A Libyan Charm Offensive

To the shores of Tripoli with the son of Qaddafi

Michael C. Moynihan  

Tripoli, Libya—Perhaps I overestimated the bien-pensantultra British understanding of “modernity.” When the BBC reported that “at Tripoli’s ultra-modern airport…you could be almost anywhere in the world,” I expected at bare minimum a Starbucks, a fake Irish pub, and (this is the bit) a bank of vending machines dispensing iPods and noise-canceling headphones.

Well, perhaps we came through Libya’s spillover airport, its Midway or Stansted, because this is “anywhere in the world” only in some mad, dystopian-novel sense. Available for purchase are Egyptian gum, cheap watches celebrating 40 years of the Libyan revolution, and glossy magazines with Hugo Chavez on the cover. Sinister men in baggy uniforms, all puffing Marlboros, shout at each other and disappear with my passport. I later find out this bit of theater was required because I possess a passport stamp from Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. After some discussion, my personal government apparatchik informs the entire staff of Libyan customs that, on orders from high, this particular learned elder of Zion can be allowed through.

It’s not entirely clear why I am in Libya, although it would have been rude to refuse a trip funded by the generous and, according to their hired help, deeply misunderstood comrades of the Qaddafi Foundation. At the behest of Saif al-Qaddafi—Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s slick, London-educated son and dauphin—our group of journalists is being shuttled to the country in an effort to demonstrate a new Libyan openness and, it is implied, a future rather different from the past. Personally, I’m more interested in sneaking a glimpse at the world’s only Islamo-socialist personality cult.

The Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

It doubtless keeps Qaddafi pere awake at night that had he tamped down the rhetorical goofiness and sartorial excess (and maybe a terrorist bombing or two) his country could have been like Castro’s Cuba or Sandinista Nicaragua in the eyes of the West. In the 1970s, Libya promoted itself to European revolutionary tourists and gringo sugarcane harvesters in Havana as a socialist alternative with a moderate religious component. The regime took part in all sorts of radical-chic nastiness too: bombing a German disco full of American soldiers, talking nonsense about collectivizing the Sahara, and providing the Provisional IRA with the weapons needed to kill wayward Catholics.

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