QADDAFI’S GREEN BOOK An Unauthorized Edition ...

QADDAFI’S GREEN BOOK An Unauthorized Edition by Muammar Muhammed al-Qaddafi, edited with an introduction by Henry M. Christman (Prometheus Books: $17.95)

While Contra funding continues to be the subject of spirited debate, few dissenting voices were raised in Congress after the Reagan Administration bombed Col. Kadafi’s headquarters last year. Not even Ayatollah Khomeini has been the object of as much derision in the United States as Kadafi. This isn’t surprising, for unlike Khomeini, Kadafi exports his radical views by supporting anti-Western revolutionary groups. Kadafi, U.S. officials say, also lacks Khomeini’s broad base of support; he is perceived as a lone warrior; the mad dog of the desert. Kadafi wrote “The Green Book,” named after the symbolic color of Islam, to counter these images. There is a temptation to dismiss his writing on the assumption that his actions speak louder than his words.

“The Green Book,” however, warrants our attention for several reasons. Kadafi’s family history, for one, helps explain his anger toward the West. His grandfather was killed and his father imprisoned for many years for fighting against the Italian occupation of Libya after World War I, we learn in an introduction by Henry Christman, a former appellate judge and New York state commissioner. “The Green Book,” moreover, offers some evidence to counter the Reagan Administration’s conviction that Kadafi has no broad base of popular support. Christman quotes from John K. Cooley’s “Libyan Sandstorm” (Holt): “Before 1969 Libya was one of the poorest countries in the Third World. . . . The elite few who were made wealthy by oil raced throughout Tripoli and Benghazi streets ignoring (the poverty). . . . Only a fool or a willfully blind person, however he feels about Kadafi’s policies, could deny that the colonel from the desert has brought guaranteed education, health care, housing and employment to his country.”

Kadafi favors a nation-state because he says it is consistent with the “natural human social structure: a large family evolved from one origin, together with those who have affiliated themselves with it.” Rejecting “materialistic capitalism” and “atheistic communism” as “failed and dangerously confrontational,” he says the state should be governed by people’s congresses and should guarantee the basic needs of a house, a vehicle and income. Christman’s introduction competently captures the contradictions in Kadafi’s thinking, though its relentless derisiveness is sometimes blinding. In attacking Kadafi’s views toward women as “astounding,” for instance, Christman overlooks the fact that these views are less the product of Kadafi’s own craziness than a reflection of his Bedouin upbringing.