“Every American feels the aching temptation to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age from which its barbarous dictator springs.”
—Denver Post editorial, January 9, 1988
The main noise in the media last week was an unlikely tale about a showdown between Ronald Reagan and some maniac criminal Arab named Khadafy or Gaddafi or even Moammar el-Qaddafi, the usage of The New York Times. Nobody in Washington seemed to know how to spell the man’s name, despite his sudden emergence as the pivotal figure in a countdown to World War III.
Col. Khadafy—the accepted West Coast spelling—is the chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of the Libyan Arab Republic and also commander-in-chief of all the Libyan armed forces. He lives, they say, with his wife and seven children behind thick stone walls in the Bab al Aziziya military barracks on the outskirts of Tripoli, where he spends most of his nights raving and plotting into a phalanx of microphones connected somehow to the International Cable and Wireless network, which allows him to speak at all times to every capital in the civilized world, and presumably to most of the others.
The colonel is not shy about communicating his night thoughts and broodings on the airwaves, even to people he may plan to kill—which is a long and varied list, these days, from Ronald Reagan and the queen of England to U.S. jet pilots on the USS Coral Sea and random civilian targets on any street in America. He will kill them all, he says, unless he is left alone.
This is the word we get out of Washington, where Khadafy is viewed as a mad-dog fiend worse than Hitler. Even smiling Jody Powell, former White House press secretary under former President Jimmy Carter, is now saying in print that “the time has come to punish Khadafy” for insane crimes of international terrorism. . . . And “punishment,” in this situation, is generally understood to mean serious military action, such as hitting the beaches of Tripoli with U.S. Marines and B-52 bomber strikes on suspected “terrorist training camps” far out in the Libyan desert.
This is an interesting line of thought, with many loose ends, and both Reagan and Powell have been to this well before. The last time Reagan intervened in a violent Middle East situation, he got 264 Marines sent home from Beirut in body bags, for no good reason at all . . . and Jody Powell’s last adventure with military leverage in the Pan-Islamic world resulted in a humiliating disaster—the failed and brainless 1980 “rescue mission” of U.S. hostages in Iran that ended in a fireball of death, dishonor and disgrace.
Our recent record is not good in that part of the world. The Arabs are no more afraid of our threats and bombs and technology than the North Vietnamese were. They seem to have other plans, for good or ill, and on some days you can get a strange feeling—despite the current chaos in the price pattern of OPEC oil—that we are not really included. They are looking beyond “The American Century,” as Henry Luce called it, and even the Islamic calendar puts the year 2001 less than a dog’s life away from today.
Col. Khadafy was born 43 years ago in a goatskin tent somewhere in the desert between the Mediterranean port city of Sirte and a bleak inland boom town called Sebha, capital city of the southern province of Fezzan. Libya was still a colony of Italy at the time, a war-torn primitive fiefdom on the useless shores of North Africa, boiling over with fear and confusion.
Moammar’s father and his uncle were jailed for political crimes against the colonial administration, so he grew up hating Italians. At the age of 27, recently promoted to the rank of captain in the army signal corps, he seized control of the country with 60 young co-conspirators in a bloodless coup that toppled the hapless King Idris—who had a 20,000-man personal army at the time—and began a long and fruitful reign as leader of one of the world’s leading oil producers.
So what? He has been there for 16 years now, which is longer than almost anyone else in the currently active political world except Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Fidel Castro in Cuba—none of them classical democrats.
Sixteen years is a long time in this league and this century. Ronald Reagan has the look of a man who has been at the helm forever, but in fact it has been just five years. John F. Kennedy was killed before he finished even three, and Winston Churchill was fired twice after less than five.
Tenure is short in the fast lane. Julius Caesar was dead after five years at the top, and the hideous pervert Caligula was gone just short of four, like a one-term U.S. president.
Not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt served as many years as Moammar Khadafy has already logged as the weird shepherd-king of Libya, and the man is still only 43 years old. He is said to have no living enemies, or at least not for long, and his regime is apparently more stable than anything in North Africa since Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, who was deposed after ruling for 44 years.
Selassie, the “Lion of Judah,” deferred to no man or even to God, in his time, but he misjudged the ignorant thugs who deposed him and Mussolini years earlier.
Selassie’s reign was chaotic and his legacy was worse, but his tenure was longer than that of anybody else in the century except Emperor Hirohito of Japan, who has been in for 59 years. It is a record that might last forever, given the nature and pace of the times . . . and if there is any conceivable challenger still alive and working these days, it is probably Col. Moammar Khadafy of Libya.
He is smarter than Reagan and dumber than Fidel Castro and he has a perfect understanding of the ethic of massive retaliation. Not even the Germans want to cross him, regardless of what crimes he’s committed.
Col. Khadafy might be savage and treacherous and crazy, as Ronald Reagan says, but even our closest allies enjoy doing business with him, and he will probably be around for a long time, unless Reagan can have him killed.
January 13, 1986