COLUMN LEFT / ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Watch Bush Play Libya for Votes : The Pan Am case is a ruse; the U.S. behaved more lawlessly in the Vincennes incident.

U .S. retail sales were off 0.4% in March, which spelled bad news for Libya. A few more months of poor economic numbers and the bombs will surely fall on Tripoli.

Even by the brazen standards established in the Iraq affair, the United States’ and hence the U.N. Security Council’s breaches of international treaties and laws in the case of Libya are astonishing. As a columnist recently remarked in the Cairo newspaper Al Ahram, “What this shows is that the ‘new world order’ is a system of codified international piracy.”

Libya is acting in accord with international laws and treaties. Having instituted proceedings against its two citizens suspected of being party to the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am plane over Scotland, it is under no obligation to extradite them to either the United States or Britain.

But, so far as the United States and its poodles in the Security Council are concerned, law is not the issue. As the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Thomas Pickering, so brusquely proclaimed: “The issue at hand is not some difference of opinion and approach that can be mediated or negotiated.” These are the words of international brigandage. Central to all these procedures, indeed to the very mandate of the United Nations, is peaceful arbitration of disputes. Pickering’s is the language of despots.

As repulsive as this junking of the U.N. Charter is the hypocrisy of the United States and its allies, none of them above refusing to extradite. France is pressuring Switzerland to deny extradition of a French agent sought by New Zealand in connection with the bombing (with one death) of the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior. Britain, a few years ago, denied extradition to Italy of a convicted terrorist, saying piously that “his personal conduct” was not “such as to constitute a present threat to one of the fundamental interests of society.” The Air India plane that blew up off Ireland in 1985, with 329 people killed, had been targeted by Sikhs trained in a paramilitary camp in Alabama. According to mercenaries who were familiar with the place, the camp director had ties to U.S. intelligence. In India, there were charges that Washington had sanctioned the camp. A few months later in India, then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese conceded obliquely that there was some truth to the story. That was the end of it in the United States--no Lockerbie-type investigation, almost no press interest. No one called for sanctions against the United States or the bombing of Washington.

For years, Costa Rica has been calling for the extradition of U.S. citizen John Hull, charged with premeditated homicide and drug and arms trafficking, along with other criminal acts including participation in the 1984 bombing of a Costa Rican news conference at in which six people died. The request, made as recently as last November, amid the uproar about Libya’s refusal to extradite, was duly ignored.

It’s likely that the decision to blow up Pan Am flight 103 was made in Tehran, in revenge for the downing of an Iranian Airbus over the Persian Gulf by the U.S. Navy’s Vincennes in 1988, killing 290 civilians. There is strong evidence to suggest that the Vincennes was inside Iranian territorial waters at the time. U.S. Navy Commander David Carlson wrote a year after the episode, in the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings for September, 1989, that he “wondered aloud in disbelief” as from his nearby vessel he observed the Vincennes shoot down what was plainly a commercial airliner in a commercial corridor, perhaps out of “a need to prove the viability of Aegis,” the missile system aboard the Vincennes. Carlson described the Vincennes as a “Robo Cruiser” looking for a fight.

In April, 1990, George Bush conferred upon the brave Airbus-slaying Capt. Will Rogers the Legion of Merit, an honor also bestowed upon the Vincennes officer responsible for anti-aircraft warfare. Rogers’ citation, which made no mention of the fatal rendezvous between missiles and 290 civilians, commended the captain for “exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service” and for the “calm and professional atmosphere” prevailing aboard the Vincennes.

Reverse it. A Libyan vessel inside U.S. waters, eager to test its equipment, shoots down a U.S. civilian airliner. On return to its home port in Tripoli, the ship is given a tremendous welcome. Moammar Kadafi honors the captain in a moving public ceremony.

Most people I meet wag their heads in agreement at the proposition that Libya is a cornerstone of George Bush’s reelection bid. Better pray for good economic numbers and not a triple-dip recession. Otherwise those folks in Libya are going to pay the price.