Exit the Colonel (28 page)

By November 2010—a few months short of the 2011 revolution—the Revolutionary Committees, supported by Mahmoudi (whom Saif had previously referred to as a “fossil”), appeared to have tilted Gaddafi decidedly against Saif, whose public charges of government ineptitude seemed to have pushed his father too far. Saif thus retreated to his £10 million Hampstead, London, mansion, which he had bought in July 2009. He told his friend and adviser Benjamin Barber he was “tired of Tripoli, that he had too many enemies there,”
³⁰
echoing statements that he would retire permanently from Libyan politics to live in London that he had made earlier in the year.
³¹
Many in the political and business circles saw this as a concession that his brother Mu'tassim had “won.”

The issue of what to do about or how to respond to developments in Libya entered, peripherally, the Obama presidential campaign in 2008. Advisers to the campaign prepared briefing notes on the evolution of the relationship and a set of talking points for debates, in case some aspect of the “rehabilitation” arose in sparring with other Democrats or Republican nominee John McCain. (The issue of US involvement in Libya never came up in the debates, even though the next step in the US-Libya relationship proved to be a critical moment in the Obama presidency.)

Those who held out some hope that Gaddafi would moderate his behavior in the wake of his diplomatic coups—notably, extricating himself from the terror list—did not have long to wait before understanding that this was not part of his plan. Gaddafi was remarkably restrained in his public comments between 2004 and 2006, limiting his speeches largely to
marginal topics for a domestic audience. They were rambling discourses on the evils of genetically engineered organisms, for example.

As soon as the last of the bilateral US-Libya sanctions were removed, however, the old Gaddafi quickly reemerged. According to one observer, Gaddafi—or his handlers—may have begun to feel “safe” in speaking his mind once he realized how desperate various commercial parties were to secure deals with the new Libya. Tony Blair's infamous 2007 meeting in the desert was a case in point. From 2007 to 2010, Gaddafi's performances became more and more bizarre.

In one strange and rather forced attempt at bilateral cultural diplomacy, the Middle East Institute and Columbia University hosted call-in conferences with Gaddafi on two occasions. The first conference, entitled, “The Prospect for Democracy: A Libyan-American Dialogue,” was held March 22–23, 2006, at the Columbia campus. It was sponsored jointly by the Green Book Center, Columbia, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). US Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs David Welch attended the event.
³²
The brother of now-famous Libyan dissident Fathi Al Jahmi would write in the lead-up to the conference that “both the university setting and the presence of senior State Department officials are a gift to Qadhafi [sic]), who will use his monopoly over all Libyan television and newspapers to declare this a sign of U.S. support,”
³³
which of course it was, and he did. Libyan News Agency JANA reported that Columbia was “grateful for the opportunity to exchange ideas and thoughts around [Gaddafi's concepts of] Third Universal Theory and Direct Democracy.”
³⁴
The conference generated an outcry among the Columbia student body and a scandal for the then dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, a Libya expert.

On March 31, 2008, the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, hosted another planned Gaddafi call-in conference, cosponsored by Exxon Mobil and the Green Book Center. The Libyan panelists, who included Yusuf Sawani and Mohammed Siala, former head of Libya's Department of Foreign Cooperation, were noticeably on edge throughout the event, fearing that they might say something that Gaddafi might not like. At one point, Sawani, in response to a question about the fate of Fathi Al Jahmi, exploded in rage, inviting the US to come “pick up the ‘crazy old man' Jahmi, put him in an orange jumpsuit, put him on its ‘flying prison' aircraft and take him to Guantanamo.”
³⁵
The backlash against and chaos engendered by both conferences presumably squashed the hopes of any
repeat performances, though Georgetown University undertook another such conference in 2009 (at which Gaddafi did speak).

Gaddafi was clearly feeling on a roll. In a June 2008 speech on the anniversary of the US strikes against Libya, he said:

During a November 2009 visit to Italy, Gaddafi asked Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to find two hundred Italian “models” for whom he paid £53 each to listen to what was described as a “solemn discourse on the role of Muslim women” (twenty of the models were invited on an all-expense-paid trip to stargaze and drink warm camel's milk).
³⁷
Some of them apparently accepted the offer.

After President Obama took office in 2009, Gaddafi made various plays to meet the president, most of which Obama's staff managed to parry. He did shake the president's hand on July 9, 2009, at a G8 Summit in Italy, less than three months after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton welcomed Mu'tassim al Gaddafi to the State Department. “We deeply value the relationship between the United States and Libya,” Clinton said on that occasion. “We have many opportunities to deepen and broaden our cooperation, and I'm very much looking forward to building on this relationship.”
³⁸

Less than a month later, in a speech before the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2009, Gaddafi could, apparently, no longer contain himself. Characteristically, he spoke long beyond his allotted fifteen minutes and chastised the UN and implicitly the US for violating the sovereignty of member states:

The Security Council “should be called the Terror Council,” he said, after ripping up a copy of the UN Charter. To underscore the point, Gaddafi explained the Western action in Iraq:

As if to soften the meaning of his words, he added, “We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the President of the United States of America.”

If Gaddafi really thought that Obama would be his guarantor of peace, he would soon be very disappointed.

