Qaddafi On Drugs (?)

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February 23, 2011

The Qaddafi Haze

Posted by Samantha Henig



“Did u see Gadhafi’s bizzare speech?” Anderson Cooper wondered, on Twitter, yesterday. “Is he on drugs?” It’s not the first time that Muammar Qaddafi has elicited such speculation. David Ignatius wondered the same when he almost interviewed Qaddafi in the early eighties. As Ignatius recalled in a blog post yesterday, the Libyan leader

stopped about a foot from my face and stared at me with bulging, bloodshot eyes. Then he shouted something in Arabic to his aides and bolted from the room, never to return…. Honestly, I thought at the time that Gaddafi was high on drugs. Those eyes were popping with unnatural intensity.

Fareed Zakaria had a similar response when he interviewed Qaddafi in 2009 (above). “My honest reaction to him is I thought he was on drugs,” he said on “Parker Spitzer” yesterday. “There was something so out there about the way he behaved, so vacuous, so vague, the glazed look in his eye. It was all very, very weird.”

(Qaddafi, for his part, said in his speech yesterday that the Libyan protesters that have been calling for his ouster are the ones on drugs, in addition to being “cockroaches” and “rats” whose demonstrations are “serving the devil.”)

Zakaria’s description fits for the Colonel’s interview the same year with Larry King, in which Qaddafi responds to King’s questions with heavy-lidded confusion, seemingly unaware of Osama bin Laden’s connection to September 11th (“Was he on board one of those aircraft?”) or his own nation’s reaction to the return of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, “the Lockerbie bomber,” after eight years in prison (“What is it that happened?”). He also groggily defended his “historic solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: combining the two into one state called Isra-tine.

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Qaddafi was matched with a peppy British translator for an interview that same week with Al Jazeera’s Ghida Fakhry. Unlike King, Fakhry does not gape in disbelief as Qaddafi speaks, but she does phrase most of her questions in the basic form of “Are you actually serious about this thing that you’ve said?” (The answer, in each case, is yes.)

While interviewers struggled to understand the apparently dazed dictator, American ambassadors, we now know, were doing the same. On September 29, 2009, a day after the Larry King interview, Gene Cretz, an American ambassador to Tripoli, described the colonel in a cable that generated a good deal of buzz upon its publication, by WikiLeaks, last November, mostly for its mention of Qaddafi’s reliance on a “voluptuous blonde” Ukrainian nurse. In addition, Cretz writes, Qaddafi

appears to have an intense dislike or fear of staying on upper floors, reportedly prefers not to fly over water, and seems to enjoy horse racing and flamenco dancing. His recent travel may also suggest a diminished dependence on his legendary female guard force, as only one woman bodyguard accompanied him to New York.

Less publicized cables flesh out the Qaddafi image. He is “notoriously mercurial” and “often avoids making eye contact during the initial portion of meetings,” according to one cable from 2008. The latter point is particularly evident in a 2001 interview with Charlie Rose, in which Qaddafi appears as unable to look at Rose as a viewer is unable to look away from his mustache.

Though he baffles the Western media, Qaddafi is a fan. Another cable reveals that he asked the Secretary for the Americas, Ahmed Fituri, to write him “four- to seven-page” Arabic summaries on “ ‘significant’ English-language books dealing with American politics and policy, current affairs and history.” At the time, the upcoming titles were Zakaria’s “The Post-American World” and Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat 3.0.” Qaddafi, Fituri said, had liked Zakaria’s “The Future of Freedom.”

Another cable details Qaddafi’s sense of fashion:

Al-Qadhafi’s personal designers (he employs two full-time) have incorporated the continent’s shape into all types of clothing (favorites include a large green Africa-shaped brooch on a white double-breasted blazer, a pseudo-camouflaged tunic comprised of Africa-shaped patterns and a jersey emblazoned with pictures of prominent African leaders like Kwame Nkrumah).

A drugged-up colonel with continent-shaped accessories: it’s an amusing image, but Cretz warns against getting too distracted by it. In his 2009 cable, Cretz writes, “While it is tempting to dismiss his many eccentricities as signs of instability, Qadhafi is a complicated individual who has managed to stay in power for forty years through a skillful balancing of interests and realpolitik methods.” Complicated, yes. In power? We’ll see for how long.