But What Did We Gain? : Cuffing of Kadafi Followed a Script That Accomplished Little

Monday’s clash between American and Libyan military forces went according to script. Observers worldwide have been predicting for weeks what would happen: The United States would exercise its right of free navigation in the Gulf of Sidra, below the so-called line of death that Libya has drawn across the head of the gulf. Libya would attack, and the United States would respond. Barring an extraordinary twist, the United States would win.

The script now calls for the United States to complete its diplomatic demonstration, secure that it has registered its message: Libya’s Moammar Kadafi cannot with impunity play by his own rules. Meanwhile, he has no interest in continuing this combat. He already has what he needs to try once again to play David to our Goliath.

The puzzling question is why the United States chose to make this particular demonstration.

This past January, Washington entered a new phase of obsession with the Libyan dictator. Terrorist bombings at the Vienna and Rome airports were traced to his doorstep. He had to be stopped. The economic sanctions that followed, however, seemed unconvincing as a means of compelling Kadafi to change his ways. Even the U.S. case that he is the world’s arch-terrorist failed to be convincing to many nations, compared with the role played by Syria and Iran.

Combating terrorism is a high priority for the U.S. government. This is so not because of the actual threat to Americans traveling abroad. That risk is infinitesimal compared to the chances of being subjected to equivalent violence in this country. International terrorism is mated to television, however, and is an indignity both to individual Americans and to the nation.

Yet, given that we must counter terrorism and Kadafi’s role in it, it is still puzzling that we sought this confrontion with him. (In denials that we provoked Kadafi, U.S. credibility became a minor casualty of the episode.)

Politically, there are domestic benefits. It looks like something is being done about terrorism, even though the Reagan Administration still lacks a coherent policy and does little about the political causes of much Middle East terrorism.

Beyond our shores, it is less clear that we gain politically from Monday’s encounter. The Soviet Union has a potent issue to use in propaganda, especially in continuing to divert attention from what it is doing in Afghanistan. Last week, anticipating U.S. naval maneuvers in the Gulf of Sidra, Moscow foreshadowed its role. Reading the tea leaves as well as anyone, it took the unusual step of protesting an “innocent passage” of U.S. warships through Soviet Black Sea waters.

The allies in Western Europe, bemused by January’s sanctions of Libya and the tenor of debate over Nicaragua, are likely to wonder about the instruments of U.S. action, further U.S. unilateralism, and the relative benefits to the two antagonists.

Within the Middle East, events will have complex effects. Just as he will blackmail Moscow into providing more arms, Kadafi will use the incident to try the same tactic to gain political backing from other Arab countries. He will try to translate the incident into added internal pressures against two friends of the United States, Tunisia and Egypt, both of which are now unusually vulnerable.

To be sure, sympathy in the Middle East for Kadafi will be expressed in the form of crocodile tears. Behind the soaking handkerchiefs will be broad smiles that Kadafi has suffered a military humiliation, that his posturing did not pay off. Washington will be applauded privately by many of the same governments that will scold it publicly. But countries in the region that we want to influence will notice that there is something missing. Kadafi is still in power. The U.S. military response was hardly more than a pinprick. And there is no reason to believe that the Libyan dictator will moderate his behavior toward other regimes or forswear terrorism as an instrument of his ambitions.

There is no doubt that the United States was within its rights in challenging “the line of death,” just one of Kadafi’s B-movie formulations. When attacked, we reacted correctly and with proportionate military force. Yet it is doubtful whether we are better off now than we were before.