The reformers’ own diplomatic efforts have had limited success. Representative Tom Lantos, of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, of Indiana, both have visited Libya, where they met with Seif, Shukri Ghanem, and Qaddafi himself, and have taken an optimistic view. “Qaddafi has clearly made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn,” Lantos said to me, “and we are turning around the aircraft carrier that is U.S. policy.” But when Lantos sought a co-sponsor for the United States–Libya Relations Act, which was meant to strengthen bilateral relations, nobody was interested. Mack said, “We need to show the world, particularly governments like Iran and North Korea, that there is an alternative paradigm for dealing with the United States, and much to be gained by having a normal relationship with us,” and suggested that American interests would be served by improved relations with an Arab leader who opposes fundamentalism and has substantial oil reserves.

“Deep down, the Libyans think the U.S. will not be satisfied with anything short of regime change,” one of Seif’s advisers said. “And, deep down, the Americans think that, if they normalize relations, Qaddafi will blow something up and make them look like fools.”

Everywhere I went in Libya, opposition to U.S. policy was tempered by enthusiasm for individual Americans. Among the older generation of Libyans, the reformers were eager for news of the towns where they had once studied, in Kansas, Texas, Colorado. (Most of the hard-liners I met had never visited the United States.) Many Libyans hoped for improved relations with the outside world simply because the pariah experience has been a lonely one.

I spent a morning with the human-rights lawyer Azza Magour, a striking woman with cascading hair and a warm laugh, who had just returned from a humanitarian conference in Morocco. Her father was an important figure in post-revolutionary Libyan politics, and this has given her leeway; she seemed almost oblivious of the constraints that keep most Libyan women in headscarves and at home. I asked her how she felt about the U.S., and she told me that it was hard for her to be pro-American in the wake of the news reports about Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. “You cannot imagine how we worshipped the idea of America,” she said, and she looked down at the floor, as though she were talking about a relative who had recently died. “We wanted nothing more than to be with you, this rich, fair democracy. But now we ask who is giving us this lesson of freedom? I mean—if you caught your high priest in bed with a prostitute, would you still count on him to get you in the door of heaven?” Magour is still hoping to show her young daughter the United States, though. She said that, at least once a week, her daughter asks how things are going between Libya and America, and Magour says, “It’s going, sweetheart.” And her daughter wonders, “So can we visit Disneyland yet?” and she has to say, “Not yet, sweetheart, not yet.”

For a culture that is politically and socially underdeveloped, Libya has a surprisingly active intelligentsia, who view their own society with tenderness and irony. People I met and liked invited me out over and over and introduced me to friends and family. I went to a birthday party at the house of one Libyan; his wife cooked a feast for us, and I stayed up half the night with them and their children, watching movies. The day before I left, friends took me out for late-night tea and gave me full traditional Libyan dress—a long shirt, an embroidered vest, and a little black hat—as a going-away present.

The social life of Libyans is essentially private. Tripoli is latticed with wide highways; gasoline is subsidized, and, because there are no bars or clubs and few cinemas or theatres, the most popular pastime is driving; people cruise around for hours. The privacy of cars enhances their charm, but mostly the Tripoli highways, busy through the night, provide diversion for citizens desperate for entertainment or novelty. When they aren’t driving, most Tripolitans socialize at home rather than in cafés, partly because of the absence of women and alcohol in public places.

I had my first drink in Libya after a friend called an Army colonel and asked, “Do you have any pomegranate seeds?” (It is wise to use euphemisms in police states.) He did, and we drove to the outskirts of a small city, to a large white house with a long veranda, beside a dirt road. In the Libyan way, the house was built of concrete and painted white, but it was beginning to show signs of wear. We sat on a wide, bright-colored banquette under fluorescent lights in an enormous room. The place was decorated with souvenirs from Central Asia, where our host had trained, including many carvings of bears with fishing rods. We listened to a medley of Shirley Bassey hits played on the zither, and took turns smoking from a five-foot-tall hookah. The colonel, a beaming, extroverted Libyan of sub-Saharan ancestry, served the local home brew, eighty proof and rough enough to remove not just fingernail polish but quite possibly fingernails as well, on a table covered with a lavishly embroidered cloth and laden with Fanta and Pringles. The atmosphere was reminiscent of a high-school pot party.

