Gaddafi on the 1 Dinar Note
In June 1942, Adolf Hitler promoted Erwin Rommel to Field Marshall after he captured Tobruk, near Libya’s border with Egypt, along with tens of thousands of its British Commonwealth defenders. Rommel, known as the "Desert Fox" for his North African warfare skills, is famously reputed to have said that he would have preferred for Der Führer tohave given him another Panzer division instead. The same year that Rommel was breaking the British, a baby was born in the Libyan desert around Sirte. His parents, of the Gaddafi clan, named him Muammar. And today, 65 years after Rommel’s brilliant, but short-lived success, "Baba Muammar" (Daddy Muammar), as Libyan children are taught to call their country’s dictator, has shown himself to be the new "Desert Fox," proof that in the modern world tens of billions of barrels of oil in the ground are more effective than tanks at conquering the West.
As London-exiled Libyan dissident Ashur Shamis says: "The problem with Gaddafi is that he wants to be everything to everyone. With the Muslims he is Islamic, and, according to his Green Book, he adopts the Koran as the ‘law of society.’ With socialists he is a socialist. With the liberals he is a liberal and internationalist."
Whether anybody but the truly deluded really believes Gaddafi’s self-promotional propaganda anymore is besides the point. His goal is now and has been since 1969 to be a player on the world stage. While he has shrewdly renounced terrorism as part of his 10-year-long campaign to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the West, he continues to terrorize the Libyan people.
In his latest of several incarnations, the wily Gaddafi now seems bent on turning Libya into the Dubai of the Mediterranean, or, as his son and heir-apparent Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi might say, its Hong Kong. Perhaps Halliburton – which, in violation of the U.S. embargo, sold to Libya six pulse neutron generators, devices that can detonate nuclear weapons – chose the wrong place to build its second headquarters.
Last week, after decades as a pariah, subject to sanctions and bombing and threats, Gaddafi, or "Brother Guide," as he prefers adult Libyans to call him, capped off his rehabilitation campaign with a whirlwind trip to France at the invitation of President Nicolas Sarkozy. It was the "Guide’s" first trip to Europe in 34 years. This included being photographed Friday at the Chateau of Versailles next to a replica throne of Louis XIV, the absolutist "Sun King," who personally ruled France for 54 years. A fitting pose for Gaddafi, who has in the past referred to himself as the sun of his people and has ruled longer than any current world leader except Fidel Castro. After five-and-a-half days of pomp characterized by a slew of Gaddafi’s trademark weirdness, the dictator flew on to Spain, leaving behind $14.7 billion in contracts or promises to sign contracts for Rafale fighter jets, combat helicopters, anti-aircraft radar, armored vehicles and a nuclear installation to desalt sea water.
Furious critics, including many in the European media, challenged the wisdom of the visit. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner got into it with his Libyan counterpart over Libyan human rights. French Human Rights Minister Rama Yade wondered if a few million euros in business deals would allow Gaddafi to "wipe off the blood of his crimes." For her trouble, Yade got a private tongue-lashing from Sarkozy, who said he had also privately urged Gaddafi to improve his human rights record. But Gaddafi said Sarkozy had not mentioned human rights. And he denied that Libya - only Libyan individuals – had ever engaged in terrorist actions, that his regime has political prisoners, or that it has tortured anyone. He decried France’s treatment of its African immigrants, whom he said he would help return to Africa if their situation did not improve, a typical Gaddafi empty gesture.
Gaddafi’s official trip to France follows on visits to Tripoli by Sarkozy in July the day after Libya released six Bulgarian medical workers it laughably claims never to have tortured during their eight years of imprisonment. That’s when the arms deal and desalinization project were informally approved. A visit by Tony Blair in March 2004 also ended with business deals, more than a $1 billion in proposed contracts, and billions in further deals have since been made.
Come January 3, the "Desert Fox" will enjoy yet another diplomatic coup, the visit to Tripoli by Condoleeza Rice, the first U.S. Secretary of State to appear in Libya in more than half a century. Will she too come away with a fistful of contracts, perhaps an order for a few F-16s? Will she invite Gaddafi to pitch his embroidered tent on the White House lawn and make a side-trip to Orlando? Or will arrangements be made for Mister Bush to stop off for a few hours in Tripoli next spring or summer after the Senate confirms the new U.S. ambassador to Libya?
