REAGAN'S POLICIES AND THE LOCKERBIE BOMBING

September 27, 2009

Since the first draft of this blog on August 15, 2008, revelations and media analysis have cast some doubt on the Libyans as the likely perpetrators of the downing of Pan Am 103. Press reports have indicated other possibilities--that the evidence against the only convicted person: al Megrahi was weak, and perhaps it was not even Libya which initiated the bombing. Some now claim the shooting down of an Iranian commercial flight, Iranian Air #655 by the Aegis Class cruiser USS Vincennes which was lurking in Iranian territorial waters on July 3, 1988, under the command of Captain William Rogers III, was the cause. That “accidental” attack killed 290 innocent Iranian civilians, among them 66 children. Some think this precipitated an Iranian reaction—and the downing of Pan Am 103, in retaliation about five months later. That seems quite reasonable. But that is another story and perhaps another blog. But it does not change the over-all thesis of this author that American actions overseas cause reactions, and American aggressive policies of the late 80s helped to set the stage and generate the angry motives for the attack on PanAm 103. This author does not condone the perpetrators on either side…only innocents seem to die and suffer. This is a call for more circumspection from our citizenry, more questioning of our government’s motives, more review of theirpolices abroad, and a call for political action to modify or control their actions. Read on.

Fox News reported this week (August 15, 2009)that the families of the victims of the December 21, 1988 PanAm 103 (Lockerbie, Scotland) bombing were outraged at the release of a Libyan man, Abdel Ali al-Megrahi, who was serving a life sentence for the 1988 bombing of the Pan Am flight 103 which fell from the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland killing 269 passengers and crew and 11 on the ground. The convicted perpetrator, Al-Megrahi is seriously ill and is not expected to live very long. As would be expected, the parents and relatives of the many victims can see no reason for “compassion” for the man who they see as responsible for the death of their loved ones. Their great losses were too harrowing to expect anything else from them and their responses are fully understandable.

Regarding the Pan Am 103 tragedy one can empathize with the responses of the survivor-relatives of the victims but what is troubling, is the attitude of the American public at large. For that, one can blame America's general lack of interest in history and background knowledge--all aided and abetted by the American mass media which rather over-simplify, and shore-up an "American exceptionalism" rather than deal in facts.

Little is generally known here in the US of the underlying causes of the conflict between the US and Libya--- in the--so distant 1980s. This Pan Am 103 case is just one of many in which the American public seems to have no clue as to the "why" of events and seem to prefer simplistic answers such as "they hate us", or they are "envious of our freedoms" or similar pabulum offered up for the unconcerned, uniformed masses.

In this case, there is a well-documented history of our actions and of those of the Libyans. Purposeful acts such as the tragic bombing of Pan Am 103 are not random acts of unthinking terrorists. As in physics:''To every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction" (See Newton’s third law in "Aximata Leges Motus"). Political actions have consequences too.

President Reagan's purposeful over-reaction to a terrorist night club bombing in Germany (which killed one soldier) was the stated reason for a massive aerial attack on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986 which initiated events which are presented here as one cause for the Lockerbie tragedy. We live in a much smaller world than we think. Our actions in foreign lands can and do have consequences. When the American public understands that fact, perhaps we may better evaluate then act to modify or moderate the actions of our leaders when they propose actions abroad.

What is the history of this act of horrible terrorism? If al-Meghari was actually complicit in the bombing (and many in Scotland and elsewhere believe the wrong man was convicted) then why did he do it? (It is noteworthy to mention here that after the trial it was revealed that the key witness against Meghari was paid $2 million dollars for his court testimony by the FBI.) We must go back a few decades.

The Reagan years were a time when the US government initiated some questionable actions in foreign policy. Libya was only one folder in the thick foreign policy dossier of President Reagan, but it is one which is fully documented and is easily available for anyone who may be interested in reading it.

President Reagan is often remembered as an elderly, avuncular, bumbling, but good-natured President—more of an old vaudevillian actor than a politician. But as the man who was credited with helping to bring down the Soviet Union there had to be a darker more sinister side—and there was. Most Americans are unaware of the shadowy area of American foreign policy which President Reagan led the nation into for the first time. (See: http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0406c.asp) The so called "Reagan Doctrine" openly supported right-wing, pro-American insurgencies in many countries around the world--such as in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, Cambodia, Lebanon, and this policy led to great deal of terror, hardship and bloodshed for many innocent civilians who were caught up in a conflict between opposing economic philosophies, for abstruse economic and political theories which they did not care about or understand.

