Fairness before justice?

Editorial

The Iranian nuclear situation may move to a different level on the international diplomatic front soon, with meetings slated between Iran and the five veto-holding members of the United Nations Security Council.

While the diplomacy dance gears up, there are actually voices making the case that, since other countries have nuclear weapons or capabilities, why shouldn't Iran? In a world where there are actually activists – some of them in Canada – actively demanding no intervention in the Darfur genocide, any ideas are considered entirely valid as long as anyone, however deluded or malevolent, thinks them. Fairness and justice would demand, wouldn't they, that one country without nuclear weapons has as much right as their enemy or neighbor who does have them because, well, it's only fair.

But fairness loses all meaning when judgments of such absurd inhumanity claim the title.

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the commencement of the Second World War. The lessons of that war's cataclysmic history have been wasted on many contemporary observers in innumerable ways. Applicable to today's discussion is the absurdity of appeasing dictators and assuming that justice means parity, even for malevolent dictators.

The "peace" movement of the 1930s – which evaporated largely after Germany abrogated its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union – may have justifiably hoped that some peaceful resolution could be made with Hitler's ambitions. But hindsight proves what foresight somehow eluded: some dictators will not and cannot be bought off, co-opted or appeased.

There were those, among them prominent British artists, poets and royals, who believed Hitler was not only due fair consideration and equal treatment by the international community but that he had some pretty good ideas. In retrospect, we know that most or many of those who defended Hitler on fairness grounds – Why shouldn't Germany re-militarize, when they are surrounded by militarized potential adversaries? – agreed with him to some extent or another on ideological grounds as well.

So while those who defend Iran's "right" to have nuclear weapons may claim to do so only on the basis that Iran should be treated no more or less equally than any other state, reality demands that leaders whose sworn goal is destruction of a people should be countered at every turn to ensure they cannot execute their ambitions.

Interesting, and illustrative in a different way, is the case of contemporary Libya. Libya's now-40-years-and-counting mad man Muamar Khadafy, known domestically as the "leader of the Arab leaders, the king of kings of Africa and the imam of the Muslims," is one leader who was successfully co-opted. Once the pariah of the Western world, Khadafy essentially bought his way back into global good graces.

The sincerity of Khadafy's rehabilitation, of course, is under more scrutiny now than ever, after his country gave a rousing hero's welcome to the only individual ever convicted in the catastrophic 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 terror attack.

Pan Am 103 was the flight that exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing 243 passengers, 16 crew and 11 citizens on the ground. Last month, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence agent who was serving life in a Scottish prison, was returned home on compassionate grounds because he is evidently dying of prostate cancer.

Megrahi's homecoming might have gone largely unremarked were it not for the exuberant greeting he received on arrival in Tripoli.

The narrative from the Libyan side is that Megrahi was an innocent fall guy intended to deflect criminal sanctions from the entire state of Libya by scapegoating a single perp. If this were true, it could make a case for Megrahi's release. But what would it say about Khadafy's rehabilitation in the international community?

If Megrahi is innocent, what does that make Khadafy? The explanation is that Khadafy, seeing an opportunity to earn some petrodollars and gain whatever other advantages come from participation in the community of nations, handed over one of his country's intelligence agents as a human sacrifice.

Abdul Majeed el-Dursi, the head of Libya's foreign media corporation, alleges this is precisely the case.

"[Megrahi] volunteered to go [to trial] and to save his country the bitterness of the sanctions, which the Libyan people paid a very, very, very high price for," said el-Dursi. "We greet him for that and we think he's a courageous man and he did the right thing."

What, we wonder, do they think of their leader, who marked 40 years as an almost-unchallenged dictator this week?

The parallel between Khadafy and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, aside from the number of Western observers willing to believe the most generous assessments of them, is instead one of the oldest aphorisms. We have seen with Khadafy and we would probably see with Ahmadinejad, if the world community continues to give him endless chances at redemption, that a leopard doesn't change its spots.

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