On the Lockerbie Verdict

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These legions’ judgments are based on the understanding that the Lockerbie affair has been a triumph of realpolitik over all the evidence and questions of motive. Their suspicions still focus on Iran, Syria and the dissident Palestinian armed-action squad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command, and the likelihood that Lockerbie was a simple and devastating revenge for the downing in July,1988, of an Iranian airbus by the USS Vincennes, a guided missile-destroyer, in the Gulf of Hormuz.

Their cynical surprise is triggered by the immunity seemingly granted these suspects for reasons of the Greater Good by Western Governments, especially ours.

There are excellent reasons why American and British politicians, policemen and diplomats would have rather seen isolated, feeble and irritating Libya in the frame than the Palestinian dissidents, Iranians and Syrians at whom the accusing fingers first and so convincingly pointed.

When Lockerbie happened in December, 1988, the Western shaping of the Middle East for the 1990s and even 2000s was already beginning.
The Iran-Iraq war had ended, with Iran reduced if not defeated; Iran and the United States, and the West in general, were extending tentative feelers towards one another, nearly 10 years after the Iranian Revolution, in the shape of an American unfreezing of many Iranian financial assets and Iranian compensation for American individuals and Amoco’s damaged oil interests.

Both Britain and the United States, after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, saw a practical and canny man they could deal with in the new President, Hashemi Rafsanjani. He promised, for example, to try to limit the threats contained in the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Both countries had hostages held by pro-Iranian groups in Lebanon. The West Europeans and the United States wanted Iran’s help in their release and, in Europe’s case, its peacetime business.

Syria, Iran’s only Arab ally during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, was emerging from an area of darkness. Britain had broken off diplomatic relations with Syria in 1986, over the attempt by a man connected with spooks in the Syrian Embassy, Nizar Hendawi, to plant a bomb on an Israeli airliner at Heathrow Airport. Syria was also reviled by its Arab cousins for its support of Iran.

But Syria, with its vast Intelligence network in Lebanon and its close relations with Iran and the pro-Iranian guerrilla groups, like Hezbollah, that swarmed with Syrian help and approval in the fastnesses of Southern Beirut and South Lebanon, was also indispensable to the release of Western hostages and to any hopes of a wider regional peace..

Most importantly, after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990---while vigorous British-Scottish-American pursuit of the Syria-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command over Lockerbie was still under way, and much apparent evidence of its involvement was being unearthed and leaked---the rehabilitation of Syria and an almost benign tolerance of Iran became tangible.

It was no time for the West to be stirring the embers in Iran and Syria, both of whom had close, and in Syria’s case almost boss-client, relations with the PFLP-GC, which was based in Damascus and Syrian-controlled Eastern Lebanon.

Syria was a vital element in the Allied Coalition assembled to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait---it gave the American-led effort “radical” and pan-Arab cover. With Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria signed up, most of the rest of the Arab regimes accepted the Western solution to Iraq’s aggression.

In September, 1990, the Americans ( and Israel ) gave the “Green Light” for Syrian forces to impose their military discipline on Lebanon and its incoherent, warring Christian Maronite forces; in November, Britain reopened diplomatic relations with Syria. In the next year or so, all the Western hostages would be released with Iran’s and Syria’s help and instruction, and the British and the Americans were fulsome in their praise of these once-abhorred satanic entities for effecting these “humanitarian measures”. In 1991, Iran released the British academic Roger Cooper, who had been imprisoned in 1986 on trumped-up charges of spying.

In the Middle East of 1991, the sky was dark with quid pro quos.

In late 1991, Syria—again crucially---agreed to attend the Arab-Israel peace conference in Madrid, out of which, for better or for worse, the American inspired attempts to bring Middle East peace ( a pax-Americana-Israeliana ) have flowed for the past 10 years.

It was at this time that the focus shifted to Libya, Libyans and only the Libyans. And there it has stayed, pace the critics consistently written off by the Foreign Office and the British/Scottish judicial system as conspiracy theorists and nutters.

Whether such cynicism and suspicion is justified will not be known in my or Jim Swire’s lifetime, if ever. The likelihood of a rigorous inquiry at which key American and Arab, British and Iranian players will tell all in all honesty is far less than that of a handsome pay-off to the victims’ families and the uninterrupted march of Britain’s and the United States’s coincidental interests in the Middle East.

It is, I am sure, time to“ move on.”