Can't buy me Love? Libya offers payment forPA103

Various news reports suggest that a final settlement is near that may result in the lifting of UN sanctions applied after a bomb destroyed Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988:

Full article, as long as it lasts:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62437-2003Apr30.html

This has raised a couple of questions in my tiny little mind. Firstly, only two persons associated with the Libyan regime, to my knowledge, have ever been prosecuted for this outrage (one was aquitted), and only after years of footdragging by Libya. Is a cash payment sufficient to absolve Khaddafi & Co. of further punishment?

Another has to do (and I have a feeling you know what’s coming) with Libya’s position vis a vis the US; I personally see more similarities than differences with the Iraq situation, and certainly a more clear link between Libya and state-sponsored terrorism than between Iraq and same. I’m not saying we necessarily should have invaded Libya and deposed Khaddafi anytime in the past 20-odd years, but is there a fundamental difference here? Why was the Iraqi regime more important to depose than that of Libya?