The Brits are in a mess: They have freed the Lockerbie bomber for reasons that nobody truly, or reasonably, believes. And yet, maybe they know what they’re doing.
True, something always seems terribly off about Gordon Brown’s government. It is not just that so much of what they do has been incompetent, but that it looks squirrelly, shame-faced, and defensive. They’re not just sneaks, but they keep getting caught.
In theory, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi
has been freed from his life sentence in Scotland to return to Libya on compassionate grounds: He has cancer and will reportedly be dead in three months. This theory has not been helped by the fact that he is ambulatory, almost jauntily so, and
has been giving interviews to almost anyone who asks. But even more to the point, governments, as everybody knows, seldom do the compassionate thing. They do the most politically viable and expedient thing. When they do something different than that, every sentient person’s don’t-ever-trust-a-politician-radar goes off. In this instance, the Scottish government, full of sudden, abiding, compassion, and with hardly an objection from the British prime minister, decides to free one of terrorism’s most dastardly evil-doers, even knowing that it would provoke a political firestorm large enough to threaten many careers.
This unlikely story
intersects with the strange tale of Libyan leader Col. Gadhafi, once a renegade, but more recently a man assiduously courting Western leaders and allowing himself to be courted by them. He is one, and arguably the only, example of any real progress of moving radical Arab figures in a more moderate direction. Almost everybody, from the Bush administration to, most recently, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy to the labour government in Britain, has been unseemly in extending this rogue (and murderer) an amount of pomp and ritual if not outright affection.
So, yeah, we might reasonably suppose a deal. (Gadhafi’s son, who flew to Scotland to pick up the bomber,
certainly suggested as much—although he is probably less than reliable). It is just so cold war, when a prison exchange was part of the currency of many successful negotiations. The Brits especially seemed to love those kind of realpolitik transactions and shenanigans (the Brits love being the middlemen). It’s so MI5.
True, it seems like they didn’t quite know how to pull this off until the guy got his convenient terminal diagnosis. At that point, they left it to the Scottish government, which, in its antipathy to the English, likes to do the opposite of what London might logically have wanted it to do (this, also, probably pleased many people in Westminster—screwing the Scots).
And where is the US in this? Various figures in the Obama government are now expressing great umbrage. But who believes there wasn’t in Langley, if not the White House and State Department, some careful consideration of the merits of such an exchange, the fall-out from which would fall on the shoulders of the Brits (or, even, more irrelevantly, the Scots).
And, while it’s a repellent move, who’s to say it’s not a very savvy one. Maybe we’re actually getting something for it. A dying man (well, maybe dying) gets a brief respite, and we get a little more leverage with our sketchy new ally,
some major oil contracts, and, even, a safer world. It’s oddly reassuring that somebody might be trying to make a good deal.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com.
