Well, the only thing more inscrutable than the Occidental mind is the California variant of it that has developed in Washington. So who can explain why the Pentagon, after crying ''Take out!'' and ''Surgical strike!'' was shocked to find Libyan fighter planes acting bellicose when our planes showed up in the neighborhood?

I have been to Air Force shows where those fantastically expensive planes come right at you faster than speeding bullets, and though I knew they were on my side I felt myself go white inside and out. It is unlikely that the thought of such a moment could make Colonel Qaddafi feel anything but extremely nervous.

Is it reasonable to suppose that, after so much ''take-out'' talk in Washington, two of Qaddafi's military planes encountering two American warplanes might conclude that they were the vanguard of the promised surgical strike and do something foolish?

Whatever the explanation, something foolish was done in the Mediterranean sky and Libyan planes were destroyed. They did not, apparently, carry foolishness to the point of firing at our planes, but the Pentagon insists they were armed and could have.

Can we really tell that for sure? One wants to believe our side, but if we believed the Pentagon's first account of the Navy's shooting down the Iranian airliner last year, we ended up dead wrong.

Other unanswerable questions abound. For instance, if small nations making chemical weapons are so intolerable, why aren't we considering a ''surgical strike'' in Iraq, the one nation that has already used chemical warfare on a mass scale?

For instance too, why is it that the genial Gipper, who seems capable of liking almost everybody everywhere in the world, including ex-evil empire Sovietskis, gnashes his teeth and sees red whenever he has to deal with two small-bore dictators? Namely, Qaddafi and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.

Besides small-bore, they also probably rank Number Two and Number Three among the world's most theatrical leaders. Is there a little mutual dislike among show biz performers involved here?