The Question we Still can't sk

On 20 August 2009, the man known as "The Lockerbie Bomber" - Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi - was released from his Scottish Prison on compassion grounds. Accused of blowing up Pan-Am Flight 103 in 1988, he was sentenced to life imprisonment before being released in August when determined to be in the final stages of Prostate Cancer. When he returned home to Libya, he received a comparitively warm welcome from the government of Colonel Gadaffi.
Naturally, everyone in the United States and Britain in government has been "outraged" by the treatment shown to Megrahi upon his return. Obama was "disturbed", Jack Straw was "disgusted"; the list of supposed outrages goes on. At first glance, the collective western press's head exploded. There were a few newspapers that did not subscribe to this madness: The Guardian (to a lesser extent), The Independent; to name the two most prominent ones.
Unfortunately, something else happened in what quickly became a reexamination of Pan-Am Flight 103's destruction. We (being the western press) stopped asking the question that has to be asked, yet it seems is not allowed by the British and American governments to be asked. And that, of course, is Why. Why did those who blew up the Pan Am jumbo jet do so? The German police reports in the subsequent investigation (so far not mentioned by every journalist not named Robert Fisk) clearly reveal that the perpetrators of the bombing had more connections to Lebanon, Damascus and Tehran than they did to Tripoli. The bomb-bag was physically put onto the baggage carousel by the Lebanese handler of the passenger whose suitcase it was. Though Gadaffi was almost definitely responsible for the bombing of French UTA flight 772 over Chad in 1989, it is less likely that he was involved in Lockerbie.
In order to truly understand why Lockerbie happened, we need to look to events on the eastern end of the Islamic world the year before. On 3 July 1988, IranAir Flight 655 was shot down by the USS Vincennes while flying from Tehran to Dubai. The Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time, and Flight 655 was within Iranian airspace. When the crew of the vessel returned to the United States, the reaction of the American government was relatively similar to that of Gadaffi's Libya this past month. The air-warfare coordinator of the ship was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal, while the ship's captain was given the Legion of Merit.
The bombing of Lockerbie was not an act of state terrorism by the Libyan government; it was a vengeance operation. It was an act of revenge for the destruction of IranAir 655, in which all 290 passengers and crew on board were killed. Though this does not excuse the appalling nature of the crime of Lockerbie, we need to appreciate history not so much to excuse what happened, as to understand why it happened.
It would be bad enough if Lockerbie was an isolated incident in terms of the Why question. The unfortunate thing, however, is that it is not. We need only look at the first international Crime Against Humanity of this decade: 9/11. On the eighth anniversary of the attack - this Friday - many among us will still assume that those who committed the atrocities hated us for our freedom and wealth. In the aftermath of September 11, all that western media asked was "how?" (box-cutters, aircraft, tall buildings) and "who?" (was it Bin-Laden? were Hussein or Arafat involved?). The question that no one would ask - but the question that has to be asked - is why 9/11 happened. The unfortunate thing is that those in charge do not want those questions asked, because the asking of those questions opens up a door to the discussion of a whole thread of issues that could get very ugly: The nature of America's relationship with Israel and 'Palestine', American war crimes in Iraq and Iran, American military hegemony in the region, support for corrupt despots like Mubarek and Musharref, and the demonization of the world's 1 billion Muslims. These are not issues that those in power want us to ask, because it puts a great deal of blame on those who wield power - or have wielded power in the past.
Last spring, following the Iranian president's remarks about Zionism being "equal to racism", a letter of mine appeared in The Calgary Herald pointing out the same thing: we have refused to ask why people do what they do, or why whole societies do what they do. Until we understand why events like Lockerbie and 9/11 happened, we stand no chance of ever preventing them from happening again. It is unfortunate that those in power (both in government and in media) are too comfortable to realize this and speak honestly about the events of the past. If we don't ask why, we don't learn from it. And if we don't learn from it, we are likely to repeat it. One 9/11 was bad enough. one Lockerbie was bad enough. But unless we understand why they happened, more of them will occur.