In part, Gaddafi's performance may have had something to do with a few indignities that had come with his first trip to the United States. Contrary to the hospitality afforded him by Sarkozy on his first official trip to France in 2007, Gaddafi was denied permission to set up his tent in Manhattan—or even in rural New Jersey—and banned from visiting the World Trade Center site. Libya's delegates to the UN desperately tried to find a place for their leader to stay. Thoroughly insulted by his reception in the US, one of Gaddafi's first acts upon returning to Tripoli was to refuse to allow the Russians to take back spent uranium—part of the original understanding on the disposal of components of Libya's WMD program.
⁴¹

Saif, uncharacteristically, had been the first to thumb his nose at Libya's key allies when he accompanied Megrahi on his return to Libya in 2009, saying “In all commercial contracts for oil and gas with Britain, al-Megrahi was always on the negotiating table.”
⁴²
In 2010, during an interview with British press, he raised eyebrows by bragging that the now former prime minister, Tony Blair, was a “personal family friend” of the Gaddafis and had visited Libya many times since he left office.
⁴³
The origins of these comments are unclear, but they certainly appeared to have been made with the intention of embarrassing Blair, who was already under scrutiny for his postretirement dealings with Libya. Was this an instance of hubris or a veiled threat, a reminder, to one of the individuals who had benefited most and personally from the rapprochement, that he needed to be circumspect in how he characterized his relationship with Libya? Blair described, in
September 2011, his role in Libya in almost the same terms he had used to justify his role in the Iraq war: “I have no regrets.”
⁴⁴

Had the rigged dichotomy of “reactionaries versus reformists” become a hard reality, as some aspects of the makeover began to look a bit too lifelike for Gaddafi's taste. Interviews of some of Saif 's “implementers,” from Yusuf Sawani to Mahmoud Jibril and others, suggest some disillusionment with Saif 's personal stake in, and commitment to, a process he professed to champion, and which they claim they originally felt was sincere.
⁴⁵
Sawani, who after the revolution assumed a post as professor of political science at Tripoli University, maintained that Saif did not pay enough attention to the process, and “was more concerned with attracting the attention of foreign experts and advisers,” than making firm progress toward his stated goals.
⁴⁶
At the same time, Sawani suggests that regime supporters, those with revolutionary committee credentials, were alarmed by some of Saif 's maneuvers, noticed his vulnerability, and worked to undermine individuals in his orbit. Jibril, the “sheikh of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya” is one example. In a further, critical move, Mu'tassim had by this time aligned himself more forcefully against Saif, a development that individuals in Saif 's orbit confirmed indirectly. According to Sawani, “Mu'tassim was completely opposed to the plan of Saif Al Islam.”
⁴⁷

Many of Saif 's former assistants or aides described a process in which Saif sought to pursue his own agendas, without having to directly confront his father, such as asking others to float opinion pieces and watch the results, all the while making a show of the fact that it was
he
who would suffer at least part of the consequences. Thus Gaddafi and his son seemed to be waging an indirect and believable contest, via third parties. Fathi Baja, a journalist and professor who wrote for Saif in
Quryna
, described in an interview with the postrevolutionary, Benghazi-based paper
Miyadeen
(
Public Squares
) how he was challenged by Gaddafi about an article entitled,
Libya Ila ‘ain
(“Libya's Going Where?”). In the article, he challenged what he described as the “Michael Porter/Monitor” thesis that reform should start (and could be limited to) economic reform, and advocated strongly for the drafting of a new constitution, which Saif had intermittently been promoting.
⁴⁸
Shortly after the article came out in 2009, Baja, a bespectacled academic who bears some resemblance to American actor John Goodman,
was summoned to meet with Gaddafi in Tripoli. It was a surreal spectacle in which Saif Al Islam, Musa Kusa, and Khamis Gaddafi made cameo appearances.

Baja described how Gaddafi explained he had summoned him to “protect” him from those who felt his article had been disrespectful and wanted to “eliminate” him, and that his son Khamis, who had been Baja's student in the university, had “put in a good word.” Baja went on, “Gaddafi said to me then, I want to protect you now, because these words [you have written] have displeased many, and they want to kill you.” After listening to Gaddafi for two and a half hours, Baja was then released to the beaming Khamis, who took him out to dinner and let him go. Saif was present at the Tripoli meeting with Gaddafi, but apparently neither intervened nor said anything to Baja, perhaps, in Baja's estimation, because Baja had implicitly criticized Saif for not moving far or fast enough:

Sawani attributes the experience to the fact that Saif could not go against his father on any matter that was critical to progress, such as a constitution, which Saif first proposed in 2006. Even in the area of economic development, many of Saif 's projects—however well intentioned—suffered from being scatterbrained, influenced at least in part by fear of his father's reaction. A former Department of Defense official and later adviser to Saif said that it was apparent, in her many conversations with Saif, that he was “fixated” or “obsessed” with his father on one hand; on the other hand, Saif tried to dispel the perception that Gaddafi held sway over him or that he needed to clear every decision with Gaddafi.
⁵⁰
Sawani alleges that he was himself increasingly targeted by members of the revolutionary councils, who suspected him of being a foreign agent sent to undermine the regime. Sawani says he was likely saved (perhaps the only person to have been “saved” in such a manner) by Wikileaks cable revelations of “tense relations and differences between him and Saif.”
⁵¹