THE SPECTATOR
REAGAN, THATCHER AND THE COLONEL
Our first reaction to the bombing of Libya is that the President of the United States has made a mistake, and that Mrs Thatcher is wrong to have encouraged this mistake. We make this hard judgment in sorrow not in anger. We do not bask in moral outrage. We do not accuse Washington of a Crime. Anger and moral outrage are what We feel at Colonel Gaddafi's crimes. We sYmpathise deeply with the Reagan ad- ministration and the American people in their frustration at seeing innocent Amer- icans killed by acts of terrorism, some of them undoubtedly Libyan-sponsored. We also feel that Western Europe has not done all it might have done to try to deter Colonel Gaddafi from the sponsorship of further acts of terrorism. We recognise that to deter Colonel Gaddafi from such spon- sorship was the Reagan administration's good intention. But we do not believe that this end justifies the means used by the United States early on Tuesday morning. We also fear that these means take us further away from the desired end, not closer to it. Let us suppose, for the sake of argu- ment, that Washington does indeed have Irrefutable proof of the direct responsibil- ity of the Gaddafi regime for the bomb- blast which killed one American soldier and wounded others in a West Berlin discotheque a fortnight ago, proof which it cannot reveal publicly for fear of com- promising its intelligence sources, but and Wounded others furnished privately to Mrs Thatcher (although in a Commons answer she talked only of having examined 'our °wn intelligence evidence'). Even if this is the case, do the United States' retaliatory strikes' qualify as 'self-defence' in the sense of Article 51 of the UN Charter? We have Yet to hear an independent authority on international law say unequivocally that they do. Sir Anthony Parsons must be correct to suggest that those who drew up a,e UN Charter certainly had something terrorist in mind. The delay between the victims deed and the retaliation by the .:ctims' national government further robs 1 of the instinctive moral plausibility of 'an 7.': for an eye'. And anyway, was it not o t litr rather 'a hundred eyes for one eye'? In words, were the means proportionate to the ends? These doubts about the moral justifica- tion of the attack would matter less if the practical effects were to be those intended. If all Libyan-sponsored terrorism were now to disappear from the face of the earth, and if in a short time Libya were also to be rid of Colonel Gaddafi, then our judgment might swing in favour of the action. We fervently hope that these will indeed be the results. Mrs, Thatcher in- sisted In the House that the American intention was to hit 'specific targets de- monstrably involved in the conduct and support of terrorist activities'. But it is in the nature of terrorist activities (as it is of guerrilla warfare) that such targets are almost infinite, even if your bombers could hit them all, and only them, with perfect accuracy; which of course they could not. When Israeli jets destroyed an Iraqi nuc- lear power plant, they destroyed Iraq's nuclear arms potential. That was a justified `surgical strike'. But terrorists are not nuclear power plants. Almost by defini- tion, you cannot destroy them by 'surgical strikes'. Politically, moreover, the immedi- ate effect of this attack appears to have been to goad the half-mad dictator to further acts of armed lunacy, such as the attack On an American installation on Lampedusa. The immediate ill-effects also include the temporary rallying of the whole Arab world in condemnation of the Amer- ican action, and a significant fuelling of anti-Reagan and anti-American sentiment in Western Europe. In short, at the time of writing the international balance sheet on this action looks little short of disastrous. All these consequences were entirely predictable when President Reagan asked Mrs Thatch- er for her permission to fly the mission from American bases in Britain. If she did not foresee them immediately herself, they must very soon have been pointed out to het by her own officials. And these are the reasons why she should have urged him most forcefully to reconsider. We do not suggest that she should have flatly and immediately said 'no', as the Churchill- Truman agreement theoretically entitles her to do. This is not an argument about sovereignty. Anyone can appreciate the force of Mrs Thatcher's remark that we should not stop the Americans 'using their own planes flown by their own pilots to defend their own people'. Moreover, it is mean-minded and short-sighted to support the Americans only when and where they are directly defending us. This is an atti- tude, quite widespread in Western Europe, which people in Washington very under- standably resent. No it is precisely be- cause we do feel a responsibility for what happens in the world outside the Nato area and Western Europe, it is just because we are concerned about the future of the whole 'free world' (and not least, the free Arab world), that Mrs Thatcher should to adapt Cromwell's famous words — have beseeched him to think it possible that he might be mistaken. Instead, she encour- aged him in his mistake.
That is our critical judgment of the attack's likely result. All we call hope now is that it is we who are mistaken in making it. An hour before we went to press a news flash reached us suggesting that Colonel Gaddafi had fled Libya. But even if we are swiftly and happily proved wrong by events, the Government's role in preparing Monday's EEC position on the Libyan crisis will remain extremely difficult to reconcile with its vigorous unilateral en- dorsement of Tuesday's American attack.
The issue is not 'What did Sir Geoffrey know when?' Nor is it 'Europe or Amer- ica?' It is simply: 'Where do we really stand?' If the Government genuinely be- lieves that the American military action was the right response to this crisis, then it should never have signed an EEC state- ment which said — almost in so many words — that military action was the wrong response to this crisis. If the Government believes what it put its name to in the EEC statement, then it should not have en- dorsed the American action. If there are `two ways about this', we cannot see them.
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