I asked my friend how he would feel about his sons drinking, and he laughed, replying, “It’s inevitable.” Then I asked about his daughters, and he grew serious: “If my daughters were drinking, I would be very, very upset—furious, in fact. Because, if people found out that they had been drinking, they would think they might also be sexually active, and their marriage prospects would be shattered.”

I met a Libyan woman who worked for Alitalia, a job that she loved but that she felt no Libyan husband would tolerate. “I have to choose between a marriage and a life, and I have chosen a life,” she said. “Most women here choose a marriage. It’s a question of taste.” The restrictions are a matter not of laws—on issues like gender equality, the laws are more progressive than in most Arab countries—but of social norms.

Qaddafi accepts such customs, but he frequently describes his own society as “backward” (his favorite term of disapprobation); one Libyan intellectual complained to me, “If you listen to his words, you will agree that he hates the Libyan people.” While Qaddafi represses the democratizing forces from the left, he is far more brutal with the Islamist ones on the right. Indeed, most of the regime’s political victims in the past few decades have been members of Islamist groups that he has banned, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Libya’s Islamic institutes, almost fifty of them, were shut down in 1988. When clerics protested Qaddafi’s “innovative” interpretations of the Koran and his dismissal of all post-Koranic commentary and custom, Qaddafi declared that Islam permitted its followers to speak directly to Allah, and that clergymen were unnecessary intermediaries. A year later, he likened Islamic militants to “a cancer, the black death, and AIDS.” As if to vex Hamas, once a beneficiary of his largesse, he has even argued, in recent years, that the Palestinians have no exclusive claim to the land of Israel, and called for a binational state—he dubbed it “Isratine”—that would guarantee the safety of both Palestinians and Jews, who, far from being enemies of the Arab people, were their Biblical kin. (“There may be some objections to the name,” he allowed, “but they would be unhelpful, harmful, and superficial.”)

“You ask us, ‘Why do you oppress the opposition in the Middle East?’ ” Qaddafi said in March, speaking via satellite link to a conference at Columbia University, dressed in purple robes and seated in front of a map of Africa. “Because, in the Middle East, the opposition is quite different than the opposition in advanced countries. In our countries, the opposition takes the form of explosions, assassinations, killing. . . . This is a manifestation of social backwardness.” On this point, at least, the hard-liners and the reformers tend to converge. Foreign Minister Shalgham told me, “The fundamentalists represent a threat to your security. They represent a threat to our way of life. They are against the future, against science, the arts, women, and freedom. They would drag us back to the Middle Ages. You fear their acts; we fear the ideology behind those acts. O.K., read the Koran for an hour a day, and that’s enough; if you don’t also study engineering, medicine, business, and mathematics, how can you survive? But people have figured out that, the tougher your Islam, the easier to find followers.”

The fear of radical Islam helps explain why authorities cracked down so forcefully when, in February, protests erupted in Benghazi over the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and the decision of an Italian Cabinet minister to wear a T-shirt featuring the images. Eleven people were killed by the police, and violence spread to at least two other cities in the eastern part of the country, where Qaddafi’s hold on power has always been relatively weak. Seif gave local voice to international opinion, saying, “The protest was a mistake, and the police intervention against the demonstrators was an even bigger mistake.” His father, too, repudiated the “backwardness” of the police response, but mainly wanted to insist that the riots hadn’t arisen from Islamic fervor, much less discontent with his regime; rather, they were spurred by anger at the history of Italian colonialism. (More than a quarter of a million Libyans—perhaps a third of the population—are estimated to have perished as a result of the Italian occupation, many in concentration camps.) “Unfortunately, there could be more Benghazis,” or even “attacks in Italy,” if Rome didn’t offer reparations, Qaddafi warned, saying that he would be mollified if Italy were to build a highway across Libya, for some three billion euros. The Italian Foreign Minister, Gianfranco Fini, said that this was “a not too veiled threat,” adding, “We have already said that we want to put the colonial past definitely behind us in our relations with Libya. We maintain this position in a clear and transparent way. We expect a similarly coherent position from the Libyan leader.”

When I read this statement to a Libyan acquaintance, he burst out laughing. “Good luck, Mr. Fini!” he said. Expatriate opposition leaders have claimed that Qaddafi staged the riots to extract concessions from Europe, and that they then escalated out of control. In Libya, the issue was widely seen to be economic—a disgruntled population of unemployed youth needed an outlet for their anger.

