Showdown Was Almost Inevitable, U.S. Officials Say

Reagan Administration officials acknowledged Monday that they have long been looking for a way to punish Col. Moammar Kadafi, but they denied that the United States had sent the Navy into the Gulf of Sidra to provoke a Libyan military response.

Since 1981, when U.S. jet fighters shot down two Libyan planes in the same area and White House officials charged Kadafi with dispatching “hit squads” to Washington, President Reagan has been locked in a shadowy, frustrating struggle with Libya’s dictator--with no clear results.

The Administration has expelled Libyan diplomats, frozen Libyan assets, banned the purchase of Libyan oil and tried, without much success, to persuade its European allies to do the same. It has sent American ships and planes to the Libyan coast 25 times, launched airborne warning and control system (AWACS) radar surveillance planes to counter Libyan military moves in Africa and even quietly backed Libyan opposition figures in exile, officials said.

Earlier this year, they said, Reagan actively considered military action against Kadafi to retaliate for the terrorist attacks in late December on the Rome and Vienna airports, believed by the Administration to have been engineered in Libya. He turned down the idea in hopes of organizing joint Western sanctions, they said.

Refusal by Europeans

But after European allies refused to apply any serious sanctions--and after Kadafi dramatically declared the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra to be a “line of death” for foreign forces that crossed it--a showdown such as Monday’s was almost unavoidable, they said.

“When Kadafi tossed out a challenge like that, we had no choice but to respond,” a State Department official said.

Officially, White House spokesman Larry Speakes took pains to portray Monday’s action as a limited response aimed solely at guaranteeing U.S. navigation rights in the Gulf of Sidra.

“The United States has no intention of provocation,” he said. “It has no idea of doing anything but operating and demonstrating our right to operate in international waters.”

He insisted that the navigation issue was “quite (a) different subject” from Kadafi’s sponsorship of terrorism.

But he also took the opportunity to link the Libyan missile attack on the elements of the U.S. 6th Fleet to the Administration’s earlier charges of terrorism. “Libya’s actions,” he said, “ . . . point out again for all to see the aggressive and unlawful nature of Col. Kadafi’s regime.”

He said that the United States is continuing its meetings with allies “to encourage them to isolate the Kadafi regime.”

“We had approached this as a long-term approach to the terrorist activities that Col. Kadafi was promoting worldwide,” he said. “We were making progress; I think we’ll continue to make progress.”

Frustration for Shultz

In fact, State Department officials said, that progress has been so meager as to be mostly a source of frustration, especially for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, the Administration’s foremost champion of a tough line toward terrorism.

In January, after the Dec. 27 terrorist raids on the Rome and Vienna airports, Shultz sent Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead to Europe to ask U.S. allies to join in the economic sanctions against Libya that Reagan ordered Jan. 7.

The allies refused. Whitehead warned that Reagan had “considered military measures as well as peaceful measures and he decided to put aside the military option for the time being at least. . . . However, he reserved the right to come back to the military option in case the nonmilitary, peaceful measures don’t work and in case Kadafi doesn’t change the pattern of his actions.”

Officials said that the Administration weighed not only European reaction but also the probable Soviet response--the Soviet Union has an estimated 1,400 advisers in Libya--and the impact in the Arab world.

Aware of the Risk

Speakes said the Soviet government was aware of the risk it took in putting its troops at Kadafi’s service. “Any staffing of the missile sites by Soviets would be something that the Libyan government would have to account for,” he said. “We have made our views plain to the Soviets in the past that we consider Col. Kadafi’s regime as an outlaw regime.”

The ultimate issue, however, may be whether such U.S. military actions are likely to succeed in changing Kadafi’s behavior. Although the Administration clearly hopes that they will, some experts on the Arab world warn that history suggests otherwise.

“Kadafi will ride high after this,” said William B. Quandt of the Brookings Institution, who served on the National Security Council staff under President Jimmy Carter. “The other Arabs are going to have to side with him. They’re going to have to pay him tribute for defying the might of America. Any Arab who doesn’t support him will be viewed as colluding with the Americans to help kill other Arabs.”