By Jeremy Elwood

As the world’s attention segues from the natural disasters which have plagued us for too long to the wholly man-made one unfolding in Libya, it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves about the man at the centre of it, Colonel Muammar Gadhafi, or Gadhafi, or Qadhafi, or Qaddafi… however you choose to spell it, he’s a pretty hard figure to ignore.

You see, for myself and many of my generation - raised in the 1980s, particularly if they spent any time in Europe - Gadhafi was the original boogeyman. A shadow of a man, eccentric in dress and lifestyle, living a nomadic, hunted life in undisclosed locations, surviving assassination attempts and emerging to send recorded messages to the media after any atrocity praising the actions of whoever committed them, offering financial aid to their families and offering to smuggle arms to splinter groups around the globe.

Sound familiar?

For those of us for whom the “War on Terror” started decades before September 11, 2001, and for whom al-Qaeda are but the latest in a long lineage of terrorist organisations, Gadhafi was our bin Laden. It all culminated in the downing of Pan Am 103 on Dec 21, 1988, over a town whose name, like those of Dunblane, Aramoana and Port Arthur, would become synonymous with the fears of the day – Lockerbie.

And then something strange happened. During the 1990s, his country crippled by uprising and US and UN sanctions and his revolutionary swagger (and let’s not overlook the dress sense) fading to a Spitting Image punchline of the previous decade, Gadhafi pretty much dropped below the radar. Then, from around 1997, he began to re-emerge, and when he did so it was not as the dictator he still undoubtedly was and is, but, bizarrely, as a statesman. He hosted official visits; first from Nelson Mandela in 1997, and then over the next 10 years everyone from representatives of the UN, the CIA and MI6 to Tony Blair and Condoleezza Rice. He managed to convince the UN to suspend sanctions by handing over the Lockerbie bombers to Scottish justice via the Netherlands, and finally, in 2008, in exchange for the final deposits into a compensation package for the victims of a number of historic terror attacks, the US signed an executive order which dismissed all pending terror-related lawsuits in that country. The president who signed it? George W Bush, not someone who can be accused of being all that familiar with the concept of forgiveness.  

So what happened? After all, we know that politics makes for strange bedfellows, but to those of my aforementioned generation, there can be few stranger than Bush and Gadhafi. Partly it was shrewd politics, with Gadhafi positioning himself as a voice of stability in an increasingly unstable part of the world. Partly it was the same phenomenon of short-term memory which led Donald Rumsfeld to go from shaking Saddam Hussein’s hand in one decade to trying to smart-bomb it off in another. And partly it was the sad truth that what we don’t know doesn’t bother us so much. Gadhafi never relinquished any control over his country, but the tribal politics which he has expertly exploited for more than 30 years to maintain it make little sense to our homogonously yet multi-cultural day to day. He has reportedly kept his hand in the terror game, but refrained from vocalising it the way he used to.

In fact, his smartest ploy for nearly 20 years was simply to keep his mouth shut – most of the time. When he failed to do so, the signs were there that he hadn’t exactly mellowed in his old age. In one speech to the General Assembly of the UN in 2009, for example, he managed to defend the Taliban and Somali pirates, accuse Israel of assassinating JFK and claim that swine flu was released by an unnamed foreign army.

It’s worth remembering, even as some question the timing and efficiency of the current air assault on Tripoli, that you don’t get the nickname “Mad Dog” for nothing.