Qaddafi: How the West was won over

“Almost everyone has dirty hands,” said Martin Peretz in The New Republic. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi decided that it was no longer such a good idea to be “the Mad Dog of the Middle East.” So together with “favored son Saif,” Qaddafi started wooing and rewarding statesmen, scholars, and even pop stars who could help rehabilitate his reputation. Huge amounts of cash were funneled to the well-connected U.S. investment firm the Carlyle Group and other big U.S. banks and investment houses; the London School of Economics signed a $3.6 million deal to train Libyan bureaucrats. Qaddafi also bought off a host of intellectuals, said David Corn in Mother Jones. Harvard professor Joseph Nye, for example, wrote a glowing piece in 2007 about the transformed Qaddafi’s belief in democracy, failing to mention that he’d been well paid to conduct the interview.

At least some public figures now admit shame for associating with the “loathsome” Qaddafi clan, said Margaret Wente in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Canadian singer Nelly Furtado is giving away the $1 million she earned performing for the family in 2007, while R&B warbler Mariah Carey is handing all proceeds from a new single to charity, to offset a similar fee. “I was naïve,” Carey has admitted. That can’t be said of Western leaders such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who treated Qaddafi like an esteemed member of the club, despite his history of terrorism. “Worst of all” was the British government’s 2009 deal to free Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi from jail, on the grounds that he was dying from cancer. That murderer of 270 people lives on, and his freedom is “a snub to victims of terrorism everywhere.”

But consider for a moment what would have happened if the West hadn’t gotten its hands dirty in Libya, said Elliott Abrams in The Wall Street Journal. In return for letting Libya come in from the cold, the Bush administration—of which I was part—demanded that Qaddafi stop funding terrorism and hand over to the U.S. his missiles, his chemical weapons, and the rudiments of a nuclear program. If we’d refused to deal with Qaddafi, he’d be in his bunker today with chemical weapons and perhaps nukes. That’s “a terrifying thought. So is a Libya after regime collapse with those materials available to the highest bidder.”

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