This is good news. Libya has announced it is packing away the evil - just in time for Christmas. George looked just a little uncomfortable from the White House press room putting Libya with the glad tidings merry merry happy happy stuff. With luck, he'll get used to these announcements.

Me and Bruce in Paris in Feb. 1986, dodging "Syrians", drinking red wine

Almost three years before the Libyan secret service blew up a passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, the US had bombed Tripoli in the heady spring of 1986 when a club in Berlin with US service personnel blew up, when I was goofing off in Paris with Bruce, Jamie (of the Hotel Home Latin) and Mark as the bombs were going off there. We missed one explosion in the front of a bookstore by a few minutes as we headed out to supper. During the best part of a month, we never went to the Eiffel Tower, a prime target. Gendarmes with machine guns were in the subways. The word was it was the Syrians, who were the puppets of the Soviets. We thought it wasn't Islamic-related terror at all - just good old Cold War terror. Bruce ended up a few weeks later in Athens when TWA 840 was blown open. I was interviewed when I returned on CBC Halifax's Information Morning in what rapidly turned into the most boring piece Don Connelly ever did:

"So what did you do when the bombing started?"

"Ummm, went to a bar...no, we went to a bar in Belgium...umm, no that was later...no, we just went to the supermarket and bought a few litres of Algerian red. Yea, that's it."

The place where we are at now with the war on terror was a long time coming. Clinton is blamed for not getting a handle on it soon enough. That is at least two administrations too late.

Later:A detail of Bruce's greasy 1986 moustache. Moustache, by the way, is the most popular Greek word in English.