At the recent Arab summit Libya’s Gaddafi asked: “How can we accept that a foreign power comes to topple an Arab leader while we stand watching?” And then he answered, “Your turn is next.” That sheds light on an earlier controversy.

In 2003 there was great debate over why exactly Gaddafi suddenly had come clean about his WMD programs. The foreign policy establishment, Europeans, and most opposed to the Iraq war argued that is was the dividend of careful and long-term diplomacy, dismissing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s revelation – in late 2003 not long after the well-publicized capture of Saddam Hussein — that Gaddafi had called him to explain why he had given up his weapons programs, “I will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.”

That may be a melodramatic rendition of Gaddafi’s fears, but his recent candid outburst suggests that he really was obsessed and terrified by Saddam’s fate. The near contemporaneous shut-down of Dr. Khan’s nuclear franchise (January 2004) and the NIE’s theory that Iran ceased it weapons track at about the same time, have been dismissed as relics of the vast neocon conspiracy. But Gaddafi at least still seems to think that Saddam’s abrupt collapse, culminating in his climb out of the notorious spider hole, sent a powerful message.