Sir: Your coverage of the American attack upon terrorist bases
in Libya (19 April) was shameful. Christopher Hitchens's pre- dictably snide comments about the La Belle discotheque in Berlin were in typical- ly bad taste. (There was no mention anywhere in the issue of the 21-year-old black sergeant from Detroit killed in the attack.) Charles Glass implied that any attack against terrorists was self-defeating and Alan Watkins's sickening reaction to the murders of American citizens — 'When Americans get hurt they are tremendous cry-babies' — reached new depths of Puerility and indecency. But your own editorial was perhaps the most worrying. On its own terms it ignored the possibilities that appeasement is not always the most effective way to counter- act violence; that Gaddafi has in the past (as the French have seen in Chad) re- sponded to force rather than argument; that international law cannot deal with the unique dangers of state terrorism; that the action was as much caused by European tinwillingness to co-ordinate any less dras- tic strategy that could respond to American humiliation as by a trigger-happy Presi- dent; and that military attack with inciden- tal civilian casualties is morally proportion- ate to a shameless campaign of terror designed exclusively for innocent civilians. It might even be argued that an alliance of any meaning will require temporary sacri- fice of national self-interest, whether American or British, from time to time.
But the most glaring omission was simp- ly a sense of overwhelming outrage at the attacks on American and British civilians. It seems that your main concern was with the consequences and moral probity of reaction rather than with terrorism itself. In so doing, you have largely conceded what terrorists most seek — a numbed acceptance of their barbarism. You natur- ally cede them the initiative. Perhaps it is because the United States government has not tolerated a continual level of terrorist violence for two decades within its own country that it is still able to feel a sense of overpowering rage at the actions of terror- ists against its own citizens. That rage is neither naive nor cry-baby. It simply re- flects standards of order and self-respect that the British have been slowly taught not to expect.
Andrew Sullivan
Lowell House, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
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