Dubik, who served in the Iraq War and is now a senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, framed the debate in a way to make escalation and victory the only "responsible" choice. He also projected a long-term U.S. and NATO presence in Libya after Gaddafi's defeat.
"If Colonel Qaddafi falls, the United States and NATO will have a responsibility to help shape the post-war order, including providing security to prevent a liberated Libya from sinking into chaos," Dubik wrote. "Washington must start planning and preparing for this complex and expensive contingency and muster the substantial political will required to see it through."
In other words, we're looking at another U.S./NATO occupation of a "liberated" Arab or Muslim country.
What's also clear from the U.S. news coverage is that the Times editors and other opinion-shapers are engaged in Dubik's important first step, building the "political will" for this new war and future occupation by excluding any serious questions about the wisdom of the desired course.
The Times on Wednesday published another pro-war op-ed -- focusing on Gaddafi's supposed failure to provide quality milk to his countrymen. Meanwhile, there has been zero reexamination of a key rationale for U.S. participation in the war, Gaddafi's alleged guilt in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
"The blood of Americans is on [Gaddafi's] hands because he was responsible for the bombing of Pan Am 103," declared Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, after a recent trip to rebel-held Benghazi during which McCain joined the call for a larger U.S. military role.
The Times and other leading U.S. news outlets also treat Libya's guilt as a flat fact, but the case actually remains murky.
In 2001, a Scottish court did convict Libyan agent Ali al-Megrahi for the bombing which killed 270 people. But the judgment appears to have been more a political compromise than an act of justice. One of the judges told Dartmouth government professor Dirk Vandewalle about "enormous pressure put on the court to get a conviction."
Megrahi's conviction assuaged the understandable human desire to see someone punished for such a heinous crime, albeit a possibly innocent man.
Reopening a Terror Case
In 2007, after the testimony of a key government witness was discredited, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission agreed to reconsider the conviction as a grave miscarriage of justice. However, that review was proceeding slowly in 2009 when Scottish authorities released Megrahi on humanitarian grounds, after he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer.
Megrahi dropped his appeal in order to gain the early release, but that doesn't mean he was guilty. He has continued to assert his innocence and an objective press corps would reflect the doubts regarding his conviction.
The Scottish court's purported reason for finding Megrahi guilty -- while acquitting his co-defendant Lamin Khalifa Fhimah -- was the testimony of Toni Gauci, owner of a clothing store in Malta who allegedly sold Megrahi a shirt, the remnants of which were found with the shards of the suitcase that contained the bomb.
The rest of the case rested on a theory that Megrahi put the luggage on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to a connecting flight to London, where it was transferred onto Pan Am 103 bound for New York, a decidedly unlikely way to undertake an act of terrorism given all the random variables involved.
Megrahi would have had to assume that three separate airport security systems -- at Malta, Frankfort and London -- would fail to give any serious scrutiny to an unaccompanied suitcase or to detect the bomb despite security officials being on the lookout for just such a threat.
As historian William Blum recounted in a Consortiumnews.com article after Megrahi's 2001 conviction, "The case for the suitcase's hypothetical travels must also deal with the fact that, according to Air Malta, all the documented luggage on KM180 was collected by passengers in Frankfurt and did not continue in transit to London, and that two Pan Am on-duty officials in Frankfurt testified that no unaccompanied luggage was introduced onto Pan Am 103A, the feeder flight to London."
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