Gaddafi's Mad World

We live, as the Arabs say, in interesting times. Today, our Prime Minister flies to Libya to pay homage atthe court of Gaddafi. The man blamed for blasting two airliners - one American, one French - out of the sky,for sending weapons to the IRA, for invading Chad, killing a young British policewoman, murdering politicalopponents at home and abroad, who has himself been bombed by both the United States and Egypt, is to play hostto our dear Prime Minister. Gaddafi of the Green Book meets Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara. I cannot wait.

Is it only the Arabs, I wonder, who have been asking the obvious question: how desperate can Mr Blair be totoady up to Gaddafi? Not that the Arabs dislike Gaddafi. They have a sneaking admiration for the man who walksout of the Arab League because it is irrelevant, who makes fun of his fellow Arab leaders for their pomposity,who survives all America's attempts to get rid of him - the 1985 US air raids were also intended toassassinate the Great Leader but killed his adopted daughter instead - even if he did once deport half thePalestinian refugees in Libya and told them to walk back to Palestine.

Like Saddam, Gaddafi has even unburdened himself of a work of literature - old monsters, it seems, tend towrite epics in their dotage - which is called Escape to Hell and Other Stories. It should be essential readingon Air Blair today. I would certainly recommend a browse through the chapter entitled "Is Communism TrulyDead?" which suggests that a number of extraordinary events may occur now that the Soviet Union hascollapsed.

These include the possibility that "some people in the Christian world might become aware of the factthat Christ's crucifying himself for their sakes is a historical falsehood", a German "FourthReich" lording it over Britain and America, and Israelis distributed throughout the Arab world,"putting their expertise at the service of the Arabs, because this will be one million times better thantheir staying in Palestine..." Reflecting on Death, he asks if the Grim Reaper is male or female -Gaddafi seems to favour the latter. But then, would we expect anything else from the man who surrounds himselfwith a bevy of heavily armed female commandos as his "security team"?

Indeed, I recall an Arab summit in Cairo a few years ago at which - after arriving in a golden robeescorted by his gun-toting women - Gaddafi greeted President Mubarak and promptly pretended to confuse apublic lavatory with the door of the conference chamber. I shall always remember Mubarak's thin, sufferingsmile. Lord Blair of Kut, sitting perhaps in Gaddafi's famous tent, will be able to practice that same thinsmile today.

At least he won't have to suffer the embarrassment of Tito's old head of protocol who told me how Gaddafionce arrived in Belgrade with a plane load of camels for his fresh milk and a white charger upon which heintended to ride in triumph to the non-aligned summit in the Yugoslav capital. This is the same man whosupported a bi-national state for Palestinians and Israelis called Isratine. No wonder Jack Straw now callsGaddafi "statesman".

Of course, it's not difficult to see what lies behind today's charade. Having taken his country to war on acocktail of lies and distortion, Lord Blair must commit yet another fraud by claiming that the "defanging"of Libya is a direct result of the illegal invasion of Iraq - and thus justifies the whole disastrousoccupation of Mesopotamia. I don't blame him for trying. Anyone with the conscience which our PM should besuffering is bound to search for a get-out. What does amaze me is his choice of fall-guy: one of the weirdest,battiest, funniest, deadliest Arab dictators of them all.

Nor does the narrative of history make our Prime Minister's voyage to the Orient any saner. First of all,he sends our soldiers into Iraq because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction which no longer exist; then hepays a social call on Libya because Gaddafi really has had weapons of mass destruction all along. Or has he?

For one of the strangest elements to the Libyan saga is the newness of all those centrifuges and nucleargizmos which the UN, the Brits and the Americans have been "finding" in Gaddafistan. Were theyreally there for decades? When did Gaddafi decide to install them? And how come the US intelligence service -which could identify non-existent railroad chemical weapons labs in Iraq - failed to pick up the radiationfrom Gaddafi's supposed nuclear programme? It was a humble Independent reader - thank you, Willy McCourt ofManchester - who pointed out to me that Libya has a population of only six million; "imagine Irelandhaving a nuclear programme and nobody knowing about it," he wrote. Quite so.

Now here's another intriguing question. If we can find out when Gaddafi purchased all this stuff, can wealso be told when he decided to abandon it? A week later? A year? Or did he decide to give it up before hebought it? In other words, is there some connivance here, some complicity between a man who is tired of hisinternational isolation and another man who is tired of being told - all too truthfully - that he took hiscountry to war on a lie.

It's a good sell, claiming that Gaddafi is giving up his nuclear ambitions because he learned the lesson ofSaddam. But Gaddafi was in no danger of being invaded. After the conquest of Iraq, the US administration wasblathering on about Syria and Iran, not Libya. Indeed, on the basis that Gaddafi might have had nuclearweapons, he would have been - like the Dear Leader in North Korea - as safe as houses.

It would be nice to have another Downing Street "dossier" on all this. And perhaps Gaddafi - whomour Prime Minister may discover has a disturbing habit of sometimes telling the truth - will enlighten us. I'msure our civil servants have already written the narrative for him, but our favourite colonel has anotherdisturbing habit which our Prime Minister should be made aware of: he often fails to keep to the text. Aworrying example of this came last month when the Libyan prime minister, Shokri Ghanem, blandly announced onthe BBC that Libya had not accepted responsibility for the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.Whoops!

Of course, some subjects just won't get a mention when the two great statesmen of East and West sit down inTripoli. They will not, for example, talk about the US government's 1991 white paper on Libya which blamesGaddafi for not just Lockerbie but the sabotage of UTA Flight 772 over Chad in 1989, the attack on a Greekcruise ship by gunmen based in Libya the same year, the hijacking of the yacht Silco and the abduction of itscrew of eight for four years in Libya. Nor will they chat about the secretive Mathaba, which was used to trainforeigners in "subversive activities".

There certainly won't be any time wasted in discussing the 1979 public hanging of dissident universitystudents in Benghazi's main square. Nor, I guess, on the fate of the Libyan human rights defender Mansour al-Kikhiya,who "disappeared" while attending a Cairo human rights meeting in 1993 after complaining aboutGaddafi's execution of political opponents.

So maybe the two Great Leaders will hit it off. Both, after all, take themselves immensely seriously. As aLibyan opposition group pointed out a decade ago, Gaddafi "would have us believe he is at the vanguard ofevery human development that has emerged during his lifetime. It is not sufficient for him that he is anabsolute ruler with unchecked powers..."

Barring the usual electricity cuts, no one in Baghdad will be watching today's rickety epic with moreenthusiasm than I. Whoops! Productions presents Escape to Hell. It promises to be as much fun as Iraq.

Courtesy, Znet