Don't Dictate To Europe

The majority opinion, along with President Reagan, calls on our European allies to sever economic relations with Libya, which has been flimsily termed a "terrorist state" by disturbing numbers of centrists as well as the right. All this furor results from some recent acts of irrational slaughter that claimed fewer than 50 civilians--a trivial toll in comparison with, for example, the Lebanese citizens killed during the Israeli occupation of that country, or for that matter with last year's butchery by U.S.-funded Nicaraguan "contras" and the U.S.-supported apartheid government of South Africa. In the recent airport attacks, a handful of Americans died along with several handfuls of Europeans. This episode, says Reagan and now The Crimson, gives the U.S. the right to set European countries' foreign policies.

In the first place, while Americans have almost nothing to lose economically by a strengthened version of our present sanctions against Libya, our allies would be hard hit indeed, and that means their citizens would suffer. In the second place, no one has produced any hard evidence for the record that Libya harbors the terrorists concerned here. For that matter, no one has established the terrorists' identity. Israeli officials have said the culprit probably isn't Abu Nidal; their conclusion would appear to destroy Reagan's theory prima facie. And in addition, even Reagan's Defense Department, in its report on the airport murders, didn't blame Libya.

The basic message is that Reagan doesn't like Khadafy and wants to make things less pleasant in his country. Let Reagan make that case before the American people, as he did with less-than-stellar success before our allies. Distorting the facts and spewing jingoistic hype didn't impress them, and it shouldn't impress us.