Gadhafi's about-face

Editor's Note: Barak Barfi is a research fellow with the New America Foundation.

By Barak Barfi – Special to CNN

As the world rejoices in the death of long time Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, the media is emphasizing his battles with the United States and his malicious terrorism.  Largely overlooked, however, are his attempts to rehabilitate his image by turning his back on the terrorism he so passionately embraced for two decades and by embracing a United States he long derided.

Gadhafi, obviously, was no saint.  Rather, he was a semi-repented rogue dictator who only recently sought to integrate himself into a world of nations he previously disdained.  Beginning in the 1990’s, he ceased funding insurrections from South America to Southeast Asia, and instead used his country’s oil wealth to mediate international conflicts.  He played a key role in launching peace talks in Sudan and brokered an end to a Tuareg rebellion in Niger.  He paid ransom for hostages in North Africa and the Philippines. 

It was his links to terrorism that drew the ire of the United States under President Ronald Reagan.  Gadhafi viewed groups such as the Palestinian Abu Nidal Organization as legitimate weapons in his battle against Western nations, which he despised for propping up Israel and pro-American Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia.  After his intelligence agents bombed a West German disco frequented by American servicemen in 1986, President Reagan ordered the military to attack Libya.  Though he subsequently reduced his terrorist profile, Gadhafi nevertheless retaliated in 1988 with the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland, which resulted in the deaths of 270 people.  These events left an indelible mark on American views of Gadhafi that he was never able to efface.

But by the beginning of the new millennium, Gadhafi was eager to shed his image as a sponsor of terror.  He offered to pay reparations to the families of the Pan Am flight’s victims.  He ended his support of terrorist groups.  He cooperated with the United States in its war against  Al Qaeda. He was rewarded by a grateful Washington, which in 2006 reestablished relations that had been severed since 1981.  In 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice became the highest ranking American official to visit Libya in fifty-one years.

By the beginning of 2011, Gadhafi had evolved into a tolerated nuisance.  He pestered American officials to sell him weapons and to stay out of Africa.  He hectored oil executives to invest more in his country.  But he was no longer viewed as the ‘mad dog of the Middle East,’ as President Reagan dubbed him.  Instead, he was a bulwark against the Islamist extremism that had become America’s number one enemy.

Today his successors will be hard-pressed to assume this mantle.  Their military ranks brim with former jihadists, some of whom fervently disdain the West.  Libya’s new leaders have proved incapable of imposing control over their own militias, which control weapons coveted by regional terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.  They will likely have difficulty controlling the sprawling country and its deserts, possibly abandoning the hinterlands to smugglers.

America’s longtime nemesis Moammar Gadhafi is dead.  But the forces he held in check may submerge his successors and the country he ruled for forty-two years.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of Barak Barfi.