After nine months of secret negotiations with the U.S. and Britain, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi agreed Friday to abandon plans to develop chemical and nuclear weapons and to open his nation to inspections, a dramatic move that President Bush hopes will send a message to other countries harboring weapons.
“Old hostilities do not need to go on forever,” Bush said Friday evening at the White House. “I hope that other leaders will find an example in Libya’s announcement.”
Less than a week after the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the president and British Prime Minister Tony Blair praised Libya’s intention to rejoin the international community. Both leaders, though, demanded that Libya prove its commitment to fighting terrorism.
“Because Libya has a troubled history with America and Britain,” Bush said, “we will be vigilant in ensuring its government lives up to all its responsibilities.”
If Gadhafi follows through with his agreement, Bush said, relations between the U.S. and the North African country could be restored after nearly 30 years of intense division. Since Gadhafi staged a coup in 1969 and gained control of the country, he has supported terrorist operations and been a chief opponent of the United States.
In the Libyan capital of Tripoli, Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam said the country had chosen “of its free will” to disclose weapons programs to the U.S. and Britain and would “completely eliminate” the weapons. In a statement from his official news agency, Gadhafi called the agreement a “wise decision and a brave step that merit support from the Libyan people.”
For the Bush administration, the Libyan agreement marked the second major foreign policy achievement in less than a week. The White House hailed the development as proof that Bush’s approach to foreign policy–and the controversial decision to launch a pre-emptive war–includes diplomacy.
“Today’s announcement shows that we can fight this menace through more than purely military means,” Blair said Friday evening in Britain, “that we can defeat it peacefully, if countries are prepared, in good faith, to work with the international community to dismantle such weapons.”
The action was praised by Democrats and Republicans alike, who said it could pave the way for deals with North Korea, Iran and other countries. In interviews late Friday, proliferation experts characterized the agreement as stunning.
“We may be seeing the beginning of a trend here. For whatever reason, we’re stumbling onto the right combination of force and negotiations, of carrot and stick,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “You get a country’s attention when you have a quarter-million troops in their neighborhood.”
A senior Bush administration official said Friday evening that Libya’s nuclear weapons program was significantly more advanced than experts initially believed. Since October, U.S. and British government experts have visited more than 10 weapons production sites in Libya and discovered high-speed centrifuges, devices that can enrich and prepare uranium to be used in a warhead.
Libya approaches Britain
In March, about the time coalition forces were invading Iraq, Libyan officials approached British officials about its weapons program. The talks began after Gadhafi agreed to a settlement in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland.
After Gadhafi’s government took responsibility for the bombing and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the victims’ families, the UN Security Council dropped sanctions on Sept. 12. The United States, however, has kept its own 17-year embargo in place and has kept Libya on the list of nations that sponsor terrorism.
It wasn’t until this week, officials said, when discussions among the three countries intensified.
Asked whether the capture of Hussein led to the agreement, a senior administration official told reporters: “I can’t imagine that Iraq went unnoticed by the Libyan leadership.”
With the surprise announcement, eyes turned to the U.S. continuing a tense effort to negotiate nuclear disarmament with North Korea. The Libyan agreement underscores that the Bush administration will strike an agreement if conditions are right, said non-proliferation expert Leonard Spector.
“I don’t think it puts pressure on the North Koreans,” said Spector, deputy director of the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “But it shows them that the United States will play ball if we get what we need, that we will publicly say as much and we will do something affirmative to clear the decks to establish normalized relations with a country.”
He added: “It shows we make good on our pledges.”
In a brief statement in the White House briefing room, which was announced only minutes before it began, Bush did not specifically mention any other nations. But he pointedly said the U.S. had “sent an unmistakable message to regimes that would seek or possess weapons of mass destruction.”
“Leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations,” Bush said.
Political boost for Bush?
Charles Jones, a presidential scholar and political science professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, said the Libyan agreement could provide a political boost for Bush as he approaches an election year in which foreign policy is a key concern.
“It creates a general atmosphere of seeming capability and leadership,” Jones said. “As the polls are showing, that results in a basic public attitude that the guy knows what he is doing, contrary to what the Democratic candidates are trying to convey.”
Indeed, after months of intense criticism by Democratic presidential hopefuls, only Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina had responded to Bush’s announcement by late Friday. And his brief statement was not critical of the president.
`Tangible benefit’ to strategy
Whit Ayres, a Republican political consultant, called it “the first tangible benefit of the new strategy toward dictators with weapons of mass destruction.”
“It verifies the wisdom of the president’s basic approach and undermines the reticence of the Democrats, specifically Howard Dean,” Ayres said, referring to the former Vermont governor who has emerged as Bush’s chief Democratic critic. “Can you imagine the same reaction from Gadhafi if Dean were president? I don’t think so.”
For the first time in years, Ayres said, next year’s election will feature major disagreements over foreign policy.
“Events like this help reinforce the president’s position,” he said.
