Qaddafi also had an affection for resistance fighters and revolutionaries everywhere, no matter whose side they were on. To give you some idea, he funneled money and arms to Scottish revolutionaries. (What do those meetings look like? I imagine six kilted old geezers at a banquet table in Inverness.) Some of his revolutionary largesse seemed to fit in with his pan-Arab goals (the Moros of the Philippines, the Palestinians); others were just plain wacky: radical natives in South America, the New Jewel Movement in Grenada, the Irish Republican Army (!), the Basques and the Kurds (so much for Iraq joining the Arab super-state). He had a special fondness for Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, as well as the Black Panthers, and he tried to give Farrakhan a billion dollars on the occasion of Farrakhan's receiving something called the Qaddafi Human Rights Award. (Don't laugh. Remember, Libya is the current chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, in spite of holding the world record for longest imprisonment of a journalist: Abdullah Ali al-Sanussi-al-Darrat, jailed in 1973 and still caged--place of confinement unknown.) The United States blocked the billion, by the way.

What makes this all possible, of course, is oil. Without the oil, Qaddafi would be one more wacky but ineffectual African dictator. As it is, he's like an International Monetary Fund for illegitimate governments. He's apparently never met a secessionist he didn't like, funneling support to breakaway guerrillas in Chad, Eritrea, Lebanon, the Canary Islands, Wales (!), Egypt, Sudan, Corsica and Sardinia. He even gave his blessing to the American Jesus-freak movement, Children of God, which apparently passes muster on the strength of its anti-government beliefs. (He's been officially declared a messiah by the Children of God, an honor he accepted reluctantly, apparently after being convinced it would help his Muslim missionary goals.)

But is Qaddafi a changed man? He recently turned 61, which happens to be the average life-expectancy for a Libyan, and he doesn't seem so keen on murder in his declining years. He was never an indiscriminate assassin in the first place. Like the Mafia, all killings were kept in the family--people he thought had betrayed him in one way or another. His notorious Service special des renseignements--assassins who carried out hits in Rome, London, Athens, Beirut, Bonn and Milan--had eliminated most of his chief political opponents by 1980. Most were shot, one was strangled and one was decapitated. The decapitation seems to be his only indulgence in Idi-Amin-style vengeance. For the most part, he's been, by dictator standards, a moderate bloodletter.

Of course, there's the widespread belief that he was responsible for the explosion that knocked Pan Am flight 103 out of the air over Lockerbie, Scotland, leaving 271 dead. Even though he's publicly apologized for it and turned over two men to international courts, he's never said he ordered it, and it's unlikely that he did. When you're supporting various terrorist cells in every nation on the planet, sooner or later one of them is going to do something that threatens your oil sales. Perhaps to make this point, he was the first Muslim leader to condemn Al-Qaeda after the September 11 attacks. "Irrespective of the conflict with America", he said, "it is a human duty to show sympathy with the American people and be with them at these horrifying and awesome events which are bound to awaken human conscience."

The statement was especially significant because it's been widely assumed that much of his grudge against Europe and the United States has been intensely personal. His grandfather was killed by an Italian colonist in 1911. His infant daughter was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on his personal residence in 1986. In the days immediately following, he expressed his hatred for President Reagan in several colorful ways and said it was legal to eat American soldiers since they had been revealed to be animals. He rarely speaks this way anymore--perhaps because his country has just recently returned from the brink of economic collapse, perhaps because he doesn't have to. In Western marketing terms, "Qaddafi" is a mature brand, so high-concept that the word itself inspires allegiances and blind loyalty that doesn't need further proof of quality. He can afford, like Disney or Coca-Cola, to diversify without fear of losing his core business.