In a relationship already rich with irony, the nominee for that job is Gene Cretz, a career diplomat previously posted as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, who, were he a private American citizen with an Israeli stamp in his passport, could not even obtain a tourist visa for Libya.
The hold-up on confirming Cretz is due to Libya’s failure so far to pay the full compensation promised to the families of the victims of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, for which a high-level Libyan intelligence operative was convicted in 2001. It's a failure several Senators, including Senator Clinton, have objected to. Anyone who has followed Gaddafi's political career know that he will yield in this matter when it suits him, which could be tomorrow or a year from tomorrow. With oil prices trading in the $90s, the $388 million needed to compensate those families is no squeeze, less than a week’s worth of production.
Observers as diverse as Bill Richardson and Charles Krauthammer have argued the Cheney-Bush administration gets the credit for Gaddafi’s turnaround from terror-backing thug to respectable-if-eccentric world citizen. Frightened by the invasion of Iraq, it is said, Gaddafi decided to cry uncle, giving up not only his support for terrorism but also his programs for building weapons of mass destruction. It is no accident, Krauthammer argued, that Gaddafi initiated talks with the United States (via London) in March 2003 and concluded them in December by coming clean on his nuclear weapons program just days after Saddam Hussein was captured.
But, as Ron Suskind points out in The One Percent Solution, that’s not how it really went down. By the mid-‘90s, Gaddafi wanted legitimization, an end to sanctions, the ability to send Libyan children to universities abroad, and a rebuilding of a shattered economy that was contributing to the unrest that the dictator ruthlessly put down yet could not eliminate. It was made clear to him that nothing could happen until Libya accepted responsibility for the Pan Am 103 bombing and compensated the families. Kusa was and is the head of foreign intelligence in Libya. The first talks took place in 1999, when CIA lifer Benjamin Bonk met Musa Kusa in Geneva.
Kusa – like Bonk a graduate of Michigan State University – was and is the chief of foreign intelligence in Libya. Among other things, in "the consensus of every significant intelligence agency in the West," Kusa had planned the Lockerbie attack and sent assassination teams to kill Libyan dissidents in Europe. His portfolio was broad. At home, Kusa presided over a security force that ran surveillance operations on Libyans – including my stepson – detained citizens for years without charge or trial, and routinely tortured political foes. Techniques including cudgeling, electric shock, hanging by the wrists, suffocation with plastic bags, pouring lemon juice on open wounds, as well as breaking fingers and letting them "heal" without medical attention.
A month after the September 11 attacks, Suskind writes, Bonk met Kusa again, this time in the palatial London house of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, nephew of Saudi Arabia’s ruler, then Crown Prince Abdullah, now its king. By this time, Bonk was deputy director of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorist Center and his mission was to obtain any and all useful intelligence about Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists. Kusa arrived with the goods, an armful of dossiers. Some of them, it turned out, were of Libyan dissidents.
In the mornings he met with Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns to discuss compensation to the families whose kin he had helped murder in 1988. Kusa was told then, October 2001, that Libya would have to surrender any weapons of mass destruction it had. In the afternoon, he met with Bonk, who told him what Kusa had been waiting to hear for two years: compensate the Pan Am 103 victims and help us fight the terrorists and you’re home free.
For the next couple of years, Libya and the United States cooperated extensively in hunting, capturing, interrogating and imprisoning alleged terrorists. Libya fingered or turned some over to the United States, and vice versa. At least four CIA charter flights landed in Tripoli in 2003 and 2004, according to flight logs posted on a Web site by Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane: The true story of the CIA torture program. The CIA even allowed Gaddafi’s intelligence officers to interrogate Libyan prisoners at the Guantánamo detention center, according to a lawyer for several detainees. Some prisoners were shipped back to Libya for incarceration there.
In March 2003, Gaddafi initiated talks with the British and Americans dedicated to clearing up the issue of his unconventional weapons. A three-day visit by the International Atomic Energy Agency was allowed. Not much was found, and the IAEA reported that, as far as it could determine, the regime was far from building any kind of nuclear weapons. In October, however, the BBC China,, a Libyan-bound, German-owned ship carrying parts for centrifuges designed to enrich uranium for use in nuclear reactors or nuclear bombs, was interdicted and its cargo revealed to the world. Gaddafi soon invited the British and Americans for a longer inspection, After 10 days, the inspectors had uncovered a vast program that included comparatively advanced, so-called P-2, centrifuges. Confronted with this evidence and a compact disk of phone conversations between Pakistani A.Q. Khan and the man in charge of Libya’s clandestine program, Gaddafi publicly gave up his nuclear ambitions.
