Hawks in Washington will attempt to make the argument that Libya's sudden willingness to give up its weapons of mass destruction programs is a dividend of the Iraq war.

For those who know anything at all about Libya, however, an entirely different interpretation is obvious. Libya proves that economic sanctions can work. ...

The one thing standing between Qadhafi and a return to stability for his dictatorial regime (and efflorescence for his potentially rich economy) was Washington's new campaign against weapons of mass destruction. Libya didn't have much of that sort of thing, though it had dabbled, and it wasn't important to Qadhafi any more. The conflict in Chad (in which Libya is accused of using chemical weapons) had died down. Washington was making it a quid pro quo that Tripoli give these lackluster and small programs up in order for Libya to reenter the world economic system on a favorable footing. It was an easy decision.

So the real reason Qadhafi just folded is economic. And the lesson to be drawn here is that under certain circumstances, economic pressure can work, and remove the need for war.

The sanctions on Libya were very different from those on Iraq, and peace thinkers need to study why the former worked but the latter didn't. One thing is clear; the Iraq war has hindered, not helped, US-Arab relations, and it is not the reason for which Qadhafi has made up with the West, a process that began some time ago.

One caveat: Qadhafi hasn't offered to step down or become less dictatorial. This isn't an advance for democracy. The Bush administration, despite its rhetoric of democratization, still has to choose in the Middle East between having malleable, known strongmen in power, or having unpredictable democracies that might elect radical Islamists or others odious to Washington. I wouldn't bet a lot on the democratization policy. The US if anything has been urging countries like Tunisia and Yemen to be less democratic and less concerned about civil rights, in the cause of stamping out radical Islamism.

Though some scientists had long warned that mad cow disease would eventually appear in the United States, cattle owners and meatpackers repeatedly resisted calls for a more substantial program to test for the disease, and the Agriculture Department went along with them. Congress came close three times to banning the sale of meat from downer cows — ones that are too sick or hurt to amble into slaughterhouses — only to see the industry's allies block each of the bills at the last moment. And proposals for systems to track which farms produced sickened cattle — now required in Europe, Canada and Japan — also languished for years here.

"This is one of these times when unrealistic optimism triumphed over responsibility to the public," said Carol Tucker Foreman, a consumer advocate who ran the Agriculture Department's food-safety programs in the Carter administration.

If a number of countries stick with hastily announced plans to ban American beef, she added, "I think the damage to the American meat industry costs infinitely more than anything U.S. cattlemen would have had to pay to do this thing right."...

Several major restaurant chains — including McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King — have long refused to serve meat from downer animals to avoid health problems.

But powerful lobbies representing big ranchers and dairy farmers have stopped efforts in Congress in each of the last three years to prohibit slaughtering these animals for meat sold elsewhere.

Chandler Keyes, the Washington lobbyist for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said that because some downer animals merely have injuries like broken legs, his group would continue to resist efforts to declare all downer animals unfit for human consumption. That is a decision, he said, that is best left to federal veterinarians who inspect cows as they enter the nation's slaughterhouses.

But trusting federal veterinarians to find mad cow disease may be a mistake, an inspector at a Midwest meatpacking firm said. The inspector said that in his two years overseeing the killing of 600 downer cows, the veterinarian at his plant tested the central nervous tissue of only one of the animals. "All we tested downer cows for was antibiotic residue," said the inspector, who insisted on anonymity to protect his job.