Leader

Gadhafi’s son says Bush, Blair to visit Libya

Arab newspaper quotes son predicting end of U.S. embargo
Updated: 9:01 a.m. ET Dec. 24, 2003DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A leading Arab newspaper quoted Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi’s son on Wednesday as saying British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush would visit the North African country early next year.

The London-based daily Asharq al-Awsat said Saif al-Islam told the paper in a telephone interview that Blair would visit Tripoli at the beginning of next year, adding that he did not expect a U.S. trade embargo on his country to last long.

“This will be followed by a visit by U.S. President George Bush, and I expect it (the Bush visit) after the American embargo is raised. I don’t think the embargo will last any more than three months at most,” Gadhafi’s son was quoted as saying.

In Tripoli, Libya’s official Jana news agency said Foreign Minister Abderrhmane Chalgam had received an invitation from his British counterpart Jack Straw to visit London. It gave no date.

A spokeswoman in Blair’s London office, asked about the Asharq al-Awsat report, said only: “We do not comment on the prime minister’s movements for security reasons.”

Commenting on the Jana report on a visit by Chalgam, a spokesman for the British Foreign Office said: “No decision has been taken. We will be looking at the matter in the New Year.”

There was no immediate comment in Washington on Bush’s plans.

Libya abandons nuclear plans
Gadhafi’s oil-rich state, long on the U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism, said last week it was abandoning plans to build an atomic bomb and other weapons of mass destruction. It now wants trading benefits, including an end to U.S. sanctions.

"(The United States) has pledged to protect us from any aggression,” Saif al-Islam said.

“There have been consultations in the past on various security and military agreements with the Americans which will even lead to joint military manoeuvres in the future.”

Saif al-Islam, whom analysts say Gadhafi is grooming to succeed him, said Libya’s plans to develop long-range missiles never got beyond the preliminary stages.

“These were workshops...which didn’t get to an advanced stage to produce weapons of 800 km range, for example. But it will all stop in Libya now, as will projects to produce chemical, biological and nuclear weapons,” he said.

“(Libya) has factories to produce missiles, most of which are short-range Scud-B, of about 300 km range, and these will stay...They were made through cooperation with the former Soviet Union and then with North Korea,” Gadhafi’s flamboyant young son added.

Libya, once at the vanguard of anti-U.S. radicalism, has said it is a long way from having nuclear weapons and has no long-range missiles. Washington says Libya has acknowledged cooperating with North Korea to develop Scud missiles.

Copyright 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3762401/

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Officer of Engineers

Well, there's a stick in the eye for France. They were the ones who checked Gahdaffy (killing the Lybian Army in Chad) and made more bombing runs into Lybia than the US.

And Chirac don't get to goto the victory parade.

Poetic justice in a way. It wasn't Chirac who boxed Lybia in but Mitterand. And Chirac is everything that Mitterand wasn't.

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Chimo

TopHatter

The British PM and the US President visiting Libya...
This child of the 80s is rolling over in his grave and I'm not even dead yet.
Boy oh boy, the world sure has changed a lot. I can only imagine what it was like for the World War II generation or the Baby Boomers to see the Berlin Wall come down. It was plenty of a shock to me and I was only 13 or 14 at the time.
And now Libya has decided to come clean and rejoin the world family...Seems like only yesterday I was all excited about Operation El Dorado Canyon just taking place (I always loved that op name)

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