US attack on Libya

What to talk about this week? I wonder. Not for long. You might guess.

I should like not to go on at any length about Libya, not from sort of war-weary wish to escape from topic A, or a desire to avoid the obvious, but because it strikes me that in spite of the pollsters' assurances that about 70 per cent of the American people support the attack on Tripoli, a great deal of the passion that invests the arguments finds good friends, who are included in that majority, coming to blows about the likely effects of it.

In other words, people can agree on a great body of facts and considerations that led the president to go, as he put it, the military route, but the heat sets in when people guess what will come of it, whether that is the aim, first, of the intrusion into the Gulf of Sidra and then of the direct attack on picked targets in Tripoli, whether the aim will be achieved. And we shall not know the answer for some time.

I think I ought to say first what I have in mind by that body of facts and considerations that some people will agree about before they start knocking each other's blocks off. First, that the military decision was held back as a last resort until Mr Walters, the president's roving ambassador, and other American advisers and ambassadors had done a week of intense briefing and consultation with the governments of Western Europe, including evidence put before the Russians about Gaddafi's direct dictation of the Berlin disco bombing and an appeal to Mr Gorbachev to restrain the colonel.

Along with the briefings which entailed the reluctant admission that American agents had broken the East Berlin code – now there'll have to be another one – there came, at the start, American proposals for not just economic sanctions, but an economic blockade of Libya, including the suspension of air traffic, trade, banking, diplomatic relations. France, Italy and West Germany would not go along with anything so drastic and France would have no part of it. They have considerable trade, including arms, with Libya.

An oblique and fairly pessimistic suggestion was made to the NATO headquarters in Brussels. If the most interested nations of Western Europe – Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, which means the ones that have suffered most from terrorism – if they wouldn't go along with a campaign of economic warfare on their own, it was unlikely they would come in under the banner of NATO. The Americans had their old, sad conviction confirmed that NATO does not exist in fact as an alliance of mutual help, but as a shield exclusively against the Soviet Union.

The one bright spot from the official American point of view was Britain and it was no secret either to the British or the American officials involved that the time had come to pay back the quid for the quo. Britain was greatly helped in the Falklands War in spite of many misgivings about the whole adventure by American intelligence and the provision of sea bases. Britain had an obligation which France, Italy, West Germany did not.

What was needed now was a good legal reason, or pretext. The United States said it was acting under article 51 of the United Nations charter which reserves to each member nation the right of self-defence. Now to make this apply, you have, of course, to define an act of aggression in terms that had never crossed the minds of the 50 nations that wrote the charter. Remember, it was written in 1945 by nations whose experience of war had been preceded by an ultimatum and an attack at dawn.

I mentioned the other week that the Constitution of the United States ratified in 1789 gave the power to declare war exclusively to the Congress, but such has been the wildly developing nature of modern warfare that most of the, perhaps all of the – at latest count – 120 wars fought since the invention of the atom bomb have been undeclared wars, few fought by national armies, most starting with sneak attacks. Many have been civil wars started by guerrilla uprising against the government in power.

At any rate, on the American side, the president has, in the past 30-odd years, come to assume war-making powers in order to catch the enemy before he could mobilise. The last time the Congress was asked to declare war was against Italy in 1941.

The president – several presidents – have taken this war initiative into their own hands and since the biggest gamble landed the country in Vietnam, the Congress has attempted to return the president to the constitution by passing a War Powers Act which requires the president to give Congress 48 hours notice before he orders American troops into a hostile area.

Both the ranking party members of the Senate Military Affairs Committee have protested this time that President Reagan did not so inform the Congress, but gave quick briefings to a few, picked congressmen on the actual eve of the bombing. So there's much talk and new bills being drafted to toughen the War Powers Act in the Congress's favour.

So much for the application of the American constitution to the Tripoli adventure. But now, how about the relevance of the United Nations' charter, which, as I say, assumed that self-defence meant the right of a nation to defend itself after an attack – an attack being assumed to be a break across your own borders. Obviously the assumptions of that definition are gone with the wind in the history books.