As a consequence of these covert actions (some of which Congress legislated against) Reagan was faced with a storm of opprobrium and an investigation when his illegal support of the Contras in Nicaragua was revealed. He weathered that storm. But during the Congressional investigations bits of embarrassing information were exposed. One was that Reagan's CIA, under the direction of William Casey, financed, produced and disseminated an assassination manual entitled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War” which recommended “selective use of violence and propaganda” and examined various ways to assassinate legally elected government officials in target countries.

The expose' of this secret program clearly destabilized relations with some allies and non-aligned nations and strained relationships with others. But it was clearly in direct contravention to Reagan’s own 1981 executive order, which explicitly banned assassinations. While the US media and Reagan himself denounced terrorism as “uncivilized and barbaric” the US policies continued to use and to espouse these very methods when it found them useful. (See http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0406c.asp ).

In 1984 Reagan authorized the CIA to equip and train a wide range of terrorist organizations in the Middle East. This directive was so loosely stated that it was understood by intelligence officials (as reported in the Washington Post in 1984) as a virtual “go-any-where-do-anything-license-to-kill”. The results of these aggressive policies were a wave of terror and death emanating from both the US, on one side, and its targets in the conflict on the other. Often innocent civilians were caught in the cross-fire. Or sometimes they were purposely targeted by US operatives to generate terror.

In an example of the latter case, in March of 1985 a car bomb exploded a few meters from the Beirut, Lebanon residence of the Islamic cleric known as Sayyed Fadallah, a Moslem cleric sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians and insurgents in Lebanon was the target—he escaped injury. At the time it was widely believed to be a CIA sponsored attack, but there was no firm proof. The attack killed more than 80 civilians, mostly women and children exiting from a near-by mosque, and injured over two-hundred. The perpetrators remained uncertain until, years later, CIA director William Casey admitted his personal culpability to journalist Bob Woodward for the attack on Fadallah. A much later interview with Bob McFarlane is revealing on this same subject. See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/target/interviews/mcfarlane.html.

Then in 1986, President Reagan decided to attack Libya. According to McFarlane's account, the attack had been planned for nine months--and thus the proximate and published cause of the attack--the bombing of a Berlin night club where a US trooper was killed was simply a cover story. However, reading McFarlane’s statements, one surmises that the actual cause was domestic politics.

In those years the Reagan administration had been frustrated and buffeted by a number of overseas setbacks (the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon, the abduction of the CIA’s Beirut Chief, William Buckely, the bombing of the US Beirut embassy annex in September 1984, and the hijacking of TWA 847 (in June 1985). All of these events--many which were responses to CIA covert actions, caused the administration to appear weak and indecisive.
For domestic political reasons something had to be done to reverse that trend in the public perceptions. Though the “just do something” school of foreign policy is probably not the most sensible route to follow, frightened and worried heads of state and threatened politicians often do just that. The plan to bomb Libya appears to have been hatched by McFarlane for just that specific purpose---to satisfy a domestic audience and boost the President’s popularity, among other even more mundane concerns. You choose which was more prominent in the President’s mind. (See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/target/interviews/mcfarlane.html)

Libya is a small (about the size of the State of Alaska)undeveloped desert country on the north coast of Africa, with a population of a about 3.5 million. In 1969, Muammar Qaddafi seized power and hewed to an independent socialist and pro-communist line. He used his nation’s oil wealth to confront the US in several areas, but mostly by sponsoring independence movements and left-wing insurgencies in several countries from Northern Ireland to the Philippines (See: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=us+attack+on+libya+1986&aq=0&oq=US+attack+on+Libya&aqi=g1).

One of his more independent and "pro-statist" moves was his 1973 declaration to extend Libya’s territorial control from the normal 12-mile limit to the entire Gulf of Sidra, a wide embayment enclosed by two Libyan coastal promontories. The Gulf of Sidra is about three-hundred miles across and and about ninety miles wide, or about the size of the Ionian Sea (which incidentally is claimed by Hellenic Republic its territorial waters). At the time, in the late 1980s, Libya was weakly defended, it had no significant naval forces, a clear, dry, desert-climate (which permitted easy bomb-targeting), and its leader was and remains a blustering, uncompromising man who was easily demonized in the press. See McFarlane interview: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/target/interviews/mcfarlane.html.

The history of the Libya-US relationship was marred by a series of naval and aerial skirmishes in the Gulf of Sidra which continued over several years. The US acknowledges only a 12 mile limit and maintains that the Gulf of Sidra is part of international waters. To underscore this fact aggressively, President Ronald Reagan sent the US Sixth Fleet into the Gulf for naval maneuvers and to “show the flag”.

