When Condoleezza Rice met Moammar Gaddafi
Condoleezza Rice is out with a new memoir that critics consider a revelatory, if limited, review of her eight years working with George W. Bush.
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But the book, due out next Tuesday, does divulge what she thinks of deceased former Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi’s strange obsession with her.
Rice describes a 2008 meeting between the pair that ended with Gaddafi showing her photos of Rice with world leaders — and the performance of a song he had composed in her honor.
“What was going through my head was ‘How long do I have to sit here and how quickly can I get out of here?’ You know, it was funny because when he said, ‘I have a video for you,’ I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, what is this going to be?’ But it was actually just a bunch of pictures of me with Vladimir Putin, me with Hu Jintao,” Rice tells ABC News in an interview set for next week. “And then he said, ‘I have Libya’s best composer, most famous composer write this song for you,’ and it was called ‘Black Flower in the White House.’”
Rice called Gaddafi’s scrapbook “eerie” and labeled the exchange one of the strangest of her tenure.
Asked if the Bush administration grew too close to Gaddafi after he agreed to give up his weapons of mass destruction, Rice said no: “I think what we did was to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction, or the most dangerous ones,” she said.
“We weren’t ever really going to get very close to Gaddafi,” Rice added. “And the most important thing was to try and open up this place that had been closed for so long, to get him out of terrorism, to get him away from weapons of mass destruction, to make it a little bit safer. But it’s far preferable that he’s gone.”
Rice’s book, “No Higher Honor,” earned a generally thoughtful review from The Post’s Glenn Kessler, who now serves as our Fact Checker, but also literally wrote the (unofficial?) book on Rice, “The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy,” when he served as our State Department correspondent. (Kessler’s account occupies a prominent spot on The Eye’s bookshelf.)
Follow Ed O’Keefe on Twitter: @edatpost
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