Sewing the Libyan suppliers

Libya rarely seems to be out of the news these days so it’s nice that we’re not talking about Lockerbie or Megrahi, least not directly, for a change.

Brown is being accused of a u-turn on support for victims of IRA terrorism – i.e. foreign office support is now being given - in their pursuit of damages from the Libyan Government who allegedly supplied the explosives to Irish dissidents.

I do find myself wondering though if we can now expect to see those who ultimately paid for the explosives to be pursued for damages by the victims and for the foreign office to offer support in the same manner as they are in pursuing the Libyans.  Somehow I don’t see it.

It would be interesting to see the reactions of those Americans who have so vociferously opposed McAskill, called for (and failed) a boycott on Scotland and variously slandered Scotland, when it could be shown so starkly just who it was that, at the same time as the Pan-Am flight was being blown up, was paying for British citizens to be murdered in their homes and streets and financing the organisations that would buy the explosives from the Libyans.  Why chase the Libyans for supplying the explosives and not the Americans who largely paid for them?

The whole thing is, of course, a nonsense.  Neither should be pursued, regardless of their guilt – the guilty parties are those who chose the targets and carried out the attacks, those self same ‘combatants’ who were released under the auspices of the Good-Friday agreement when their guilt was certain and they had no shame of their actions.  An agreement negotiated with the aide of and entirely supported by an American administration.

Rank hypocrisy?

There is an international trade in arms and ammo, a trade that disgusts me and which - in the UK – is largely subsidised by the tax payer – an extension of foreign policy one presumes.  Unless countries, like our own, are about to cease trading arms and are intending on compensating every Iraqi, Iranian, Palestinian, Israelite, and the victom of every rogue African leader or ‘revolutionary’ who have been injured, maimed or killed by weapons with links to the UK then I suggest our government should keep well clear of such claims.

People in glass houses and all that.