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 terrorism attack
at a place of leisure takes the lives of innocents. The aggrieved
country
chooses
to retaliate against the perpetrators of the terrorist act with jet
air strikes. The world erupts in outrage.
All these statements describe Israel’s decision to use F-16 fighter
jets in Gaza and the West Bank last week. Few seem to recall that
these conditions also apply to another use of force — America’s
April 1986 air strikes against Libya’s Col. Muammar Khadaffi. The
Bush administration, for all its Reaganite posturing, seems to have
forgotten the president’s 1986 raid. With America’s closest ally
in the Middle East, Israel, buffeted from attacks from all quarters,
recalling the earlier air strike may drive some sense into the thinking
of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is beginning to resemble
President Bill Clinton at best and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
at worst.
On April 5, 1986 an explosion tore through La Belle disco in Berlin.
The location was jam packed with American servicemen. One, U.S.
Army Sgt. Kenneth Ford, was killed along with a Turkish woman. Two
hundred and thirty others were injured including 79 Americans. American
intelligence sources had intercepted evidence indicating that Libya
was behind the bombing. Reagan knew America had to retaliate. It
did so the morning of April 14. Thirty F-111 bombers set out for
Libya. America’s ally, France, would not allow the jets to fly over
its territory. Taking the long way around, they struck at Khadaffi’s
headquarters, an airfield, and, among other locales, the headquarters
of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. In his address to the country
explaining the bomb attack Reagan described it as an act of “self-defense.”
“We have done what we had to do,” Reagan told the country. “If necessary,
we shall do it again.”
On Friday, May 18, a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself
outside a crowed Israeli mall in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. The
attack killed 12, according to Uri Dan of the New York Post,
fewer according to other press accounts; more than 100 were injured.
In response to the attack, Israel deployed F-16 jets at the infrastructure
of the Palestinian police and the offices of Force 17, Arafat’s
Praetorians.
The principal difference between the two instances of retaliation
is that Israel did not have to uncover any secret diplomatic cables
to ferret out evidence of Arafat’s culpability in the terrorist
attacks. Each day Arafat and other officials in the Palestinian
Authority foment violence, encourage attacks, and perpetuate terrorism.
They certainly aren’t rounding up or even looking for the terrorists
planning these attacks — and some of these come from within
the ranks of the PA itself. Look no further than the response yesterday
of Ahmed Abdel Rahman, an aide to Arafat, to Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon’s call for a ceasefire. “The Palestinian people’s response
to the continuing aggression is to move forward with the intafadeh,”
he told reporters. Or look even to the comments of Arafat himself
following the air attack, calling the fighting the “decisive battle
for Palestine.”
None of this seems to make any impression on Secretary Powell. After
the Israeli retaliation Powell said American officials were “deeply
disturbed at this new escalation of the cycle of violence.” While
Powell’s even-handedness succeeds in winning him praise in the pages
of the New York Times, it seems to neglect that the Palestinians
themselves unleashed this spate of violence when Arafat refused
to take Ehud Barak’s peace deal at Camp David last summer. But now
everyone — Powell included — seems to forget that Israel
embarked on the peace process with the Palestinians in 1993, gave
them most of the West Bank back and allowed them to have an army.
Let’s concede that none of that matters anymore. What would Powell
really have Israel to do? Turn the other cheek? Go out of business?
Pack up its citizens and have them apply for special refugee visas
from the State Department? The Israelis are using force because
they have to. Otherwise, they’ll lose the “decisive battle for Palestine”
which given the fact Arafat refused the generous conditions of Camp
David must mean the whole store.
For several months now, the Palestinians have stopped harping about
Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount and are now complaining about
the West Bank settlements encouraged by the release of the Mitchell
Report. It is these Israeli outposts that are the cause of bloodshed
in the region. But there were no such settlements before 1967, and
Israel still had to fight two wars for its existence. What could
the Arabs have been objecting to then?
Like Reagan — and Winston Churchill before him — Sharon
is seen as the ancient relic of another era, a dogged warrior determined
to secure peace through strength. That’s the best explanation as
to why Sharon would have agreed to the risky tactic of F-16 air
strikes, a tactic that won him only the approbation of the world.
Perhaps Sharon, Powell and Bush can all learn from some words written
following the 1986 attack on Libya, when America was condemned by
the world for its air strikes. “Our lesson from all this is that
the right thing to do is the right thing to do; if the configuration
of diplomatic support is not something you can count on, then you
are best off ignoring it. We can expect that firmness in pursuit
of the correct policies will, in the last analysis, bring the respect
of other countries, which is different from other affection. We’d
like them both, but must court only one.”
Those words were written in the pages of the National Review,
May 9, 1986, by William F. Buckley Jr.
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