Condoleezza Rice meets with Moammar Kadafi in Libya

TRIPOLI – Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi welcomed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to his compound today, in recognition that after nearly three decades of animosity the U.S.-Libyan relationship is now officially normal, if not entirely friendly.

The meeting marked the first visit to Libya by a U.S. secretary of state since John Foster Dulles came here in 1953. The session concluded a five-year rehabilitation period during which Libya gave up its weapons of mass destruction program and settled claims against it for past terrorist acts, including the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am aircraft over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 persons.

The administration considers Libya’s reform one of its top foreign policy achievements, and a model for other adversary states, such as Iran. Earlier today, in Portugal, Rice called the meeting “a historic moment.”

Yet officials on both sides say they aspire to a neutral relationship rather than a warm one, and in recent days there have been reminders of the mistrust that still hangs over the relationship like a dusty Saharan haze.

In a ceremonial TV address to the nation on Monday, Kadafi said it was “not necessary for us to be friends with America,” and classified the two countries as “neither friends nor enemies.”

He said Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were “almost insane” in their attitude about Libya in the 1980s.

In an Al Jazeera interview last year, Kadafi joked about Rice as “my darling black African woman.”

Kadafi’s son and possible heir, Seif Islam Kadafi, told the BBC in an interview broadcast Sunday that while Libya had accepted responsibility for the bombing of the flight over Lockerbie, it was done only to end of international sanctions on the country. “We played with words … it doesn’t mean we did it in fact,” he said.

U.S. officials remain unhappy with Libya’s human rights record, including its imprisonment of dissident Fathi Eljahmi since 2002. As well, many members of Congress and some administration officials still are not convinced that Libya has fully foresworn terrorism.

paul.richter@latimes.com