DEMOCRACY IN LIBYA?

Muamar Qadaffi has run Libya as an Islamic dictatorship since 1969.  The history of his oppression and sponsorship of terrorism is long.  Ronald Reagan called him "The Mad Dog of the Middle East."

Qadaffi sponsored the Abu Nidal terrorist group that bombed the airports of Rome and Vienna on December 27, 1985.  On April 5, 1986, a bomb exploded in the La Belle disco in West Berlin, killing two American soldiers and wounding over 200 people.  Intercepted communications between Libyan agents in East Germany proved the attack was approved by Qadaffi.

Nine days later, Reagan ordered a massive assault of US fighter jets upon Libya, targeting Qadaffi personally.  His home in Tripoli was hit, but he escaped out of the rubble.  (Thus the joke:  What saved Qadaffi during the airstrike?  The camel was on top.)

Qadaffi retaliated by organizing the blowing up of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988.  Neither Reagan (whose presidency had less than a month to go) nor his successor, George H. W. Bush, did anything to punish him.

It took George W. Bush to bring Qadaffi to heel.  After Bush chased Saddam Hussein out of Baghdad and into a spider hole, Qadaffi called up Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and told him he didn't want to end up like Saddam.

So Qadaffi came clean on his WMD program, the extent of which stunned the clueless CIA.  He invited international inspectors to Libya, where they removed several tons of chemical weaponry, and dismantled an active nuclear weapons program.

As a result, this past May 15, the State Department announced the US was restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya.  Hotels in Tripoli and Benghazi are full of US oil execs and other businessfolk making deals.  Yet Qadaffi remains a dictator and Libya the antithesis of a democracy.

Until this week.

On Tuesday (August 29), Libya's most prominent dissident and democracy activist, a former political prisoner who has founded in exile several Libyan opposition groups, Mohammed Buisier, arrived in Benghazi on a flight from Tunisia.

He was met at the airport by a crowd of deliriously happy supporters, who escorted him to his hotel in a parade of dozens of cars honking their horns.

At a dinner in his honor that night, he advocated a peaceful dismantling of totalitarianism in Libya, replacing it gradually with democratic institutions.  This weekend, he will participate in a conference in Tripoli entitled Transformation from Revolution to State.

The conference is hosted by Qadaffi's son, Saif al-Islam.

Those who have met Saif al-Islam tell me he is exceedingly bright.  Before graduating from the London School of Economics, he studied economics and philosophy at the University of Vienna, where he embraced the teachings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

That means he is a thoroughly educated advocate of laissez faire capitalism.

This past weekend, two days prior to Dr. Buisier's arrival, Saif al-Islam gave a speech, published in Libyan newspapers, saying it was time for freedom in Libya, freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion.  It was time for Libya to transform itself from a revolutionary state to a "normal" state with democratic freedoms.

Yet it was not Saif al-Islam who invited Dr. Buisier to Libya.  It was his father.

Next week, after the Tripoli conference, it is quite likely that Dr. Buisier will meet with Muamar Qadaffi to personally discuss with him the democratization of Libya.

So far, there has not been a single word of this in the Western press.  Probably because the democratization of a radical Islamic state would be seen as a triumph for George Bush.

That's how low the media has sunk – it can't root for freedom for fear of rooting for the President of the United States.

But we can root for both – and wish Dr. Buisier good luck next week in Tripoli.