(In the event, no retaliation was carried out, testimony perhaps to the U.S. government's lingering uncertainty about the actual identity of the bombers.) But as was noted earlier, since no party claimed responsibility, no party could attach its agenda to the action. It is probably true that all Middle Eastern terrorist agendas (e.g., Palestinian nationalism; Islamic militancy) benefitted in some slight degree from the destruction of Pan Am 103, since the bombing underlined, to the Western public, the general power and threat of Middle Eastern terrorists. But these benefits were diffused across the entire spectrum of Middle Eastern agendas; none of them benefitted in any proportion remotely comparable to the scale of destruction caused by the bombing.
It is at least possible that if Iran was behind the bombing, it may have been carried out in retaliation for the destruction of an Iranian airliner by a missile fired from the American cruiser USS Vincennes during the period of the Iran-Iraq war in the Persian Gulf when US warships were escorting Kuwait
...