Libya's complete renunciation of weapons of mass destruction and looming reacceptance by the US and Britain may be most important for the not-so-subtle message it sends to Iran and North Korea.
The surprise announcements on Friday last week by US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair clearly signaled that Libya is on a fast track to rehabilitation after two decades on the Anglo-American blacklist.
Further, the leaders who spearheaded the ouster of the former Iraqi regime over its alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction implied that other so-called rogue states -- perhaps even their leaders -- could be redeemed.
"Old hostilities do not need to go on forever," Bush said.
"And I hope that other leaders will find an example in Libya's announcement today," he said.
Bush said that Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi had initiated the rapprochement and "communicated to us his willingness to make a decisive change in the policy of his government."
Bush said that Libya now has an opportunity to regain its standing in the community of nations. Libya's good faith will be reciprocated, he added, stressing that Qaddafi's decision to foreswear illicit weapons makes the world "a safer place."
"When leaders make the wise and responsible choice, when they renounce terror and weapons of mass destruction, as Colonel Qaddafi has now done, they serve the interests of their own people and they add to the security of all nations," he said.
The president's personal remarks about the Libyan leader were a startling reversal from the 1980s, when Washington had portrayed Qaddafi as a madman atop the worldwide rogues gallery.
A 1986 US air raid in response to a terrorist blast that killed one US soldier in a Berlin disco targeted military sites in Tripoli and the coastal city of Benghazi. US aircraft even bombarded Qaddafi's private desert encampment.
Friday's revelations are the culmination of several years of Libyan toil to restore the country's position in the world. Qaddafi has reportedly mellowed with age and eventually became convinced that reconciliation with the West is a prerequisite for Libya's further development.
Years of private negotiations concluded this year when Tripoli struck a US$2.7 billion settlement with the families of 270 people killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland. The US and Britain have since allowed the UN Security Council to lift international sanctions, imposed after the bombing of the airliner was linked to Libya.
In 1999, Qaddafi allowed two Libyan agents wanted in connection with the bombing to be deported to the Netherlands for trial by a special Scottish court. In 2001, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, while the second defendant was acquitted.
Even now, Tripoli remains under US economic sanctions over issues including the now-confirmed chemical and nuclear weapons components. Yet Libya had long fallen from the top of the list of Washington's pariahs.
The Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against New York and Washington aimed the crosshairs of US policy on terrorism. Calculating the worst-case scenario, the Bush administration soon expanded the "war on terrorism" to combating the proliferation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the technologies to deliver them.
On Jan. 29 last year, Bush declared that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction forged "an axis of evil." Regimes with links to both threats embody that nexus, and he directly pointed the finger at three suspects: Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
Libya, no longer a big league villain, went unnamed.
Since then, the US, Britain and a coalition of allies fought a war to remove the Iraqi regime. Just last week, the former Baghdad strongman Saddam Hussein was finally captured in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the US government has kept diplomatic pressure on Iran and North Korea, and Bush named both in the same statement that welcomed Libya's progress.
"We've insisted on multilateral approaches, like that in North Korea, to confront threats. We're supporting the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency to hold the Iranian regime to its treaty obligations," he said.
These policies send an "unmistakable message" to regimes that seek or possess weapons of mass destruction, Bush said.
He added that leaders who followed Qaddafi's example and abandoned the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons "will find an open path to better relations with the US and other free nations."
Libyan emissaries first contacted Bush and Blair nine months ago, coinciding with the launch of the invasion that toppled the Iraqi regime.
Just as the US and Britain were applying the stick of military might to Saddam, it has now emerged that Qaddafi chose to pursue the carrot of reconciliation.
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