AMERICAN BLOOD

So the man convicted of bringing down our 747 over Lockerbie has been released by a Scottish court. This whole business has been a depressing and confounding business from the start. I well remember President Reagan promising fire and brimstone on the heads of those responsible for this crime. The Government asserted from almost the beginning that this act was perpetrated by Libya. In do course a Libyan agent was convicted of planning the crime. If the deliberate killing of hundreds of innocent civilians a government isn't an act of war, what is? Yet the Libyan government paid no obvious price for their attack. Why? Were things done behind the scenes?

Now, I am no Neoconservative looking for middle east adventures. But it seems bizarre to me that we didn't declare war on Libya if we truly believed that this act was done as a matter of Libyan government policy. Qaddafi's military have proven themselves incompetent many times over so toppling the buffoon would not have been hard. Of course this brings up all the questions raised by our idiocy in trying to occupy and reform Iraq. But Libya is a very rich sand box with few inhabitants. Whatever government we allowed would have been as avaricious for oil revenues as Qaddafi's.

We are told that Qaddafi is "In his box" now and this is ancient history. I suppose so, but to provide so sorry a spectacle as we see now, with the return of a mass murderer of Americans to the adulation of his countrymen is disgusting. Decades from now we may know the full story. But whatever it is, it's a sad one.