Read Online Exit the Colonel by Ethan Chorin - Free Book Online Page B

sentenced to death, under highly opaque circumstances. The medics’ case remained unresolved four years after the US and Libya had begun negotiations. The fact that Congress had just forced President Bush to back down on the Dubai port operator DP World’s bid to operate several container ports on the US Eastern Seaboard (it was denied), constrained the White House’s ability to act, had Congress voiced strong objection to moving the Libya relationship forward. In fact, since Libya had committed to settling the Lockerbie claims, Congress seemed more or less likely to approve of removing Libya from the list. It was the Libyans who appeared to be intent on making it difficult, as an almost unbelievable plot began to surface.

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    Many close to the process said that Libya might have been removed from the list at least a year earlier if not for revelations concerning Libya’s 2003 plot to kill then Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, following a spat between him and Gaddafi at an Arab League Summit earlier that year. 39 The Libyans attempted—successfully—to pass this off as a private matter in which the US was meddling. In support of this view is the fact that the Saudis, while they loathed the Libyans (and vice versa), effectively settled their differences with the Libyans well before the terror list review deadline. As then Assistant Secretary David Welch recounted, “Here they were at each other’s throats, the next thing we hear, Mohammed bin Nayef [then Saudi deputy minister for security affairs] is in the Libyan desert falcon hunting with Saif.” 40
    Ultimately, a Libya-Saudi reconciliation was effected at the margins of the twenty-first Arab League Summit, held in Doha on March 30, 2009, when Gaddafi unexpectedly apologized in his own unique manner to now King Abdullah, saying, “I consider this personal problem between us to have ended, and I am ready to visit you, and to have you visit me.” 41 Musa Kusa purportedly added, off camera, “If we had really wanted Abdullah dead, we would not have failed.” 42 With one major roadblock cleared, another popped up. Gaddafi made disparaging remarks about the US and Bush on Libyan television, and Welch was again in the position—and not for the last time—of reminding the Libyans that this kind of sounding off was most certainly not serving Gaddafi well in Washington or with the Bush White House.

Cat’s Out of the Bag, May 2006
    Despite serious misgivings in various parts of the US government, on May 15, 2006, Libya was finally removed from the terror list. The influence of individual members of the Bush administration and State Department in pushing the Libya-US rapprochement past this last, critical goalpost was substantial. One former official with access to Saif said that senior US officials had reassured Saif, at the point when removal from the terror list looked most in jeopardy, that the Saudi issue would, ultimately “not be an issue.” 43
    Gaddafi reveled in his newfound power. Sensing how much the outsiders wanted to strike deals for their own purposes, Gaddafi began immediately to divide and conquer, demanding higher and higher prices. A Vanity Fair article quotes a “frequent visitor” to Libya describing Gaddafi’s strategy as the “deep stack . . . in which a rich player with mediocre cards intimidates opponents into folding by raising the stakes to levels so high that they dare not call his bluff. And that, says one frequent visitor to Libya, is the way Qaddafi does business.” 44
    With Libya off the terror list, Gaddafi felt redeemed and moved quickly to call in previous favors (that is, funding to foreign states) to positions of symbolic importance, such as the rotating leadership of the African Union, something he had craved for years. Much to the chagrin and outrage of the US and Europe, Libya was elected by secret ballot to the chairmanship of the UN’s Human