The United States was claiming, this time, as other nations have done on similar occasions, that calculated attacks on its citizens abroad, when planned and carried out by a foreign government, constituted an attack against the United States. When this was being mulled over in London, one British official called it, 'a useful legal fig leaf', but surely we ought to see that in the latest, most maddening and effective form of warfare – terrorism – it should be clear that article 51, itself, is a necessary fig leaf.

At any rate, it became, at the very least, a plausible pretext on which Mrs Thatcher could decide to allow the F-111 fighter-bombers to fly from their British bases for the attack, especially since the French would not allow rights of passage across France and the Spanish were not likely to. It must have been a tough week for Mrs Thatcher. The dispatch of American bombers from Britain would be likely to fan the embers of the once-fiery protests against having American bases in Britain at all, which indeed it did.

There seemed no way out, especially when the Americans pointed out that the F-111 is the best plane, has the most sophisticated equipment, for precision bombing at night. She must have guessed too that if Britain, alone, came in on the American side, not only would there be new protest marches at home, but Britons would become conspicuously allied with Americans as prime targets for new terrorist attacks. We mustn't think that this point didn't occur to the French, the Italians and the West Germans, as well as the probable danger to their own citizens living in Libya.

Nevertheless, she went ahead and it will be a joy to some people, and a bitter sadness to others that, on that account alone, Britain – the British government anyway – is seen anew as America's staunchest ally.

This hair-raising decision of Mrs Thatcher's was made only at the weekend before the Monday attack, after Mr Walters had reported that there was no hope of a joint American-European economic blockade. So much for the body of facts and considerations which I think most people can agree were the preliminaries to the Tripoli attack.

At this point enters a little child asking the sort of simple, direct, awkward, fundamental question that sophisticated people tend to bypass. Why was the attack made? And why against Gaddafi?

Time and again, in a flood of statements and presidential messages and speeches, the answer has been given. To do something at last, as the president put it, to do what we had to do to diminish Colonel Gaddafi's capacity to export terror. And the president gave what must, by now, be incontrovertible proof the Western allies were satisfied by it, not only the Berlin disco bombing but many other executed or planned attacks, bits of terrorism, under the direct orders of the Libyan regime.

There's no doubt, from the president's speeches alone, that he regards Colonel Gaddafi as the chief, the worst, practitioner of terrorism against Americans abroad. He's also the most vulnerable. People who confront the White House or the State Department with the fact that terrorism is very actively promoted also by the governments of Syria, Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, are likely to receive a cold shoulder or a warm invitation to leave the building. Taking on three Arab governments, or even one more, would look even more like a war on the Arab world, and nobody in this government would give that a second's consideration.

What hope is there, then, that strikes at Gaddafi's terrorist headquarters or, by now, former terrorist headquarters, will stop him? Mr Reagan hopes he will have incentives and reasons to alter his criminal behaviour, while, at the same time, Mr Reagan does not expect the pressure of terrorism to relax.

A weird contraction. Yes, and one shared by the American people. For while about 70 per cent of the people back the Tripoli attack, 60-odd per cent think it will either increase terrorism or leave its incidence about the same.

There is abroad the uncomfortable frustrated feeling that something had to be done. Whether it was wise, as well as justified, is something we won't know perhaps for some time.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, there was a solemn, forlorn, little American ceremony down in Miami. It had been 25 years to the day since President Kennedy sent 1200 Cubans, recruited, trained and bankrolled by the CIA, to storm the shores of Cuba in an invasion. On Thursday, the survivors flew the flag they had raised on the beachhead. They'd had pitiful support from disguised American planes. Most of the men were shot down or captured. Some got back to Florida.

It was seen, within only a few days, to have been a failure and President Kennedy's popularity rose dramatically. 'It was a total disaster,' recalled a Kennedy adviser who helped to run the show, 'but something had to be done.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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