Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [42]
When I sat in a green den with a pair of government analysts, I was prepared for almost anything except what I heard.
“We learned how vulnerable a country like Libya can be. Everything had to be thought afresh,” one of them said. “We have a defunct system here. It is not working.”
The men went on: Libya has made mistakes. Libya is flawed. Libya has decided to reinvent itself. Libya did not understand how the world worked. Libya had been a little naive—even stupid. I was shocked. He just called the Leader stupid.
These men were the first to tell me unequivocally that the Bush administration would soon lift sanctions against Libya. Negotiations had been going on for months, they said, and although Libya refused to acknowledge its guilt, it had agreed to pay cash to the families of victims killed on the bombed airplanes. U.S. oil firms were drooling to get back into Libyan fields, and had promised to convince Congress to vote in Libya’s favor. The Libyans were confident that the Bush administration would get its way at home. “The Americans do what they don’t say, and they don’t say what they do,” one of the men said.
“The war in Iraq?” I asked Miloud Mehadbi, the center’s director of foreign relations. “What was the lesson there?”
He didn’t miss a beat.
“It showed there is no democracy, no international law, no human rights. It’s your own selfish interests you should pursue. You should not give a damn about anything else.”
His eyes were hard.
“No one is in the position of being apologetic to the regime of Saddam Hussein. They see what’s taking place and the picture is very gloomy. Unless you give in to the United States and its interests, then consider Iraq. The Leader was clear that we’re paying money to buy our safety, to avoid a confrontation with mad, runaway U.S. power.”
He wasn’t talking only about money for the victims, but about purchasing a place in this new, post–September 11 world. Libya had realized there was no more patience for a country like Libya. The Cold War was over. Two Palestinian intifadas had failed. And then September 11 fixed American attention on terrorism. As I talked to people in Tripoli, I began to understand that Qaddafi had embarked on his second revolution, an image rehabilitation on a grand scale. The UN had lifted sanctions after those first payouts to the terror victims, leaving only American sanctions to dispel.
Anybody who believes Qaddafi is addled by madness should consider his clever maneuvers after the invasion of Iraq. The fate of Saddam Hussein was a morality play writ large across Arabian skies. If Saddam had been the tyrant, Qaddafi would be the model pupil. He would bring Libya back into the world, and bring the world back to Libya. And Qaddafi, arguably the most terror-friendly ruler in all the Arab lands, would use the war on terror to get it done. It was cynical and hard-bitten. It was brilliant.
Over and over in Libya, I heard a repudiation of the past, and the cocky brag that the country would buy its way back into good standing. This was the conclusion dawning on many Arab despots: that Saddam had been forced into hiding because he refused to play along, not because of democracy, human rights, political prisoners, or press repression. The reasons Saddam Hussein no longer deserved to rule—the torment of his own people; the cruelty of his prisons; the midnight disappearances; the megalomaniacal grip on power—also existed under Qaddafi. But in Libya, not only were such offenses not casus belli, they were forgivable traits to be brushed aside while patching up bad relations with