This doesn't mean he can't occasionally call for the saber and the musket, but it usually takes something on the order of an actual assassination attempt. Ever since 2,000 Libyan soldiers plotted to assassinate him in 1993--the biggest threat to his power he's seen so far--Qaddafi has pretty routinely dealt with the various opposition figures who want to kill or depose him. One advantage of being an Islamic, as opposed to a Christian or Jewish, dictator is that everyone knows up-front that, if you try to kill the king, there will be no trial, no waiting period, no speeches and no mercy--you're dead the moment you're caught. His crack troops, the Green Guard of the Revolution, handle the necessary formalities, if any arise. Qaddafi is avenging one serious assassination attempt every two years or so, plus the occasional bloody riot at a football game (a peculiarly Libyan form of social protest), and even a few foreign-financed jobs. (It now appears that the 1996 attempt to kill him was orchestrated by MI6, with help from Al-Qaeda. Now that post-9/11 speech starts to make sense.)

Otherwise he's lost his flair for the dramatically brutal gesture. Gone are the days when he suggested torpedoing the Queen Elizabeth II as it carried Jews to Israel to celebrate that nation's twenty-fifth anniversary. Today Qaddafi contents himself with repeatedly resigning from office--so the people can demand he return--and making apocalyptic pronouncements. (The CIA is spreading aids worldwide. It's the beginning of "The Age of Chaos." All armies will be destroyed and civilians will be taught to fight. The coming revolution will start inside America, where corporations will join with minorities to destroy the government. Soon world markets will end.) And fortunately for his international image, he remains eminently quotable: "Israel is nothing but a mirage, something that does not exist."

In fact, his recent speeches and interviews (if you can call them interviews, considering that the questioners frequently address him as "Great leader") indicate that he's dwelling on ever subtler forms of worldwide disruption. One of his favorite words is "virus", which he uses in several ways, but the utility of computer viruses is obviously uppermost in his mind: "Viruses today are much more stronger than cruise missiles." He openly gloated over the dotcom bust, and he recently proposed further destabilizing the Western economy by simply counterfeiting billions of dollars and euros. Is it just a coincidence that, since he started talking about it, the U.S. treasury has been forced to change the designs of its currency, including, so far, the one hundred, twenty and five dollar bills?

Meanwhile, all his friends from the 1969 Revolutionary Council have drifted away. Four have retired, one was killed in a car accident, another was killed in a coup attempt. Abdel Moneim Al-Huni joined the Libyan opposition in 1975 and survived a Qaddafi hit squad, then--remarkably--reconciled with the Colonel and is now Qaddafi's ambassador to the Arab League. The man considered Qaddafi's successor for many years, Major Abdel Salam Jallud, disappeared from power in the mid-1990s to devote his attention to business--and he was the last of them. Qaddafi's various sons all had their problems. Al-Saidi is a reckless and profligate man in his late-twenties whose only passion is soccer. Muhammad, the eldest son by Qaddafi's first wife, is too shy for the job. Sayf Al-Islam, the third eldest son, has served as a Libyan envoy but reportedly hates politics, and he's been spending time in Vienna taking business courses at a college program run by Americans. Only Aisha, now 25, seems to relish Dad's job. She's appeared on television with Nelson Mandela, soothed the nerves of Saddam Hussein during various crises and once slipped away from her thirty personal bodyguards at London's Dorchester Hotel to speak at Hyde Park's Speakers Corner. More important, she can use the word "privatization" with a straight face while blitzing European capitals, then become the perfect representative of a traditional Islamic household at home. It would be somehow very much like Qaddafi to try to create the first female head of a Muslim state, and somehow amend the Green Book to allow it.

He doesn't refer much anymore to the Green Book, though, perhaps because its socialist principles are a little embarrassing in a country that became steadily poorer through the 1990s. In fact, he's started making a bid for . . . business partners! At some point he started thinking about Libya's "1000 miles of unspoiled beaches" and decided he needed some tourist hotels. (Kind of a long shot, since the country doesn't accept credit cards and has a permanent ban on alcohol and gambling.) He's also not ruling out the presence of some foreign banks in Tripoli. But he draws the line at joining the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, both of which he despises. For him, that would be like Disney making pornography or Coca-Cola bottling whiskey: the brand is still strong, but you can't destroy the franchise. The Q-Man may be a little softer in his old age, but he's not so insane as to begin doing what appears to be sane.

Joe Bob Briggs is a Texas satirist whose latest book is Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies that Changed History (Rizzoli, 2003).

Essay Types: Essay