Making the Deal

29 December 2003


Khaddafy's Offer Merits Amoral Response

Libyan Dictator Colonel Moammar Khaddafy may be directly responsible for the deaths of everyone who died in the Pan Am crash at Lockerbie, Scotland. He certainly is responsible indirectly. But he must be pardoned by the world community if his offer to give up his weapons of mass destruction is genuine. Proof yet again that international politics is a moral quagmire.

Precisely why the colonel is offering to give up his WMD is a lesson for those new to the game. Germs, chemicals and radioactives are weapons that were designed and stockpiled to provide a threat. Their actual use has been held to be so appalling that the Soviet Union was prepared to disintegrate rather than use its copious nuclear arsenal to hold itself together.

For a nation like Libya, such weapons were also never meant to be used. Any such use would mean a counter-attack of unimaginable proportions. But the threat, that bought some bargaining leverage. And so the colonel is surrendering these weapons because he can still get something for them.

As suggested in this journal over a year ago, all Saddam Hussein had to do to stay in power was let the inspectors in and hand over everything. America's casus belli would be no more. Colonel Khaddafy has accepted that argument. Before the Americans turn their sights on him, he will give them up.

In exchange, he gets sanctions against his country lifted, he gets US and European oil companies back to help him develop his bank account, and he gets the prestige of being a man of peace. Yes, the terrorist-backed becomes a new Gandhi. This upsets some of the families of those whom he killed, or whom his operatives killed.

It would be nice to drag him into a court, try him and string him up if appropriate. But instead, he must be let off the hook. Justice demands his punishment, but for the world to become a safer, less violent place, his offer is needed more than his head. It is a trade-off, just for the dead against there being fewer dead in the future.

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