The most immediate sequel to the riots was the dismissal of Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem. (He was given a post at the National Oil Company.) There were already rumors when I was in Tripoli that Ghanem was going to lose his job in a Cabinet reshuffle; the openness that seemed so refreshing when we met had not pleased the Leader. “He made three basic mistakes,” one Qaddafi adviser said to me. “First, he associated reform with his own name and complained publicly about the Leadership. In Libya, if you want to accomplish things you make yourself invisible, you sublimate your ego. Second, he thought that a strong position with the West would guarantee his hold on power and didn’t understand that the West counts for very little here. Third, he failed to win over the Libyan people; he never seemed to be concerned about their suffering. . . . In the street, there is relief that he is gone—though there is no affection for the alternative.” Ghanem’s successor was the taciturn hard-liner Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi. “For the Leadership, it will be easier to make economic adjustments now that the reform will come clearly and directly from the Leadership, and not be seen as admissions that the Leader was wrong, as concessions to some kind of competition.”

The change of Prime Ministers was, of course, a reassertion of Qaddafi’s power: more tumbling of the rats. Several ministries—including oil and energy—were shaken up, with people removed from jobs they had held for decades. The U.S. State Department’s decision, in late March, to keep Libya on its terrorism list both reflects the problem and contributes to it, and has outraged Libyans in and out of power.

Because Ghanem’s strong suit was supposed to be his ease with Western powers, his failure to get Libya removed from the U.S. terrorism list helped insure his replacement by a hard-liner. Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi has been described to me as financially corrupt but wily, calculating, and extremely industrious. He is “a technocrat out of the Revolutionary Committees who works hard to glorify the Leader’s policies,” a Libyan-American academic said. “Will reform slow? Well, Shukri Ghanem talked a good line about reform but accomplished so little that there’s not much backsliding to do. Mahmoudi realizes that economic reform has to move forward and will do that for the Leader. He has absolutely no interest in political or social reform, and he will leave it to the Leader to have a relationship with the West.” It has been suggested that, with the appointment of a hard-liner, some of the infighting will subside.

“Ahmed Ibrahim’s power will wane, too,” one of Seif’s advisers told me hopefully, referring to the deputy speaker of the General People’s Congress. Seif will now be his own man: “He’s old enough to carry that off.”

“We call the world close to the Leader the Circle of Fire,” one Libyan intellectual said. “Get close and it warms you up; get too close and you go down in flames. The Circle of Fire includes both reformers and hard-liners; Qaddafi likes the chaos that creates.” He spoke with irony, almost with disdain, and yet he was not above warming himself at the fire. The class of educated Libyans—a class that includes poets, archeologists, professors, ministers, doctors, businessmen, and civil servants—is tiny. Given the way that tribalism intersects with class alliances and political identities, social relationships exist in Libya among people who in a larger society would probably be kept apart by mutual opposition. Political enmity is often crosshatched with social amity. In Tripoli, I had dinner at the home of an older writer who spoke passionately of the injustices of the Qaddafi regime in both its absolutism and its new capitalism. “He has to go,” he said. “This colonel has eaten the best years of my life, poisoned my soul and my existence, murdered the people I loved. I hate him more than I love my wife. He and his government and everyone who has anything to do with him must go. Enough is enough. We have no souls left. Do not let yourself be fooled by this talk of reform. What kind of reform is it when this man is still sitting in Tripoli? I cannot say it to you enough times. He must go. He must go. He must go.” A few minutes later, when I mentioned a high-ranking member of the regime whom I hoped to interview, he said, “Ah, he was here for dinner earlier this week.” He added, with a shrug, “I don’t agree with him, but I like him.”

The coziness between the authorities and many of those who railed against them continually surprised me. Some of this was simple pragmatism, but not all; it was more intimate than that. A person’s network of loyalties and connections was never predictable. I had a drink (of non-alcoholic beer) in the Tripoli planetarium with a professor who had previously claimed that the Prime Minister and Seif got drunk together and raped the country—and they were the good guys. We had joked about the government’s inefficiencies, and he had said darkly that no one who wasn’t Libyan had any good reason to endure this kind of chaos. He had asked how I could hold on to my sanity when I was dealing with government offices.

Now he was beaming. “Hey, I’ve been given a job with the Ministry,” he said. He raised a hand up over his head in a gesture of pride and triumph.

I said I was surprised that he was so eager to join a regime that he loathed.

“Well,” he replied, “it also happens to be the only game in town.” ♦