Washington blames Osama bin Laden for the deaths of some 3000 people in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Much earlier, after a mob set the U.S. embassy in Tripoli ablaze in 1979, Washington declared Libya a "state sponsor of terrorism," and closed its diplomatic mission in the North African country's capital. The U.S. also held Libya's longtime dictator, Muammar Gadhafi, responsible for the explosion of a passenger airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. The blast that destroyed Pan Am flight 103 killed 270 people, most of whom were Americans. (Israel's Ha'aretz notes: "Libya recently agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of the victims.")
Now, however, the Bush administration has decided that, his terrorist credentials notwithstanding, Gadhafi isn't such a bad guy after all. It has decided to resume full diplomatic relations with Libya. Just as, during Stalinist times or in Mao's China, a ruling regime's once-shunned political opponents were occasionally brought back into official favor and very publicly "rehabilitated," so has Team Bush deemed the democracy-crushing Libyan strongman worthy of its goodwill, no matter how many deaths he may have caused, at home or abroad.
Could Washington's new affection for Gadhafi have anything to do with the fact that Libya produces oil, America's must-have commodity to which, as Bush himself has noted, U.S. consumers are "addicted"? The United States' renewal of full diplomatic ties with Libya raises other questions, too. Among them: How much damage and how much killing can a declared terrorist enemy of the United States get away with and, after some time, still be rewarded by Washington's approving embrace? And for this diplomatic fairy tale, as BBC correspondent Jonathan Marcus describes it, with its "diplomatic happy ending," another "question now is whether the Libyan experience has any broader lessons."
AP
"Today marks the opening of a new era in U.S.-Libya relations that will benefit Americans and Libyans alike," U.S. Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice's obligatory statement about the new policy said. After Libya agreed to abandon its weapons of mass destruction program in December 2003, Gadhafi and Team Bush started inching toward rapprochement. However, the Bush administration, which has consistently placed human-rights concerns on the back burner, went ahead and made up with Libya despite the country's lousy human-rights record. Attention has focused on this poor record thanks to "the case of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor [whom Gadhafi's regime] accused of deliberately infecting hundreds of children at a Libyan hospital with the virus that causes AIDS." (Ha'aretz; see also Libération)
The health-care workers' "case was postponed last week and will resume on June 13. The six defendants, who have been in jail since 1999, were sentenced to death in May 2004. Libya's supreme court overturned their death sentences in December and ordered a retrial." (Ha'aretz)
France's Libération points out plainly that U.S. weapons manufacturers, hungry for a new market, and oil and oil-production companies, eager to tap into Libya's reserves, had been demanding that Bush restore full diplomatic relations with Gadhafi's regime.
Le Figaro notes that Libya needs an investment of "30 billion dollars in order [to be able] to increase [oil] production to three million barrels a day by 2010." It reports that Libya has begun auctioning off access to its oil fields to foreign, oil-extraction companies, and that a leading Spanish firm has already made inroads in this sector. U.S. companies that want a piece of the action - and that are probably not strangers to a veteran of Big Oil's market romps like Bush - include Marathon Oil Corp. and Amerada Hess Corp. (Reuters)
Nattali.com
Rice suggested that, if they play their cards right, some of Bush's "axis of evil" nemeses could eventually benefit from diplomatic relations with the U.S., too. "Just as 2003 marked a turning point for the Libyan people, so too could 2006 mark turning points for the peoples of Iran and North Korea," her statement indicated. (Reuters)
In turn, the BBC's Marcus notes, the latest news about Libya "will only bolster those in Washington...who argue that the Bush administration should be more willing to explore whether direct talks with Tehran are possible." He added, referring to Bush's handling of Iran: "If you want diplomatic happy endings, then megaphone diplomacy and the glare of the media spotlight probably have to take a back seat."
AP
Libyan diplomats in Washington expressed delight at the news about their country's return to the United States' side and at the prospects of a tide of American investment flowing into their homeland. Meanwhile, though, "some of the American relatives of those killed in the 1988 Pan Am airliner bombing...voiced outrage and complained they had not been told [about the restoration of ties to Libya] in advance." Susan Cohen lost her daughter in the attack. She said: "It is a dangerous move, and now they have rewarded the terrorists....The only reason they are doing this is oil." Alas, in diplomacy, money talks - but the dead cannot. (Reuters)