And the Cheney-Bush administration took full credit for hard-nosed negotiations that had actually begun in the Clinton Administration. And then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton claimed that it was the administration’s Proliferation Security Initiative that was behind the BBC China’s interdiction. But as Wade Boese of Arms Control Today later challenged this interpretation as a misrepresentation.
For the oil and gas companies, the return of Libya to the ranks of respectable nations has been a welcome happenstance. Libya already contains Africa’s largest proven oil reserves – an estimated 41.9 billion barrels – and that’s with 70% of the country unexplored. Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Occidental, PetroCanada, Gazprom, Sonatrach and others have already won lucrative bids to drill for hydrocarbons. Service companies are upgrading the battered oil infrastructure. Investors are also putting money into the tourist industry, which will no doubt be assisted by the fact the Libya has better preserved Roman ruins than Italy. With the revenue from these deals, Gaddafi is rebuilding his military. And presumably beefing up his security apparatus to tamp down any opposition to his continued rule.
That opposition has been held in check by revolutionary committees whose members inhabit every neighborhood, sit in every university class, watch every citizen in the streets, every day. To obtain a degree, every student must pass a test on Gaddafi’s jumbled manifesto, The Green Book. While there are no public hangings as there were when my wife taught English to Libyan nuclear engineering students at al-Fatah University in the 1980s, and quiet criticism can be heard among families who once cheered Gaddafi’s revolution, any real dissent is promptly dealt with.
For example, take the case of Jahmi Eljahmi, a political dissident who in 2004 was serving time for the terrible crime of calling for political pluralism in Libya. On a visit to Libya in March that year, Senator Joe Biden obtained Gaddafi’s consent to release Eljahmi, who began speaking up again. In an interview on the U.S.-based Arabic television station Al-Hurrah, he said "I share with President Bush and all of the American people human sentiments and desires for freedom, democracy and propagation of democracy." Bush praised him. A month later, he was arrested again and he remains incarcerated, one of the political prisoners Gaddafi claims he does not have.
Yet Condoleeza Rice could say just eight months later:
For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy here in the Middle East and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people.
The truth is that the United States now has better relations with Gaddafi’s totalitarian regime than it ever has, and there is no hint of even a nudge toward political change because the Cheney-Bush administration has never had any intention of leading the Middle East or North Africa toward democracy or anything like it. And, in the case of Gaddafi, as Suskind has made clear, the promise from the beginning was: no regime change.
In Tripoli, you can see where Gaddafi’s monopolistic grip on power has led.
There are no soft edges. It looks like a run-down Soviet satrapy, with gigantic photos of Brother Guide everywhere, and sullen youth loitering without work. The best new job these days is selling cellphones. There is a growing religiosity, paired with degeneration as unemployed young men turn to hashish and heroin, and prostitution spreads. Young men still sail the 12 hours to Malta by ferry to buy cartons of Marlboros to resell on the streets of Tripoli. Women who had begun in the 1980s to give up the head coverings decreed by Libyan tradition now wear hijab everywhere, even on the university campus. And jimar, the veil, which was never a part of Libyan dress, is becoming ever more common. Women meet in homes to study the Koran, and the opposition is said to be more Islamist in its focus than in the past. For many, this move toward fundamentalism reflects similar moves in other dictatorships, a kind of under-the-surface opposition to the regime with dangerous potentialities.
Musa Kusa once boasted that he knew every man with a beard in Libya, hinting that he knew whom to arrest if any opposition to the regime appeared. No more. Beards, a symbol of quiet resistance, can be seen everywhere. At home, Gaddafi is no hero.
The real test isn’t how well Gaddafi and his lieutenants adopt the language of the "war on terror," or how graciously he is received by and receives Western diplomats. As Ashur Shamis writes:
The Americans and the Europeans have been supporting tyrannies in our part of the world for decades and now they want people to believe they have switched sides. The credibility gap is too wide to ignore.
But the "Desert Fox" seems to have no worries. With the new U.S. embassy perched on the top two floors of Tripoli’s pricey Corinthia Bab Hotel, and Libya perched atop the world’s ninth largest oil reserves, Muammar Gaddafi can count on as many years in power as he likes, courtesy of oil men and realpolitikers whose alleged love for freedom and democracy is belied by their actions. Rewarding Gaddafi while his people suffer is a terrible, hypocritical, and dangerous example to set.
