From the Shores of Tripoli.

• Author: Miller, Judith

THE BUSH Administration can point to only one undeniable non-proliferation "success" so far in its tenure: Libya's decision to renounce WMD in December 2003. But the administration that so adroitly pushed Libya to abandon unconventional weapons has been unable, or in some cases unwilling, to apply the key lessons of that success to its other nuclear challenges.

THE RECORD now clearly shows that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, Libya's eccentric long-time ruler, did not rush into nuclear disarmament primarily because of America's invasion of Iraq. Qaddafi first signaled his willingness to discuss his unconventional-weapons programs soon after the Soviet Union's collapse, as early as 1992. But Washington, under Democrats and Republicans alike, refused to deal given his monstrous record on terrorism. The feelers to the Clinton Administration went nowhere because they preceded Qaddafi's surrender of two Libyan operatives suspected of blowing up Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 259 (mostly American) passengers and crew had died. Ultimately, Qaddafi agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the families of Lockerbie victims--$10 million per victim--and millions more to compensate families of earlier victims of terrorist attacks. He also accepted responsibility for terrorist acts committed by two Libyan intelligence officers while continuing to deny his own perfectly obvious complicity in the crime. By then, however, the Clinton Administration had left office.

Isolated and largely ignored, Qaddafi grew alarmed by the incoming Bush Administration's new counter-proliferation agenda and the growing visibility of such militant Islamic groups at home as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Sensing the prevailing political winds, Qaddafi was among the first to condemn the September 11 attacks. Through intelligence channels, Libya gave the administration a list of potential suspects, including Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who was subsequently arrested in Pakistan and turned out to be a key Al-Qaeda operative. Qaddafi also delivered a golden nonproliferation nugget: A group in Pakistan close to A. Q. Khan had offered to sell Libya nuclear material. This was evidence of Pakistan's dangerous nuclear network as well as Libya's nuclear program, both of which U.S. intelligence services could not previously verify. Washington would never have confirmed either without the U.S.-Libyan dialogue, ostensibly limited to terrorism.

Qaddafi again signaled a desire to "clarify" allegations about his unconventional-weapons programs in August 2002, seven months before the Iraq invasion. Tony Blair mentioned Qaddafi's proposal to President Bush when the two leaders met at Camp David in September 2002. Despite the focus on Iraq, Bush agreed to explore Qaddafi's avowed interest in swapping WMD for sanctions relief. In October 2002, Blair wrote to Qaddafi proposing a dialogue.

Just days before the start of the Iraq War, Saif al-Islam, Qaddafi's favored son, and senior Libyan intelligence officials contacted the British, who told the Americans that Qaddafi wanted to "clear the air" about WMD programs in return for assurances that Washington would not try to topple his regime.

While Sail al-Islam rejected the administration's argument that his father had been frightened into abandoning WMD by the Iraq War, he acknowledged that the timing of Libya's overture was affected by the invasion. "I saw WMD as a card in our hands", he told me last spring. The March 2003 invasion of Iraq was "the best time to play that card", he said.

Though initially skeptical, the administration limited details of the half-dozen secret meetings over the next seven months in London, Geneva and Tripoli to a handful of senior U.S. officials to prevent leaks and bureaucratic sabotage by neoconservatives and other opponents of normalizing relations.

The Iraq War, having initially prompted Qaddafi to act on the WMD issue, almost derailed Libya's renunciation later on. For as American forces became bogged down in Iraq, Qaddafi's desire to give up his WMD programs waned. By October 2003, Libya had yet to acknowledge that it even possessed banned weapons and programs. And while the Libyans had agreed in principle to let a team of US-UK weapons experts visit various suspect sites in Libya, no date for such a visit had been set.

The diplomatic lull ended with the October 2003 interdiction off Italy of the BBC China, a German ship the Americans had been tracking for nearly a year. Among the ship's contents were thousands of centrifuge parts to enrich uranium from the Khan network.

Libya, which had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), had not reported the purchases to the UN as required. But rather than proclaim Libya's cheating to the world, as the Bush Administration did when North Korea was caught cheating on the 1994 Agreed Framework, the administration quietly informed the Libyans of the interdiction. A stunned Qaddafi quickly extended...