The Lockerbie PanAm plane was probably blown up by Iran. The only credible eyewitness (to the purchase of the luggage the bomb was in) described him as “Iranian” (and 6’2” and early ‘50’s), not, as the defendant, Arab, 5’8” and 32. But the real question is Motive. To accuse Iran, we’d have to remember WHY they did it. And in America we will viciously defend our Amnesia. Like Pinter said to the Nobel Prize committee, “it didn’t happen”. Sure, the USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian civilian jumbo jet on its way to Mecca,a scheduled commercial flight, on time, on course. Acts of murder by the west on religious pilgrims don’t go unanswered in the Middle East. So a mirror-image crime 11 months later and we never even suspect the “Axis of Evil”? No! That would require us to acknoledge a fact that is inconsistant with the deluded self-image that underlies our imperial hubris. Murdered Iranian pilgrims? It never happened.

You mean that Col. Muammar Gaddafi isn’t completely and homicidally crazy anymore? I’m impressed at how far he has come since his psychotic days.

But wait! Maybe it’s not that Gaddafi has become less crazy. Maybe the administration is going half-way (or more) in the other direction to meet him.