WASHINGTON, March 26 (UPI) -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair was right. It was "strange" to be in Libya. Firstly because of the Arabian nightmare setting of tents, camels and security men. But also because Moammar Gadhafi's remarkable switch from leader of a rogue state with a secret nuclear weapons program to an Arab president apparently eager to cooperate with the West raises and leaves unanswered curious nagging questions.
President Bush has been quick to claim the great Libyan turnaround as one of the welcome by-products of the Iraq war. Gadhafi does not want to be the next Middle Eastern maverick to mess with the U.S. Marines, goes the Bush administration's argument. But European sources who know Gadhafi say he is less concerned about the U.S. threat than the threat from Osama bin Laden.
Libyan Foreign Minister Abdul Rahman Shalgam told British reporters with Blair Thursday that Libya had pushed Interpol in 1998 to issue an international warrant for the arrest of the Saudi-born militant leader, but Interpol failed to take action. Shalgam said Libya had done this after bin Laden had organized an attempt on Gadhafi's life because he was not a true Muslim.
Shalgam's claim was remarkable because the Libyan regime has in the past always denied the periodic reports of assassination attempts against the leader. But the purpose was to show that Gadhafi shared common cause with the United States and its allies in the fight against terrorism.
In reality, bin Laden's organization al-Qaida has tried more than once to assassinate Gadhafi, on one occasion actually wounding him in the arm and leg.
Islam is the official religion of Libya, but although Gadhafi has shown public signs of increased devotion of late, the regime is essentially a secular state. Gadhafi regards Islamic fundamentalism -- which he calls "political Islam" -- as a threat to his control. Whenever it has shown signs of surfacing in Libyan schools and the university, it has been firmly suppressed.
But bin Laden's differences with Gadhafi are more personal than religious, the sources said. In the late 1980s, bin Laden wanted to move his base of operations from Sudan to Libya. There were at the time -- and from all accounts there still are -- some Libyans in al-Qaida, but when bin Laden's desire was conveyed to Gadhafi, the answer was a flat refusal.
Still, Islamist fighters with ties to bin Laden began dribbling into Libya and settling in Benghazi. The sources say it was British intelligence that first warned Gadhafi of the nest of Islamic fundamentalists building up in Libya's second largest city.
In 1989, Libyan troops clashed with the newcomers in fierce streetfighting. A Western correspondent who was there at the time recalled Friday that the fighting lasted a couple of hours. Then the Islamists retreated to an apartment building near the center of the city. The Libyans brought up tanks and destroyed the building.
The survivors were lined up in the street and shown to a few foreign journalists. Then they were taken away and Libyan sources said they had been executed.
As Gadhafi has seen the al-Qaida network grow -- and bin Laden remain elusive despite coalition efforts to capture him -- he has increased his vigilance and sought closer ties with Western countries that could offer protection. Gadhafi was the first foreign leader to send condolences and to offer to share intelligence on al-Qaida with the Bush administration a day or so after the Sept. 11, 2001, twin attack on New York and Washington.
But the White House was not ready to do business with the Libyan leader. Among the inhibiting factors were Gadhafi's well known and well documented past support of terrorism, and the long-drawn settlement negotiations over the sabotaged PanAm jet that crashed in Lockerbie, Scotland.
Still, United Press International has learned that Secretary of State Colin Powell sent a formal but personal reply to Gadhafi -- the first communication with the Libyan in years. Powell thanked him for his condolences and offer of help and promised to contact him further if his assistance were required. There was also a cryptic sentence about how relations would be better if an outstanding issue could be settled -- a reference to the Lockerbie settlement.
