Sanctions against Libya

Waking up in the morning and humming a tune is surely as common an experience as waking up and receiving a signal from the stomach that says, 'Breakfast time!' But the tune I went on humming this morning was one I haven't heard for at least ten years. It was one of the two musical themes that introduced 'Upstairs Downstairs'. The words to the tune were, 'What are we going to do with Uncle Arthur?'

And in the second of recalling them, I had a mental picture of a face, a very terrifying face, and I almost heard myself singing, 'What are we going to do with old Gaddafi?' A very flip introduction to a very awful subject, but old Freud said that the unconscious works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform, and it became clear to me that this past week, even when we've had a score of other topics on, as we say, our mind, Gaddafi has been very much and naggingly at the back of it.

This has been one of those weeks when I, for one, would least wish to be President of the United States. First, let's hear how a range of ordinary American citizens answered the question. If you have no responsibility for answering it, it's easy to be forthright and downright. Our one national newspaper – in the physical sense that it appears on newsstands and in slot machines on the streets of hundreds of cities across the country – it questioned ordinary people from New York to California.

Thus, a businessman in Oklahoma said, 'Our policy should be one of retaliation. Words and threats are not enough any more.' A waitress in Upstate New York said, 'The USA should crack down hard on terrorists and nations that help them.' A woman lawyer in South Dakota said rather vaguely that she wouldn't want to board an international flight just now, she was tired of seeing dead bodies in airports and thought the media should take a more aggressive approach.

Well, without figuring out exactly what that means, let's move on to a clerk in Illinois who thinks that, 'I don't think fighting back with physical force is the answer. We have to take more security precautions.' A housewife in Michigan who says she's as concerned as anybody says prayer is the answer, God has a way of solving problems that we will never be able to match.

Most, however, seem to agree with the attitude of a retired navy commander in California – how fortunate for him he's retired – who says right out, 'What should we do? Line up the terrorists and shoot every one of them?' That's, of course, what the White House, as much as anybody, would like to do and I'm sure they'd give the navy commander the Congressional Medal of Honour if he'd call the president and tell him who, in any given incident, the terrorists are, where they are and how they can be lined up.

This was always, and remains, the maddening problem. If only the actual terrorists from many terrorist organisations around the world would be kind enough to hold a convention in one camp, thoughtfully isolated from a city and put up a flag or a big sign at the gate saying 'International Conference of Terrorists, Entry Prohibited', there would be no problem at all and if this is a foolish fantasy, it's no more foolish than the instinctive response of all these manly types who, like General Mitchener, in Shaw's play about suffragettes, say, 'The problem is simple. Shoot 'em down!'.

Probably President Reagan was wrong some time ago in blabbing forth an instinctive response and promising to hit the terrorists good and hard and in one of his memorable lines – which, by the way, like so many of his memorable lines are quotations from old movie heroes – he said, 'You can run, but you can't hide!' Unfortunately, they, whoever they may be, can both run and hide.

However, between the angry, instant response and the formulating of a policy, there is a long and knotty period of weighing the choices, or what we now call the options. The United States was perhaps misled by good luck in the case of the Achille Lauro, the cruise ship in which the terrorists were hemmed in with their victims and when they got off the ship and were seen and put on a plane, the plane could be tracked and intercepted and brought down. That was a unique case and the president got resounding credit for it, but in just about every other incident, the terrorists either sacrificed themselves in the act or do their hideous work, flee and the embassy and intelligence services spend the next week or month guessing which of a dozen or more possible sponsors, in or out of the Arab world, might be the culprit.

After the latest – the latest, as I talk – atrocity in the Rome and Vienna airports, official suspicion fell on the self-proclaimed Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, a man who actually boasts about murdering his relations and who has announced that his hit list includes President Reagan, Mrs Thatcher, King Hussein, Yasser Arafat and President Mubarak of Egypt.

