One Poster, No Posse

What President Reagan’s team wanted most from the leaders of seven industrial democracies at their economic summit meeting in Tokyo was a “Wanted” poster with a picture of Libya’s Moammar Kadafi and a posse to go after him.

It got something less, although a White House spokesman said it got more than it had hoped for and Secretary of State George P. Shultz was described as exuberant over the language of a resolution condemning terrorism and describing ways to cope with it.

From the White House viewpoint, the crucial item in a six-point resolution was that it named Libya as a sponsor of terrorism. Before the resolution was signed, White House sources were telling American reporters that the document would identify Kadafi not just as one source of terrorism but as the source of most of it. Still, what the resolution meant to Shultz was a message to Kadafi saying, as Shultz put it, “you’ve had it, pal.”

Among the six points, the only thing new was that Japan endorsed a program approved by European nations last month that called for banning arms sales to Libya, tightening up Europe’s police network around suspected Libyan terrorists, and escorting unwanted Libyan diplomats to the nearest border.

Americans in Tokyo interpreted another clause as an endorsement of further military actions to rid the country of Libyan terrorism. But a spokesman for Britain, whose Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher fought along with Reagan for a tough resolution, said that his country sees the objective as seeing “what we can do peacefully to discourage terrorism and act against it.”

French officials said that agreeing to point a finger at Libya did not represent a change in policy for their government. It was a matter of going along with the United States.

In such meetings, the White House places great emphasis on who wins and who loses in debates over pieces of paper. Despite his exulting over the resolution, Shultz had it right when he said that “This is not going to solve the problem.”

That, and not something that can serve as a “Wanted” poster is what Americans must bear in mind. The problem will be solved, if ever, only by hard and often slow police work, by international cooperation, by steady resolve over what might take many years, and not by posters and posses.