Gadhafi rehabilitation sealed at Rice dinner

[September 08, 2008]  RABAT, Morocco (AP) -- Once, he was one of America's most feared bogeymen: a Mideast thug who unleashed terrorist goons on U.S. interests around the world. Now, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is breaking bread with the secretary of state in his kitchen and plying her with gifts.

In the 1980s, Libyan terrorists were staple villains in the movies and on TV. It was hard for many Americans to imagine a greater evil than the strongman blamed for a string of anti-U.S. attacks, most notoriously the 1988 downing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

But after abandoning his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and renouncing terrorism in 2003, Gadhafi completed a remarkable five-year rehabilitation last week, transforming himself from a mysterious and reviled enemy of the United States to a partner of known quantity.

In a private kitchen at his home -- which President Reagan ordered bombed in 1986 in retaliation for Libya's attack on a German disco -- Gadhafi welcomed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Friday for the traditional evening meal that ends the daylight fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

His famed all-female bodyguards were not in evidence, and there were no last-minute changes in the meeting venue.

Gadhafi did repeatedly call Rice -- who is known as "Condi" in most world capitals -- "Leezza," her aides said, even if he did not reprise bizarre comments he made in an interview last year in which he referred to her as "my darling black African woman."

Clad in a spotless white robe and trademark black fez, Gadhafi appeared serene as he welcomed Rice, the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Libya in more than half a century, and her entourage in an incense-choked drawing room.

The U.S. had regarded Libya as a pariah state for sponsoring various terrorist groups as far-flung as the Irish Republican Army and Palestinian factions, and for trying to undermine pro-Western governments in Africa.

Face-to-face with the person Reagan once called the "mad man of the Middle East," Rice told aides that the often erratic "brother-leader" of Libya's 1969 revolution did not put his reputed eccentricities on display and had been professional.

He did not dwell on past hostilities between the United States and Libya: the Libyan-linked bombing of the La Belle disco on Berlin that killed two U.S. servicemen; the retaliatory U.S. airstrikes that Libya says killed some 40 people, including Gadhafi's daughter; or the Lockerbie incident, which killed 270 people, mostly Americans.

He did present Rice with jewelry, a ring and a locket with an engraved likeness of himself inside, a lute, and an inscribed edition of his personal political manifesto "The Green Book," which explains Gadhafi's "Third Universal Theory for a new democratic society."

Required reading in Libya, copies of "The Green Book" were also distributed to journalists who accompanied Rice on the trip as they waited for the meeting to begin in a large conference room where Gadhafi's Revolutionary Council sometimes meets.

Along with "The Green Book," Gadhafi's aides also handed out the leader's seminal "White Book" -- also known as "Isratine"- that proposes a single-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at odds with conventional diplomatic wisdom on ending the dispute.

A look at the library in the conference room offered some hints to Gadhafi's inspirations.

Among the English-language titles on display were an eight-volume history of Africa published by the U.N., "Gandhi: His Life and Thought," and "America's Prisoner: The Memoirs of Manuel Noriega," the former Panamanian dictator now jailed on drug charges in the U.S.

[Associated Press; By MATTHEW LEE]

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