He gave an interview to a West German magazine in which he called himself the answer to the misfortunes of the Arabs. His group has disposed of moderate Palestinians, worshipping Jews, civilians in airports. Israel says he's responsible for over a hundred attacks in the past decade and the United States State Department counts, in the past two years, 180 dead people and over 200 wounded as victims of Nidal's so-called Revolutionary Council. The best guess is that it is composed of about 500 followers.

Abu Nidal's links with Colonel Gaddafi are well-established, not least by himself, who claims a deep and strong friendship with the Libyan dictator. But, while the State Department, for one, yearns to believe his training bases are in Libya, there's no proof of it and, so far, there's no unquestioned proof of his connection with the bombings at the Rome and Vienna airports. The White House and the State Department were obviously convinced that the arch-protector of Nidal and other terrorists is Colonel Gaddafi, which is why President Reagan singled him out as the villain in his press conference on Tuesday.

Both the colonel and Abu Nidal are quite firm about identifying themselves not as random street terrorists, but as saviours of the Arab world. Colonel Gaddafi himself says he has launched on a holy war. Abu Nidal's aim, he says, is to ignite a huge fire in the Middle East.

The president, and the Western governments who might secretly long to join the president in some big, bold, attacking strategy, must take these two at their word and that word gave the first long pause to military retaliation. The fact that the Revolutionary Council, like a dozen other terrorist groups in Europe and the Middle East, is expert at scattering and hiding its assassins is another reason for a second impulse of caution on our part. Massive, or even selective, retaliation on a base, a camp, a city, a compound, would be almost certain to bomb the haystack and still miss the needle.

So what, after the first disgusted response, could the president do? What were his options? There's been a headlong tendency in the press, both here and abroad, to picture Mr Reagan as the brave hothead, cooled by wiser minds. On the contrary, it is President Reagan who, before a given policy has been discussed, has laid down the precautions. No civilians must be harmed. No cause should be given to seize the thousand, fifteen hundred Americans in Libya as hostages. The target of an attack must be identified beyond doubt with the perpetrators of any given atrocity.

And, more recently, bearing in mind Gaddafi's and Abu Nadal's grandiose threats, he has added another prohibition – no pretext for anybody starting a general, let alone a third, world war. If this seems a lurid precaution, remember that the big snag the president has in mind is the thousands of Soviet military men in Libya who are uniformed advisers to Gaddafi and the Soviet planes and weapons that continue to bolster the Libyan armed forces.

The president had also in mind, on Tuesday night, a resolution passed that day by the foreign ministers of Muslim governments, from Iran to pro-Western Kuwait, promising support for Colonel Gaddafi in any confrontation with the United States and declaring what it called 'the imperialist Zionist threat' to Libya, a threat to all Muslim countries.

Any American attack on Libya holds out the dreadful promise of a war with those nations, with Soviet allies, but also a free-for-all orgy of terrorism throughout the Middle East and, by way of warning, Europe, as well.

So the president could not go on the air and say, 'For the moment, we do nothing'. Well knowing the generally miserable ineffectiveness of economic sanctions, he had to flex an economic muscle and give as much of the appearance of an avenger to ensure big headlines next day proclaiming, 'President breaks all economic ties with Libya, freezes all Libyan assets, calls Americans home'. He knew, as well as you do, that a quarter of Italy's oil comes from Libya, that West Germany is the second strongest European trading partner of Libya, that Spain comes third and that 49 per cent of Spain's young people are out of work, that France and Britain would not join an economic boycott.

Even so, the presidential order is limited to Libyan government assets. It does not affect private holdings. The American officials and workers in the oilfields can easily be replaced by other nationals. As for American exports, their denial can always be bypassed by the well-known curse of trans-shipment. They go on legitimate order from other countries which then trans-ship them to Libya.

It's a sad story. America's allies who need the trade, also, don't need any provocation that would bring Libyan terrorism to their own cities and airports. They, understandably, if sheepishly, back away.

And, behind the lament 'economic sanctions don't work' can be heard the strong sigh of relief that, unlike the leader of the free world, they are not called on to do anything but deplore the colonel and his holy war.

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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