Gadhafi and his ‘darling’ Condi


Oh Condi, Condi, what have you done? Another leader has fallen for your southern charm.

Sex and politics are a heady mix. Look at Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his “bunga, bunga” room. Or Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund and would-be French presidential candidate just cleared of rape charges in New York.

But Moammar Gadhafi’s crush on Condoleezza Rice, the steel magnolia from Alabama, is beyond weird. We knew about his “Leezza, Leezza, Leezza” rhapsody on Al Jazeera in 2007. He said then: “I support my darling black African woman … I love her very much.”

The photo album filled with pictures of Rice, found in the colonel’s ransacked compound in Tripoli, shows how much. I wonder what his glamorous Ukrainian nurse and female bodyguards would have thought about that.

But I’d like to hear what Rice thinks too. I’ve witnessed the magnetism exerted by George W. Bush’s secretary of State over men. When the former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, invited her to his Blackburn constituency five years ago, he was clearly smitten. At the end of that visit they got on a flight to Baghdad, during which she gave up her cabin for him while she slept on the floor outside.

Rice met Gadhafi in 2008 when they broke bread at a post-Ramadan feast. A journalist friend of mine on that trip remembers that the Libyan leader gave her a locket containing a picture of himself, and some Lara Croft “tomb raider” trinkets. How inappropriate is that?

Maybe we’ll find out Rice’s feelings about the turbulent colonel in the forthcoming second volume of her memoirs. But somehow I doubt that the famously private — and single — Condi will let us in on her secrets. And I bet she never wore that locket.

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