Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [47]
“Miss your flight! Never!” these unrecognizably jovial figures cried. “We will take you to the airport ourselves, and make sure that you get onto the plane,” Dr. Giuma told me.
They packed me into the car and the driver crushed the pedal to the floor, throwing us all against the back of the seats. My minder was still smiling, thin and stiff. At the airport, she put a hand on my back, flashed some identity cards, and marched me to the front of every line. She walked me all the way to passport control, and then shook my hand in a firm and almost fond good-bye.
I turned around after a few steps. She was still standing there, waiting for me to leave. I waved the doctor’s wilting bouquet in limp farewell.
“Partners, not wage workers!” boasted a sign on the wall.
“Desire it,” proclaimed an advertisement for European chocolates.
And then there was a message from the Leader: “Wine and drugs are total destruction weapons. Hash is like the bacterial and chemical weapons and the atomic bomb.—The Revolution Leader.”
At the gate, I tossed the roses into the garbage. The plane lifted up into the sky, and Libya dropped to a blur of land, spread there beneath the clouds.
Qaddafi kept all his promises. He relinquished his weapons of mass destruction program. Though still grumbling that Libya wasn’t to blame, he agreed to pay billions to compensate the victims of the two airplane bombings. Bush removed Libya from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The United States opened an embassy in Tripoli. Tourists and oil companies poured in. Vacations in Libya are all the rage these days. In the New York Times’s list of fifty-three places to visit in 2008, Libya came in tenth.
This worked out very well for Qaddafi and his son and heir apparent, Seif al Islam. He didn’t have to stop being a dictator. He didn’t have to put up with free speech, a free press, or opposition parties. He got to keep a stranglehold on the country—and he got to make a lot of money, to boot.
I heard about Libya from Arabs around the region for months. “What is this war on terror?” they’d say incredulously. “Now America says Qaddafi is a good example! Qaddafi! And then they want us to believe they have come to bring us democracy.”
“I know,” I’d say, and shrug uneasily.
After a while, people stopped shaking their heads about the newfound Libyan–American friendship. That was even worse: it disappeared into the vague cloud of disillusionment and disgust that had thickened around the idea of America ever since the invasion of Iraq. Soon it barely rated mention.
A few years later, I slipped into a conference room at a Dead Sea resort to hear Qaddafi’s son speak at the World Economic Forum. Saif al Islam was the new, Westernized face of the Libyan dictatorship. He was olive-skinned, athletic, and almost handsome. His rangy body was clothed in a well-tailored suit. The first thing I noticed was that he, too, referred to his father as “the Leader.”
He had come to drum up tourism and investment, but the audience kept asking him about politics. “Libya is a very attractive market,” he’d say, or “Foreign banks are applying for licenses.” Come to Libya, he said, and “you will see the difference.” Then he would stretch his lips and show his teeth in a massive, lopsided grin.
But questions about the dictatorship kept coming, and Saif grew snappier. He was losing his cool. His father’s son, after all.
Libya was not a dictatorship, he informed the audience, slipping into incoherency. “We can’t talk about an absolute dictatorship,” he equivocated.
Why aren’t there any opposition parties in Libya?
“Even people who call themselves opposition and whatever and are not in line with the Libyan regime and Moammar Qaddafi,” he said, “I know them personally. They say, ‘Saif al Islam, we don’t want parties in Libya.’”
“All the world is visiting Libya.” Suddenly affable, he slipped back to his talking points. “And Libya, which was a closed box and a representative of terrorism, this box suddenly opened and we’re saying we have desert, we have oil, we have culture, we