• Crowing softly Crowing softly President George W. Bush’s supporters are crowing that his “muscular diplomacy” in Iraq is the reason that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi decided to give up his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. They’re right. Critics
• Crowing softly
Crowing softly
President George W. Bush’s supporters are crowing that his “muscular diplomacy” in Iraq is the reason that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi decided to give up his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. They’re right.
Critics of Mr. Bush’s unilateralist foreign policy say no, it was nearly two decades of work by many nations in enforcing sanctions against Libya that finally brought Col. Gadhafi to heel. They’re right, too.
That Col. Gadhafi made his announcement barely a week after fellow pariah Saddam Hussein was dragged out of a hole is probably no coincidence.
That he chose to deal with Great Britain, America’s staunchest ally in Iraq, instead of France, with whom he had better relations, suggests Col. Gadhafi may be following world events rather closely.
Still, Libya’s decision is the culmination of a long diplomatic process, not a barrel-of-the-gun decision. As a young man – he was only 27 when he took power in 1969 – Col. Gadhafi harbored delusions of uniting Africa and the Muslim world against America and the West. He began trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction in the 1970s and turned Libya into a sponsor for world terrorism.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan expelled Libya’s diplomats from the United States and began a series of escalating economic sanctions that culminated in ordering U.S. oil companies to stop doing business in Libya. In April 1986, in response to a series of terrorist attacks, Mr. Reagan sent Navy jets to bomb five military targets and Col. Gadhafi’s homes. The raids missed the dictator, but killed his infant daughter and some 100 other people.
The Libyan leader remained defiant. But after 1988, when Libya was linked to the bombing of a Pan American Airways jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people, the United Nations imposed its own set of sanctions. The noose tightened as years went by. With fewer customers for its oil and less foreign investment in the oil infrastructure, Libya’s economy was crippled. Col. Gadhafi underwent a kind of metamorphosis.
By 1993 he was warning the West about terrorism in Iraq. By 2001 he was cooperating with Mr. Bush’s war on terrorism. Earlier this year, he agreed to pay up to $10 billion in reparations to families of the Lockerbie victims. He has begun dismantling his secret police. In March, as the invasion of Iraq was starting, he opened negotiations with the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair on dismantling Libya’s weapons program.
Since then, CIA investigators have been allowed what one called “extraordinary” access to suspected weapons sites within Libya. And last Friday, Col. Gadhafi capitulated entirely, agreeing to destroy weapons stocks and programs and allow full U.N. monitoring.
Even if it were the last step in a long process, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair deserve to crow, but softly. In March, they started a war to force a dictator to rid his country of weapons of mass destruction. They finally succeeded.
St. Louis Post-Disptach
