Gaddafi: Obsessed By a Ruthless, Messianic Vision

By Richard Stengel

In the movie reel of his imagination, he sees himself standing alone in the desert, silhouetted against the moon, swathed in traditional Bedouin robes, a farsighted prophet of Islam and the mighty creator of the Great Arab Nation, stretching from the warm Persian Gulf to the dark Atlantic Ocean--a nation that would eclipse the West in power and glory and purity. Muammar Gaddafi is not a man of modest ambitions. Nor one without a sense of backlighting.

But his messianic vision, like the turbans in which he wraps himself, does not camouflage his vicious methods and his ruthless fanaticism. He believes his own erratic ends are justified by any means, however bloody. He has become the modern-day incarnation of the Society of Assassins, which flourished from the 11th to the 13th century in the Middle East, only his victims are random and spread over the entire map. The primary tool of his effort to achieve Islamic unity and the elimination of Israel is terrorism. Gaddafi regards himself not only as the last great hope of pan-Islam but as the scourge of the West, which he fervently believes has humiliated the Arab world for centuries. It is a humiliation he intends to avenge.

Although Gaddafi is often described as a madman, an irrational mystic who speaks in rhyme but without reason, there is a contorted yet intent philosophical underpinning to his actions and ideology. His madness has method in it--indeed, his apparent madness is a method. His very unpredictability is a way of keeping his enemies off guard. He revels when those in the West denounce him as a devil; it only confirms the righteousness of his cause.

Gaddafi's cause and the means with which he pursues it are the result of his desert youth, his early military training and his scattered reading of utopian and anarchist writers. His father was an illiterate Bedouin shepherd, and Gaddafi was born in a goatskin tent in the desert near Surt. "The desert teaches you to rely on yourself," Gaddafi has written. "The values I learned there have remained with me all my life."

His activism ignited early. He walked miles to school, often slept in a mosque, and was booted out of secondary school after starting a student strike. He later entered a military academy, where he immersed himself in the Koran and the passionate speeches in praise of Arab nationalism by Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom Gaddafi came to worship. After graduating, he spent ten months at a British army signals school.

When he returned to Libya, Gaddafi began to organize his fellow officers into secret cells to plan a way to overthrow the regime of the aged King Idris, whom he regarded as a corrupt and effete tool of Western oil companies. In 1969 Gaddafi led an efficient, bloodless coup, an effortless overthrow that seemed to have the tacit support of the U.S.

To many Arabs, smarting from their defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1967 war, the strutting 27-year-old Gaddafi seemed to provide an image of Arab pride. Gaddafi saw himself as the heir to Nasser's crusade for Arab unity, and he would later form paper unions with Egypt, Morocco, Syria and Sudan. He engineered the ouster of British and American bases in Libya and negotiated shrewd deals with Western oil companies to yield greater revenues for Libya. With that money, Gaddafi set about to make good on his promises of free housing, medical care and education for Libya's citizens, something he largely accomplished by the mid-1970s.

In 1973 Gaddafi announced what he called his Popular Revolution, designed to eradicate all forms of the nation's bourgeoisie and bureaucracy. His revolution was based on three slender volumes of his own self-taught philosophy titled The Green Book, Gaddafi's equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book. The books outline Gaddafi's combination of Islamic zeal and Bedouin socialism in a system he calls the Third Universal Theory. The premise is that all contemporary political systems are inherently undemocratic and divisive. Gaddafi contends that capitalism benefits only the elite, whereas Communism stifles the individual.

Guided by his own principles, Gaddafi eliminated all private enterprise, all rental properties, and froze bank accounts. He mandated the creation of so-called People's Committees, which were meant to institutionalize the Koran's concept of consultation. Today the committees run virtually all aspects of Libyan daily life and help suppress any opposition to the regime. By 1978 Gaddafi declared that Libya had become the first jamahiriyah, which means a state without a government, or a people's state. Gaddafi subsequently resigned from his official positions and took for himself the title of Leader of the Revolution. Despite the vagueness of the designation, his power was still unquestioned and absolute.