Once the Fleet's ships entered the area considered by Libya as their territorial waters, the US ships were followed and harassed by Qaddafi’s small-boat navy. The unequal confrontation resulted in the downing of two Libyan aircraft in 1981, then two Libyan radio ships were sunk by the US in March of 1986, followed by the sinking of a Libyan-Navy patrol-boat, soon afterward a similar fate befell another Libyan vessel later in March 1986.

In April, 1986, Muammar al-Qaddafi, in retaliation, or at least as claimed by the CIA, ordered an attack on an American-frequented night-club, known as “La Belle”, in what was then East Berlin. One American soldier was killed, several civilians and many others were injured in the attack. The allegation was based on a CIA intercept of an incriminating message from Libya to its embassy in East Berlin.

On the 15th of April, 1986 with the CIA report in his hand, President Reagan spoke to the US nation and claimed he had the right to protect Americans from attack anywhere in the world, and with that, he launched a punitive bombing raid, code named “Operation El Dorado” on Libya.

More than 45 planes flew from aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and from land bases in Great Britain to Tripoli and Benghazi where they dropped over three hundred and fifty bombs and laser guided missiles on military installations, and on Qaddafi’s home-compound. Qaddafi's compound was the primary target. Many other non-military targets in those cities were hit as well. Several schools were accidentally hit as was the French embassy in Tripoli. The BBC reported that the raid killed more than two hundred civilians. Quaddafi's’s infant daughter, Hanna, was killed and two of Gaddafi's young sons were injured.

It is claimed that both the governments of Italy and Malta warned Quaddafi of an imminent attack by US planes. The foreign minister of Malta is said to have called Qaddafi and warned him that unidentified planes were passing overhead (above Malta) and that he and his family had better take-cover immediately . Qaddafi and his family were in the process of escaping when the guided missiles struck. The attack on Gaddafi's home compound--where several of his relatives were killed--indicates that the attack was in effect a massive assassination plot. Reagan simply wanted to rid himself of Quaddafi. Aside from the illegality of assinations of heads of state and the extensive physical effects of the bombing raid and the death of several hundred civilians, the end-effects of the attack on Libya's "behavior" toward the US were minimal. Of course if they had killed Quaddafi they might have had more effect. (See: Terrorism and Foreign Policy, by Paul Pillar)

The hoped for "elimination" of Qaddafi, and the possible deterrent and disruption effect from such a military maneuver did not materialize. Libya’s leader continued to do what he was doing--support of regimes not necessarily in favor in Washington--and in fact the American bombing raid appeared to increase the Libyan leaders popularity and helped to solidify his domestic support and popularity around the world.

There is no sound data to suggest that blunt military force--such as the Libya air raid-- on so called “terrorists” have any deterrent long lasting effect. First, as in the case of Libya the effects though widespread, had little impact on Qaddafi actually conducting additional retaliatory attacks.

The Reagan attacks actually served to strengthen Qaddafi’s political position and galvanized public opinion, in the Arab world against the US. If it is true that Libya planned and executed the Pan Am bombing, it probably made it easier for Qaddafi to organize such counter attacks. The over the top US reaction, helped to alienate the civilian population of surrounding states and increase recruits, resources and sympathy for Libya.

Finally, the bombing raid was only part of a series of strikes and counter strikes, attack and retaliation that is a well known pattern. Thus the probable Libyan -sponsored attack on Pan Am 103 was a not an unexpected response, from a state leader who had suffered through an assassination attempt, the loss of his infant daughter and the serious injuries to his sons. Reagan and his advisors were probably hoping that the raid and the assassination would have put an end to Qaddafi as an irritant and the results would have been all positive for the Reagan administration. But events did not go the way they were planned. Quaddafi escaped assassination—and went on to fight another day. Reagan kicked over the Libyan beehive and then stepped back hoping for disruption and deterrence…and a boost in his popularity ratings.

But the angry bees went on to sting others—such as the innocent civilians on the Pan Am 103 flight. Who bears responsibility for the tragedy? Is it the angry bees we blame, who were after all, quiescent in their nests and would have stung no one had they been left undisturbed? Or was it the one who kicked the hive over?

From this vantage point…more than twenty years later..when the pain of the great losses suffered continues to affect us as we recall all those young people on that plane would have gone on to productive careers, married, had children. We must ask ourselves, was Reagan’s act of unnecessary belligerence as a motive for retaliation worth it? What did he accomplish? Quaddafi is still in power. He still claims the entire Gulf of Sidra for Lybia. What has changed? From this point of view…I say---No.

Get the picture?

rjk