LETTER FROM EUROPE: In Love With Libya
Gedmin, Jeffrey
LETTER FROM EUROPE JEFFREY GEDMIN In Love With Libya N THE ONE HAND, Europe can be a little flaky. Significant minorities here still believe that it was not Osama bin Laden but shadowy forces...
...According to her own web site, Fitts, now on tour in Europe, inspires audiences with "fierce feminine embodiments of nature who transform poison into liberating democratic tonic 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2003 for the sake of all creation" and takes on "the real deal of the evil manifesting in our world...
...The primary source for "Lies and Truths" is a crackpot American group called "unansweredquestions.org," an outfit whose Number Two is a former army band conductor who has linked the American President to Mexican drug traffickers...
...The U.S...
...Osama is watching it all...
...When he is not lobbying for Libya to rejoin the international trading circuit, Saif al Islam is pursuing his career as a painter...
...Rule of thumb for the Bush administration: Don't worry so much about what is in the back of a dictator's mind as being clear with him about what is in the back of your own mind...
...reaction to all this...
...J REY GEDMIN pensation for the La-Belle disco bombing...
...Britain agrees if Libya shows "genuine remorse," as an editorial in the London Evening Standard put it...
...Paris had threatened to veto sanction-lifting because families originally received compensation ranging from $3,378 to $33,780, a small fraction of the millions each Lockerbie family is likely to receive...
...militarily against Taliban remnants in Afghanistan...
...Maybe he'll eventually say he's sorry—kind of—and offer the families of 9/11 victims hefty sums so that he can get off the Most Wanted List...
...in Iraq...
...A $2.7 billion compensation package to the Lockerbie families recently spurred the United Nations to lift sanctions...
...In a recent interview in Die Welt am Sonntag, Saif al Islam warned Germany not to help the U.S...
...Impressed, U.N...
...This group includes, well, Libya for example, which suffered Ronald Reagan's terrorist bombing of Tripoli...
...In 1984, an official of Libya's London Embassy shot and killed a London policewoman, Yvonne Fletcher...
...Why does the American government find it so difficult to be forthcoming...
...To assess the quality of Libya's "remorse," listen to Saif al Islam Qaddafi, the 31-year-old son and probable heir of the Libyan dictator...
...Where is Margaret Thatcher when we need her...
...Nearly everybody agrees that Libya has earned its Get Out of Jail card...
...For its part, the CIA, in an unclassified report, has confirmed Libya's "continued interest in nuclear weapons...
...First, the French produced their spate of articles, books and conferences advancing the theory...
...While coalition forces fought to end Saddam's dictatorship, angry mobs, encouraged by the Libyan government, attacked Kuwait's embassy in Tripoli and raised the Iraqi flag...
...It is a demented thought, of course...
...Libya's stint as chairman of the UN Human Rights Commission has apparently not curbed its appetite for one-party rule, state-controlled media, political prisoners and torture...
...Libya is watching how we deal with Iran...
...As recently as August, peacekeepers intercepted a Libyan plane packed with arms and ammunitions for Liberia...
...Libyans have also promised Germany comIn 1989, 170 people perished in a French aircraft Libyan terrorists blew up over Niger...
...The attacks [of September were against America," he said...
...France and Germany tried teaming up with Russia and China to block the U.S...
...Note as well that Freedom House continues to rank Libya as a leading human rights abuser...
...Ousted president Charles Taylor was a Qaddafi protege...
...Significant minorities here still believe that it was not Osama bin Laden but shadowy forces within the U.S...
...It condemns Israel as a racist, aggressor state, while nodding approvingly at Palestinian terrorism...
...Now comes a German treatment of the subject in a prime-time public television documentary called "Lies and Truths about September 11...
...war planes take down United Airlines flight 93 over Pennsylvania...
...The Iranians are watching how we deal with North Korea...
...Meanwhile, the country has continued to supply weapons to combatants across Africa...
...Other senior administration officials say Qaddafi is still developing chemical and biological weapons programs...
...In 1989 170 people perished in a French aircraft Libyan terrorists blew up over Niger...
...The Qaddafi clan has likewise cheered Iraqi terrorists...
...Libyan remorse...
...government that orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon two years ago...
...That's a nice touch...
...It may be good business, but it's strategic insanity...
...So does Silvio Berlusconi's Italy, having alreadyarmounced it would use its current presidencyof the EU to lift the international embargo...
...The Qaddafi Foundation's position on the Peace Process is predictable...
...Libya's agreement to make an additional payment to the French for the 1989 attack over Niger proved key at the Security Council...
...American industry, no surprise, wants to follow suit...
...Accommodation and acquiescence, apparently...
...Britain reestablished diplomatic relations with Libya in 1999 after Tripoli accepted "general responsibility" for the 1984 London shooting...
...One of his paintings, "The Challenge," shown recently in a London exhibit, portrayed his father as a "unique eagle" in the sky prepared to do battle with the West's "new crusade...
...OCTOBER 2003 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 41...
...White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has said the Bush administration does not oppose lifting UN sanctions...
...The effort failed, but it managed to tear the NATO alliance apart...
...If Germany stands by America militarily, it could itself become the target of such attacks...
...Secretary General Kofi Annan says it's time to "resolve the Libyan issue...
...As the former colonial power, Italy has traditionally been Libya's biggest trading partner...
...Howard's trade secretary visited Libya a year ago to rev up commercial ties...
...A brooding narrator, speaking over a spooky soundtrack, asks: Did U.S...
...Now some of our allies from "Operation Enduring Freedom" are pushing effectively to allow Muammar Qaddafi's Libya rejoin the family of nations...
...In 1986 Libyan agents bombed a nightclub in Berlin, killing three and injuring more than 200...
...Saif al Islam (the name means "sword of Islam") runs the Qaddafi Foundation, which moves vast sums of compensation money to individuals his father deems world-wide victims of terrorism...
...John Howard's Australia, also part of the U.S-led coalition that ousted Saddam Hussein, supports ending the embargo...
...The work of the group's president, Barbara Austin Fitts—who actually worked at Housing and Urban Development during Bush I—has been acclaimed by no less an authority than "Conspiracy Planet," a web site dedicated to zany theories about the workings of the world...
...What hit the Pentagon, a bomb or missile...
...On the other hand, there's a serious Europe that can pose significant challenges to America's war on terrorism...
...That's very, very far from Europe...
...So why not tell allies who counsel appeasement for Libya that we might reconsider the International Criminal Court if they'll try—and get a conviction—for Muammar Qaddafi as the first case...
...On December 21, 1988, Libyans bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie, killing 270...
...The younger Qaddafi, a hip playboy, has been jetting around Europe, dangling prospects of lucrative oil deals before businessmen and pols and giving others lectures with veiled threats...
...Jeffrey Gedmin is director of theAspen Institute Berlin...
...The story is as pitiful as it is straightforward...
Vol. 36 • October 2003 • No. 5
