Moscow's Libyan tool

IN THE great flood of international verbiage about the U.S. bombing of Libya, curiously little was said, either by politicians or in the media, about the true nature of Qaddafi's Soviet connection. Let me try to fill in some relevant details.

To the casual observer, Qaddafi has naturally seemed an eccentric phenomenon, self-generated, self-financed (through huge oil earnings, now mercifully dwindling), and above all self-motivated. True; and false. In its initial phase, the colonel's revolutionary-state philosophy claimed to be against both capitalism and Communism. Since then, he has veered decisively toward the latter, and, despite the Islamic and pan-Arab context, his political machine owes much to Leninist principles.

Quite early, Qaddafi manifested his taste for helping terrorists all over the place, without too much discrimination about ideology. Thus he was ready to send arms to the IRA, who could scarcely be described as Moslems.

The Soviets were not slow to spot this useful idiosyncrasy and to exploit it. In 1976, they concluded with Qaddafi's regime an arms deal that has been described as the biggest in history. The late President Sadat valued it at $12 billion: not bad for a desert nation of some three million, many of them nomads, with an army of 37,000. The net effect is that Libya has an inexhaustible supply of weaponry for use by anti-Western terrorists.

The Soviet connection goes much deeper, however. In the fall of 1980, Soviet officers masterminded the military end of Qaddafi's plan to invade Chad. The plan worked, even though Qaddafi soon withdrew under pressure from France and elsewhere. Significantly, "elsewhere" included Moscow itself, for fear of U.S. counter-intervention.

When Qaddafi visited Moscow in April 1981, the Soviets (if one is to believe Moscow Radio's Arabic service) committed themselves to assisting by all means the revolutionary development of "this young Arab country in the interest of the Libyan people and of the anti-imperialist Arab National liberation struggle."

Two years back, when a young British policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher, was gunned down from the Libyan "People's Bureau" in London, Qaddafi's regime got a bad press almost everywhere in the world. But not in Moscow, where the Soviet press managed to put the blame on Margaret Thatcher.

Do not overlook the close links between Libya and other Soviet-protected countries, especially Syria, South Yemen, and Ethiopia. In August 1981, the Libyan leader went to Aden for meetings with the heads of state of South Yemen and Ethiopia. The agenda was drawn up by a senior Soviet official, who helpfully guided the discussion in the desired direction of a military pact, duly signed. No need to ask where the arms would come from.

Today, Libya plays hosts to some seven thousand trainees in terrorism and guerrilla warfare (the dividing line between which is sometimes thin). Training is provided in twenty camps. As William Casey Director of Central Intelligence, put it in a widely reported speech on April 7, Gorbachev is seeking to establish what he called "bridgeheads" in Libya and other countries in furtherance of "creeping imperialism."

Against this background, it matters little that in the fullest sense Libya probably is not a Soviet satellite. I don't suppose Qaddafi necessarily consults the Kremlin each he contemplates a naughty deed. More important is that without Soviet backing, Qaddafi would not amount to much.

Given the facts and the history, I never questioned whether the British prime minister did the right thing when she allowed the Americans to go ahead and use their British-based F-111s to blast Libyan targets.

It doesn't follow, however, that the American raid was necessarily appropriate to the problem of Libya as a terrorist base. Had Qaddafi himself received a direct hit, I should be revising these words, but the chances that he would were surely remote. Ironically and cruelly, the likelihood is strong that the much publicized "collateral damage" and civilian deaths, especially that of Qaddafi's adopted daughter, were caused not by stray American bombs but by misdirected Libyan missiles, thrown off course by the sophisticated American anti-radar devices. Even if this is confirmed damage has been done and probably cannot be undone: In the eyes of millions of Western readers and reviewers, the Americans were guilty. Perception is all.

BOMBING MAY weaken an adversary but does not get rid of him. Only a well-planned coup on the ground can do that. The Americans did it in Guatemala in 1954, the British in Oman in 1970, the British and Americans jointly in Iran in 1953. Grenada is a tribute to the power of an overwhelming concentration of force.

This is not the only lesson to be digested from the April crisis. Another is one of the great standard fallacies: that in order to end Qaddafi-type terrorism you have to get at the root cause, which is held to be the Palestine problem. The ineffable Edward Heath, never slow to attack the present prime minister, duly regurgitated this one in the House of Commons. Alas, this quite ignores the fact that Qaddafi is involved in helping many terrorists other than Palestinians: the Basque ETA and Philippine Moros as well as the IRA. Forget the Palestine canard: Terrorists are terrorists. If you take away one of their sacred causes, they will find others.

COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning