Success Unheralded
Judith Miller has a detailed piece on Gadhafi's decision to give up his WMD program. The timeline dovetails with the invasion of Iraq. Surely this is a coincidence?September 11th, and an increase in U.S. pressure
Col. Gadhafi was alarmed by the new U.S. agenda, and Libyans say that the 9/11
attacks were a turning point for the Brother Leader, who was among the first to
condemn them. Through intelligence channels, he sent the administration a list
of suspects. He also called Hosni Mubarak in a panic, convinced that Mr. Bush
would attack Libya once the Taliban had been crushed in Afghanistan, according
to a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo reported last month by Time.
Meanwhile, Washington increased its rhetorical pressure. Though Libya was not
included in Mr. Bush's "axis of evil," then-Undersecretary of State John Bolton
called Libya a "rogue state" determined to acquire WMD.
The run-up to the Iraq War
As U.S. and British troops began flooding into Kuwait, Col. Gadhafi grew
agitated, diplomats said. Italian press accounts quote then-Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi as saying that Col. Gadhafi had called him to say he feared he
would be America's next target. "Tell them I will do whatever they want," said
one diplomat, recounting the call. In early March 2003 just days before the
start of the Iraq war, Saif and Musa Kusa, a top Libyan intelligence official,
contacted the British to say that Col. Gadhafi wanted to "clear the air" about
WMD programs in exchange for assurances that the U.S. would not try to topple
his regime, according to several accounts.
The insurgency in Iraq begins
Yet as American forces became bogged down in Iraq, Col. Gadhafi's enthusiasm for
giving up his WMD programs seemed to wane. Libya had yet to acknowledge even
that it possessed banned weapons and programs, a senior official told me. And
while the Libyans had agreed in principle to let a team of U.S.-U.K. weapons
experts visit sites in Libya, no date had been set. "No agreement on a date
meant there was essentially no agreement on a visit," the official said. The
talks stalled.
The turning point
The diplomatic lull soon ended, however. Libyans close to the Gadhafi family
told me that after Saddam Hussein's sons were killed in a shootout with U.S.
soldiers in Mosul in July 2003, Safiya, Col. Gadhafi's wife, angrily demanded
that he do more to ensure that Saif and her other sons would not share a similar
fate.
The intelligence coup
Then, in early October 2003, the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Italy interdicted
the "BBC China," a German ship destined for Libya that the Americans had been
tracking for nearly a year. A U.S. intelligence official informed the Libyans
that the five 40-foot containers marked "used machine parts" that were offloaded
from the ship contained thousands of centrifuge parts to enrich uranium,
manufactured in Malaysia by the A.Q. Khan network. Stunned by the discovery,
Libya fast-tracked its long-promised invitation to the British and U.S. experts
to tour suspect sites.
The second intelligence coup
While Col. Gadhafi could have claimed, as Iran now does, that the enrichment
equipment was for a peaceful energy program, the pretense was shattered in
November when U.S. intelligence gave the Libyans a copy of a compact disc that
intelligence agencies had intercepted. According to Saif and Libyan officials in
Tripoli, the CD contained a recording of a long discussion on Feb. 28, 2002,
about Libya's nuclear weapons program, between Ma'atouq Mohamed Ma'atouq, the
head of that clandestine effort, and A.Q. Khan. Denial of military intent was no
longer an option.
The announcement
When Libya dramatically declared on Dec. 19, 2003, that it was abandoning its
rogue ways, President Bush and other senior officials praised Libya and Moammar
al-Gadhafi, the surviving dean of Arab revolutionary leaders, as a model that
other rogue states might follow.
The praise from the media, the credit from the American public, the credit from the rest of a suddenly safer planet
......
posted by JM @ 5:21 PM
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