Over dinner in tent, Kadafi and 'darling' Condi Rice put U.S.-Libyan relations on normal footing
It has been more than half a century -- 55 years, to be exact -- since a U.S. secretary of state has visited Libya.
But with an evening meal in a Bedouin tent today, Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi welcomed Condoleezza Rice -- whom he called last year "my darling black African woman." Presumably, he wouldn't have been quite so gushing toward John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower's secretary of state who visited in 1953.
In an interview with the Arabic TV network Al Jazeera, CNN notes, he called her "Leeza," and said: "I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders."
The dinner signaled that the United States and Libya had moved beyond nearly three decades of animosity to put the U.S.-Libyan relationship on a normal, if not entirely friendly, footing.
The session ended a five-year rehabilitation in which Libya gave up its weapons of mass destruction and then settled claims against it for past terrorist acts, including the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people.
The Los Angeles Times' Paul Richter, traveling with Rice, reports that the Bush administration considers Libya’s reform one of its top foreign policy achievements, and a model for other adversary states, such as Iran. Earlier today, in Portugal, Rice called the meeting “a historic moment.”
Yet officials on both sides say they aspire to a neutral relationship rather than a warm one, and in recent days there have been reminders of the mistrust that still hangs over the relationship like a dusty Saharan haze.
If anyone thought the mercurial Kadafi was getting mushy, note that on Libyan television in an address to the nation on Monday, he said it was “not necessary for us to be friends with America." He classified the two countries as “neither friends nor enemies.”
And his son and possible heir, Seif Islam, told the BBC in an interview broadcast Sunday that while Libya had acknowledged responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, it accepted blame only to get rid of international sanctions against the country.
“We played with words ... it doesn’t mean we did it in fact,” he said of the bombing.
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Mahmud Turkia / AFP/Getty Images
