Gadhafi: He might be an SOB, but he is our SOB

Now... if Castro had a nuclear program we might have been opening an embassy in Havana...

Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmpolitan challenges the conventional wisdomabout ourour new love affair:

If President Bush’s immigration speech was an attempt to divert attention from his failures in Iraq, then Condi Rice’s announcement this week that the U.S. would restore diplomatic ties with Libya — and that Iran and North Korea should take note — may have been a useful distraction of attention from the fact that in the course of a single week, she’d suffered two significant diplomatic setbacks (on the quest for Iran sanctions and on the attempt to financially throttle the Palestinian Authority). Most of the media seemed to lap up her explanation that Libya had been suddenly cowed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq into renouncing terrorism, WMD and seeking to rehabilitate itself in the international community.
That revisionist account, of course, ignores the fact that Libya had been strenuously attempting to restore ties with the West for more than a decade — that was the intention of all those talks over taking responsibility for Lockerbie, which were mediated by the South Africans in the mid 1990s. Libya had longsince begged off sponsoring terror attacks against the West, although part of the Colonel’s grand ambition to style himself as a Pan-African liberator had seen him back some of the most vicious war criminals (think Charles Taylor or Foday Sankoh) that the continent has ever seen. Yes, it was only in 2003 that Gadhafi declared his nuclear program and shipped it off to Washington. But that simply completed a process that had already begun years before, during the Clinton administration.read more

And apropos Gadhafi's(doomed) love affairs...She's Baaack... Judith Miller writes in the WSJ about the guy she used to milk in his tent at the desert once upon a time for news and more read. And too bad that Andrew Solomon's fascinating report from Libya in the New Yorker is not available online.