Fervor Gives Way to Reason on Libya--Raid Was Wrong

Writing for this page just after we bombed Libya, I expressed some justification for the raid. I was mistaken. Caught up by the patriotic righteousness of the moment--”We finally showed the bastards”--I did not pause for the imaginative reflection that now persuades me that the raid was a serious error--both in moral terms and for our foreign policy.

In the days that followed there were two immediate stimuli to reconsideration. First was the awareness of Libyan civilians killed, injured or made homeless by this sudden horror from the skies. These people were not terrorists. They had not even chosen the leader or selected the policies that led Libya to blow up a West German discotheque. Their only offense was being born Libyan, and their vulnerability was in being the poor citizens of a weak Third World country. They were little more than hostages, punished for the assassination of an American soldier.

The second source of second sight was the obscene spectacle of an American President, grinning in triumph, as he boasted that we had shown that “we meant business” and ebulliently threatened to “do it again.” A wise man does not exult in his power to destroy. It is not bravery to order a handful of American pilots against a small and relatively defenseless country from the comfortable security of a fortified continent. It is an abdication of leadership to arouse and misdirect the frustrated anger of Americans by equating an act of revenge with the purposeful expression of national will. In a violent world we must, occasionally, act with violence. But it is nothing to brag about. And when the act is without risk to those who command it, there is no courage. It is not strength but weakness that speaks the unwillingness to face up to harsh realities.

The bombing of Libya will not arrest the progress of the terrorism that has become the weapon of the weak--of those unable to achieve their political goals by more conventional means of warfare. Like other perverse constructions of human ingenuity, it cannot be simply made to disappear from the consciousness that leads to action. We can, and should, improve our ability to protect against terrorist plots and punish the plotters. But that will require far more strenuous, determined and dangerous forms of action than the dropping of a few bombs that, at best, relieves our frustration at the price of killing innocents.

Americans find it difficult to accept that there are problems that have no quick solution, dangers that all our power and wealth cannot easily subdue. This native flaw has been encouraged by the grotesque perversities of a national media and become captive to presidential rhetoric. It has helped persuade us that terrorism is among the most important problems of the world.

It is not.

A simple reminder of the nuclear arms race, the fear-streaked streets of American poverty, the poisoning of our air and water, should be enough to provide a perspective that dwarfs the rise of terrorism as a menace to our well-being. A daily diet of explosions or gunshots, followed by the stirring sight of giant aircraft carriers, the piloted marvels of aerial flight, the slim brilliance of guiding lasers, are all the modern equivalents of bread and circuses with which politicians, expedient or ignorant, distract us from the large and important problems that they are failing to resolve.

It is now considered cowardice, some form of trembling liberal naivete, to reflect that terrorism has causes that we have failed to address. How incredible it would have seemed, only a few short years ago, that a time would comewhen many citizens of the American nation would feel imprisoned in their own continent. We cannot escape the reflection that we have contributed to making ourselves targets. The alternative is to assume that all terrorists are agents of the Soviet Union, seeking to displace our influence from the globe. And that is nonsense. Most terrorists are fighting their own battles, not those of Moscow. They may themselves be murderous fanatics, but they have the support of millions in the Third World who, not too long ago, thought of America as a source of friendly hope.

This change in the perception of America is not the result of hostile propaganda. It is caused by our retreat from the global responsibilities we so willingly and generously assumed after World War II. We no longer identify ourselves, by policy or action, with the needs of the Third World. We have withdrawn, financially and morally, from the struggle to lift our fellow human beings from poverty and despotism. In the Middle East we have forfeited our capacity to encourage peace and have become indifferent to the open wound of unresolved hatreds and desires that breed so much violence.

Because we once seemed to promise so much, our abdication has aroused intense hostilities. It may not seem fair. But nations, like people, are judged by their pretentions. And we pronounced ourselves ally to the wretched of the Earth. Having abandoned that alliance--one which was wise, moral and just--we are inflicting on our own future a wound far more serious than the feeble blows of terrorists.