LIBYA: Could it be true? A US president - a Republican to boot - praising the Libyan leader Col Muammar Gadafy, the man Ronald Reagan called "the mad dog of the Middle East"?
Stranger things have rarely happened.
There it was, in the middle of President Bush's February 11th speech on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
"Libya's leader voluntarily agreed to end his nuclear and chemical weapons programmes, not to pursue biological weapons, and to permit thorough inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons," Mr Bush said.
"Col Gadafy made the right decision, and the world will be safer once his commitment is fulfilled. We expect other regimes to follow his example."
Col Gadafy an example for other regimes? Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Libyan dictator was famous for all the wrong reasons, considered both a laughing stock and a terrorist pariah.
Gadafy wrapped himself in exotic Arab robes and proposed "union" with Libya to nine Arab countries. When he eventually grew disgusted with his fellow Arabs, Gadafy abandoned pan-Arabism for pan-Africanism, dispensing development aid across the continent and exchanging his djellabas for even more colourful African costume.
He routinely propositioned women journalists who had the temerity to interview him. Gadafy's arrival at an Arab summit was like a Hollywood production. The Leader of the Popular Socialist Arab Libyan Jamahiriya (an Arab word he coined, meaning "republic of the masses") would ride in a convertible white Cadillac, wearing his sempiternal Ray-bans, with female body guards in combat fatigues running alongside the car. To the dismay of his hosts, he transported his Bedouin tent and a menagerie of horses and camels wherever he travelled.
The Colonel's Green Book showed his mystical side, a woolly ideology he called The Third Universal Theory. It banned private business, called salaried employment slavery, decried government bureaucracy and purported to invest all power in local committees.
The late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat said Gadafy was "100 per cent mad". Yet there were two constants in his thinking: hatred of "American imperialism" and, without ever embracing Islamic fundamentalism, a deep belief in Islam which he learned from his parents, poor Bedouins from the Qaddafa tribe.
During the Lebanese civil war, he once said that the presence of Christians was the problem and that "Arabs must struggle for them to all become Muslims."
Gadafy was a 27-year-old army captain when he overthrew King Idris in a bloodless coup in 1969. He promoted himself to colonel and banned the use of Latin script on street signs. Under other circumstances, he might have remained an eccentric, two-bit dictator of a small North African country.But Gadafy craved notoriety, and President Reagan obligingly elevated him to the status of America's chief bugbear, bombing Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. One of the 40 people reported killed was Gadafy's adopted daughter.
The colonel, it must be said, had shown a dangerous streak. The US bombardment of Libya was in retaliation for the bombing of a nightclub in Berlin, in which two US soldiers and a Turkish woman were killed.
Gadafy used Libya's oil wealth to support just about anyone calling themselves "revolutionary": Carlos, Abu Nidal, the South African ANC, SWAPO in Namibia, not to mention the IRA. He made an enemy of France by attempting to install a puppet regime in neighbouring Chad.
Most commentators believe that Gadafy was severely chastened by President Reagan's punitive bombing raids in 1986. So it's not clear why he would have then ordered the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, and the downing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in 1989.
To obtain the lifting of UN sanctions, Gadafy in 1999 turned over two Libyan intelligence officers accused of the Lockerbie atrocity for trial in the Netherlands. One was sentenced to life in prison, the other acquitted.
Tripoli agreed last August to pay up to $10 million for each Lockerbie victim. Last month, the Libyans made a far less costly deal with the families of the UTA victims. In an interview with Le Monde this week, Gadafy's son and heir apparent, Seif Al-Islam ("sword of Islam") denied that his father's "conversion" was precipitated by Saddam Hussein's fate.
The Libyan leader's rehabilitation in fact started long before the invasion of Iraq, with secret talks in the last year of President Bill Clinton's administration. Gadafy encouraged US good will by condemning the September 11th attacks.
Negotiations on a Lockerbie settlement and Libya's WMD programmes got seriously under way in London in January 2002 between William Burns, the US Assistant Secretary of State for North Africa and the Near East, and Moussa Koussa, the head of the Libyan security services. The negotiations saved Gadafy from being included in President's Bush's "axis of evil."
The fall of Saddam Hussein nonetheless influenced Gadafy. A few months before the invasion of Iraq, Libya's Foreign Minister reportedly asked a high-ranking British official what would happen to Saddam if he turned over his weapons.Would he be punished for having developed them, or would he be forgiven? Gadafy wanted to know. Libya's renunciation of WMDs just days after Saddam Hussein's capture in December enabled Mr Bush to claim that the use of force in Iraq made diplomacy work with Libya.
Despite Bush's praise for Col Gadafy's wisdom this week, Libya had little choice but to "fess up" after the US intercepted a ship carrying 2,000 parts for advanced centrifuges, which make enriched uranium for nuclear weapons, in early October. The cargo of the German-registered BBC-China was addressed to the "Libyan National Council for Scientific Research" and came with plans for nuclear warheads, courtesy of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Aside from a few Arab newspaper editorialists who deplore the capitulation of one of the last Arab leaders to "stand up to US imperialism", few will miss the old Gadafy. According to the New York Times, Gadafy promised diplomats and intelligence officers that he would try to convince other countries, starting with Iran, to give up their WMD programmes. He said he'd finally understood that such weapons "do nothing to enhance security" and hamper economic development.
Economics was a powerful incentive to Col Gadafy. Low oil prices and two decades of sanctions have left Libya backward, if not impoverished. With a population of only 5.4 million to share 3 per cent of the world's oil reserves, Libyans were accustomed to living better than their neighbours.
Now Islamic fundamentalist movements, the advent of the internet and satellite television and falling oil production have created restlessness within Libya. Gadafy has survived several coup and assassination attempts, and he wants to ensure that his children take over from him.Whatever his motives, Gadafy's transformation has been the most impressive chameleon performance of Gadafy's 35 years in power.