Oh, Libya

Hm. Harper's reports of "a $10 billion lawsuit, filed on April 5, on behalf of the families of the 21 people killed during the 1986 attempted hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73," which Harper's argues was the result of Libyan state-sponsored terrorism.

A few years ago, before the war in Iraq had started, I did a newspaper interview with Qaddafi's heir-apparent (a buddy of mine at uni), in which he made a strong case for Libya's reintegration into the new world order. He argued that Libya, which he claimed was always a religiously moderate society or at least government, had been drawing US attention to Al Qaeda for years before 9/11 (unheeded) and had basically been making every good faith effort possible to become part of the world community for many years.

A year or so after my article was published (not that my article was significant in any way -- I'm just saying that even I, a nobody, had personal proof in the public record that the Bushies were lying), the Bush regime trumpeted Libyan disarmament gestures as a huge success of the Iraq War, as if the threat of US military invasion had cowtowed Libya into finally relinquishing its nuclear program. The fact was, Libya had been offering to make the same gestures since the Clinton administration. Nobody had accepted it, because of the Pan Am Lockerbie problem. That was the singular reason.

Qaddafi, always a shrewd (though odd) guy, knew that the threat of compensation in the US legal system was very significant, so he was never willing to admit even indirect participation in the bombings. Right after the war started, Bush and Blair decided, for internal, realpolitik reasons, to accept Qaddafi's compromise, in which he gave a large monetary "sympathy gift" to victims without admitting one iota of complicity in the plot. Because the Bushies wanted some proof that Arabs were scared of the big American military phallus (even though the Iraq war, if anything, made it harder for Libya to follow through), they accepted this less than satisfying compromise.

I don't know how I feel about the Lockerbie compensation. If the US compensated victims of even a small portion of what could very reasonably be construed as state-sponsored terrorism, we'd be penniless. Yet, aside from my friend with the famous last name, I also used to hook up with this adorable Libyan guy who claimed that despite the quasi-socialist ideology of the Libyan government, wealth there is very concentrated. So why not redistribute it to Pan Am victims?