BFF: "Mad Dog of the Middle East" Qaddafi Meets His "Leezza, Leezza, Leezza..."

Two decades ago Libya's Leader of the Revolution, as Muammar el Qaddafi likes to be known by his people, never knew a terrorist cause he couldn't support, a western target he couldn't aim for, a airliner he didn't wish to bomb. He bombed his share, most notably Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 270 people, and France’s UTA Flight 772 over the African country of Niger on Sept. 19, 1989, killing 170 people.

“Yes, I am a terrorist when it comes to the dignity of this nation,” he said in 1985. “I will take up responsibility and begin terrorism against the Arab rulers, threaten and frighten them, and sever relations. And if I could, I would be head them one by one.”

In a news conference in April 1986, in response to a question by Helen Thomas, President Reagan called Qaddafi "this mad dog of the Middle East," a moniker that stuck to the Libyan leader the way Reagan's "evil empire" stuck to the Soviet Union. Six days after that news conference Reagan ordered a bombing run on Libya in retaliation for the terrorist bombing of a West Berlin discotheque, where an American soldier and a Turkish woman were killed and more than 200 people, including 50 Americans, were wounded. The raid on Libya killed, among others, Qaddafi's adopted daughter.

The "evil empire" fell. Qaddafi reigns on. He's approaching his 40th year in power. He's still young (he's only 66). And he's had an epiphany.

Qaddafi renounced terrorism, renounced his plan to develop nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, renounced his ban on foreign investors, he's even renounced a lot of the vaguely socialist policies that have chocked his otherwise oil-rich economy. He's been traveling European capitals like Casanova in his old age, winning audiences from every head of state along the way. Libya's economy has been transformed, growing by 9% this year, up from 6.8% last year. The country's foreign reserves will double to $115 billion by year's end. Libya's 900,000-thick civil service, once the bane of the country's moribund bureaucracy, was slashed as if Al Gore was reinventing the Libyan government the way he reinvented the American one. Satellite television rains down on Libyan rooftops, exposing the country's youth to Western ways.

On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a five-nation tour including Portugal, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, stopped in Libya to meet the man who said of her: "I support my darling black African woman. I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders." Not content with that, he went on" Yes, Leezza, Leeza, Leezza... I love her very much."

It isn't known whether the feelings are requited, though a few things can be surmised. The Bush administration isn't thrilled by the old "mad dog" showering love on its secretary of state during an election season when Republicans are doing their darndest to paint Democrats as the party most inclined to hug and kiss old enemies. To drill the point home, the State Department has apparently refrained from doing what it usually does when Rice shakes hands with foreign leaders. It's not posting pictures of the encounter on its Web site. Nor is it even transcribing a single word from the direct meeting with Qaddafi. The most it's done is transcribe Rice's comments with "Abdulrahman Muhammad Shalgam, Secretary of the General People’s Committee For Foreign Liaison and International Cooperation."

Most of the questions, and half the answers, were in Arabic, and were not translated, which raises an unrelated but more urgent question: are we to believe that after everything we've learned since 9/11 about the woeful absence of Arabic translators throughout the echelons of the federal bureaucracy, the State Department topmost among them, we still don't have enough translators in place? Not even for the secretary of state's tour of Arabic-speaking North Africa? Inevitably, Rice must have had her personal translator. Arab leaders make a point of not speaking English, even though most of them speak it (Qaddafi attended school in Britain for six months in his youth). But it sends the wrong message to the world, the Arab world especially, when the State Department replaces questions and answers on its own Web site with the ignorant-looking filler: "In Arabic."

The detail is telling. So much of the Middle East was lost to this administration, not just in translation, but for mere lack of translation. It still is.

Maybe this will help. Here's a new profile of the new and improved Muammar el Qaddafi.

See Also:

• Understanding Qaddafi's Green Book
• How Do You Spell Qaddafi's Name?
• Muammar el Qaddafi: the Opera
• Qaddafi à Paris
• Libya's Intimate in the Remote
• Libya at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games