He used it ruthlessly to stifle dissent abroad as well as at home. Since the late 1970s, a succession of Libyan exiles were gunned down in Europe by Gaddafi henchmen. "My people have the right to liquidate opponents inside and outside the country," he said, "even under broad daylight."

. Terrorism and the support of "revolutionary movements" are tenets of Gaddafi's foreign policy. Gaddafi in fact seems hardly to have met a terrorist he didn't like--or support. In addition to funding the radical fringes of Palestinian organizations, his hand and pocketbook have been seen behind Colombia's M-19 guerrillas, the Irish Republican Army and anti-Turkish Armenian terrorist groups. He offered sanctuary to the three surviving members of the Black September guerrillas who slaughtered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. Gaddafi has turned Libya into a kind of Palm Springs for despots and terrorists; he once provided a home for Idi Amin, as well as a safe haven for the Palestinian radical Abu Nidal, who allegedly masterminded the Rome and Vienna airport massacres.

Although Gaddafi's Green Book describes the U.S. and the Soviet Union as equally egregious imperialists, Gaddafi has made Libya into a Soviet military client, albeit one that even the Kremlin has trouble controlling. The Soviets are his principal supplier of weaponry, and he had purchased more than $12 billion worth of Soviet hardware by the early 1980s. The U.S., he says, is the "devil," the Soviets are a "friend."

The main reason for his embrace of the Soviets is U.S. support for Israel. Gaddafi is obsessed with wiping Israel off the map, and he is convinced that only America stands in his way. "Gaddafi believes that without the U.S., Israel could not continue to exist," says one Western diplomat. "He believes that the U.S. is being very unfair to the Arabs and that it is his duty as standard-bearer of the Arab cause to continually challenge Washington." Like the Ayatullah Khomeini, he sees Washington as the focus of evil on the planet and regards the U.S., not Israel, as the ultimate enemy.

Over the years, Gaddafi has become his own best public relations agent, a master at dropping homey personal details to Western reporters, making himself appear as a humble man of the desert. But there is a pride in his modesty and a kind of repressed cupidity in his abstinence. He regularly parades himself and primps before the female Western reporters based in Tripoli. Married to the same woman for 16 years, he has seven children, six of them boys. He has written that Islamic women are not to be kept in servitude; as if to demonstrate the point, his retinue has been known to include female bodygards toting submachine guns. He lives in a small boxcar of a house, no different / from the spartan homes of the other military men at the well-fortified Bab el- Azizia barracks. He keeps a tent outside, and it is underneath its cloth top that he appears to feel truly at home. He has a piece of bread and a glass of camel's milk for breakfast, a regimen he has kept since he was a boy. He says he likes Western classical music, especially Beethoven, and that his favorite book is Uncle Tom's Cabin. With a kind of adolescent romanticism, he thinks of himself as a Bedouin Byron. "I am a poet," he told a German interviewer. "From time to time, I weep, but only when I am alone."

Despite his animosity toward the U.S., he admires George Washington and the man he calls Ibrahim Lincoln. Gaddafi's only personal excess and sign of indulgence seems to be his revolutionary wardrobe. He is a desert dandy, with a gold-embroidered and tasseled uniform for every conceivable occasion and all manner of robes, capes and turbans. Although he claims, "I seldom look at myself in the mirror," his vanity, his posturing narcissism, is reminiscent of an actor whose only role is himself.

To Anwar Sadat, the posturing was a sign not of eccentricity but of lunacy. The Egyptian leader once described Gaddafi as "100% sick and possessed of the devil." What Gaddafi is possessed by is a desire for vengeance. "He seems to be motivated by a strong desire to take revenge," says a CIA analyst. "But revenge in the historic-religious sense rather than in a practical order. Revenge not so much for what we did to him last year or two weeks ago but for the humiliation of Islam, for the cultural and actual conquest of the Middle East." Whatever his motive, whether it is the quest for pan-Islam or only a greater audience for himself, he will not rest until he has struck back or been struck down.

With reporting by John Borrell/ Cairo and William Stewart/Washington