it.
The late, great Hans J. Morgenthau, who wrote the book on realpolitik, made the very first fundamental rule of diplomacy that it “must be divested of the crusading spirit.” But what is the Global War on Terror if not a crusade? The invasion and occupation of Iraq is justified (ever since those weapons of mass destruction mysteriously evanesced) not on realistic grounds, but idealistic ones. It’s supposed to be about freedom, about democracy, not about “interests” or, say, oil.
So why is Kaddafi suddenly exempt from those ideals? If you let the wild-eyed colonel off the hook, says Susan Cohen, then “the war on Iraq was just that, war on Iraq. They’re going to bring democracy to the Middle East? How? By propping up the worst tyrant in the region? [Kaddafi, she means.] You could have made deals with Saddam Hussein. And Saddam Hussein didn’t blow up any planes.”
Well, there is a double standard. That’s just a fact. Iraq policy has been dominated by the administration’s imagination and desires. Libya policy, for better or worse, is based on practical realities. The great accomplishment of the Bush administration in Libya has been to win Kaddafi’s help rolling up the vast black market in nuclear weapon components and designs. That’s no small thing, and since it reduces the chances that other flaky regimes will get their hands on build-it-yourself nukes, it’s all to the good.
Kaddafi bought his freedom, in the end, by paying off the United States and Britain with that nuclear intelligence as well as with the promise of oil; by sacrificing a flunky in his spy network (who was convicted of the bombing), and by buying the acquiescence of most of the victims’ families. To have dragged out the sanctions on Libya for many more years would have resolved nothing. As another Morgenthau axiom decrees, “Nations must be willing to compromise on all issues that are not vital to them,” and so the Bush administration did.
What’s disturbing for many of us who’ve followed this history, however, is that this dose of realism has come so late.
For most of the 1980s, Kaddafi was as much the object of Washington’s fantasy policies as Saddam Hussein was in the 1990s. Kaddafi was the evildoer du jour, described on the cover of NEWSWEEK, no less, as the most dangerous man in the world. He was supposed to be on the verge of developing an atom bomb, even way back then. (A best-selling novel, “The Fifth Horseman,” had him giving it to terrorists to use in New York.)
The Reagan administration, from the moment it came into office in 1981, set out to teach Kaddafi a lesson and, by example, intimidate any other states that might think about sponsoring terrorism. It sent warships into territorial waters he claimed. It shot down his planes and sank at least one of his naval vessels. It blew up his antiaircraft-missile batteries. And when, after months of these violent taunts, some of Kaddafi’s agents retaliated with a bomb in a Berlin disco that killed two Americans, the United States sent warplanes out of British bases to mount the 1986 version of shock-and-awe airstrikes on Tripoli and Benghazi. Even as the thunder still echoed in the night sky over Libya, the Reagan administration declared victory and said terrorists all over the world had been brought to heel.
Pure ideological fantasy, that was. As Bruce Hoffman of the Rand Corporation pointed out in his exhaustively researched book “Inside Terrorism,” “Libya not only resumed, but actually increased its international terrorist activities.” It mounted at least 23 state-sponsored operations in 1987 and 1988, including a narrowly averted effort to take terror to the U.S. mainland. Kaddafi also stepped up his support for the Irish Republican Army’s attacks on Britain. “During the months following the airstrike,” writes Hoffman, “the Irish terrorist group reportedly took delivery of some five to 10 tons [tons!] of Semtex-H plastic explosive … in addition to 120 tons of other arms and explosives, including 12 SAM-7 ground-to-air missiles, stocks of RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns.” Investigators believe that about eight ounces of Semtex-H (not in the batch given to the IRA) was used in the bomb that exploded on board Pan Am 103. And the alleged motive for all those attacks, all those arms to the Irish? The U.S. bombing that was supposed to have taught Libya a lesson.
None of this is of much help to the Cohens. None of it will bring back Theodora, or the 269 other people who died that winter evening in the skies and on the ground at Lockerbie. None of it will help the families who have to wrestle with their consciences as they try to decide whether to accept Kaddafi’s bloodied millions. But let’s not blame realpolitik.
If the Reagan administration had not embarked on its quixotic crusade against Kaddafi in the first place, using brute force instead of diplomacy to achieve symbolic victories, and then lying to itself and the world about the results, a huge amount of terrorism could have been averted. The lesson that should have been learned from the Libyan experience was that outright acts of war don’t solve one problem in this region without provoking hundreds more. That’s a bitter lesson, because realism tells us that justice, as we’d want it, may never be done. But at least a dose of cold-eyed realpolitik now and then might keep us from making bad situations a whole lot worse.
