Libyan Weapons Plant Poses Dilemma

Israeli leader Menachem Begin faced the question in 1981 and Bill Clinton faces it now - one of the most difficult questions of national leadership.

On June 7, 1981, Israeli F-16 pilots bombed and smashed Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s first nuclear reactor so badly that it had to be abandoned.

Denunciations rolled in from the Arab world and Europe, particularly from France, which had built the reactor for the Iraqis. From the United States, too, came outraged criticism; The New York Times’ editorial voice was among them, calling the “sneak attack” an “act of inexcusable and shortsighted aggression.”

The Israeli raid set back Saddam’s nuclear weapon plans at least 10 years. And that lost nuclear decade allowed the United States - and the Arabs and the French, too - to make the decision to fight him when he later invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia’s oil.

Begin’s objective was hardly to protect Iraq’s Arab neighbors or their oil. He just wanted to make sure that Israelis were protected from the most dangerous of human beings - a military dictator endowed with a record of instability, very bad judgment and a weapon of unspeakable horror.

Israel had its own nuclear weapons, but Begin did not want to find out if Saddam was mad enough to use his first.

So the question Begin faced was: Shall we act now or wait and see?

That’s Clinton’s question today.

Again, an emotionally unstable Middle East dictator is building an arsenal that could be of hideous danger to selected enemies - a list headed by the United States and its people.

Col. Moammar Gadhafi of Libya, according to U.S. and foreign intelligence, is a year or two from completing the world’s largest chemical weapons plant inside a vast cavern dug out of a mountain.

For years, this man has been producing chemical and bacteriological weapons. The new plant would make him the largest producer of chemical weapons in the world at a time when the United States and most countries slowly are destroying their stockpiles and considering a universal ban on the weapons.

With the missiles the Chinese are peddling, Libyan poison gas warheads could reach the countries of some of Gadhafi’s Middle East enemies.

He would not be mad enough to attack and bring the West into a war against him. Would he? Shall we wait and see?

Or, much easier, he secretly could equip terrorists with poison gas components for their bombs. If a Hamas terrorist is ready to die killing Israelis in Jerusalem, why would the same man not yearn for a bomb equipped with poison gas? Or why would not conspirators planning the next World Trade Center explosion?

But Gadhafi would not do that to us, even though he had his hand in destroying Pan Am Flight 103, would he? Shall we wait and see?

The possibility of poison gas terrorist attacks long has existed because of the chemical weapons capability of Libya and other supporters of terrorism. The estimates from U.S. intelligence about the Libyan mountain plant tell us how real the chemical weapons danger is.

What to do?

The answer, specialists say, is a total ban on chemical weapons accompanied by penalties for producing such weapons or using them, as Iraq did against its own Kurds.

Perhaps that is the answer - but maybe it is daydreaming to expect dictatorships such as the Iraqi, the Chinese, the Libyan, ever to abide by bans and rules or anything but the certainty of retaliation, if caught. But terrorist bombs, with or without poison gas, are hard to track back.

In any case, what about bombing that plant in the mountains?

Complicated, the specialists say. It may be impregnable by now.

And other producers of chemical weapons might become angry at us. Libya is one of 18 countries, including many in the Middle East, that make chemical and bacteriological weapons. Many of the ingredients are “dual-use” - materials that also are used to make legitimate chemical products. So, chemical weapons production would go on somewhere.

True, all true. But bombing the plant, even if we have waited too long to destroy it completely, might make Gadhafi and other such entrepreneurs of death decide that the price of actually using their chemical weapons in missiles or in toys for terrorists is too high.

Or shall we just wait and see?

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