Photos Reveal Qaddafi’s Diplo-Crush on Rice

Sergey Ponomarev/Associated PressRebel fighters looked through an album containing photos of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice they found inside Muammar el-Qaddafi’s compound in Bab Al-Aziziya in Tripoli, Libya, on Wednesday.

When you’re the single, attractive secretary of state of the United States, you’re bound to pick up groupies in all corners of the international diplomatic scene.

But for Condoleezza Rice, who has charmed diplomats from Rome (the Italian foreign minister, Massimo D’Alema) to London (Foreign Minister Jack Straw of Britain) to Pictou, Nova Scotia (the Canadian diplo-hunk Peter McKay), perhaps the strangest of all has always been Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya.

“Leezza, Leezza, Leezza … I love her very much,” Colonel Qaddafi, the now-fugitive Libyan leader, told Al Jazeera> in 2007, calling her his “darling black African woman.” When Ms. Rice visited her suitor in 2008, at the same compound that Libyan rebels are now ransacking (more on that in a second) back during the brief period when Colonel Qaddafi was in good graces with the United States, the Libyan dictator put his hand against his heart in greeting.

And, as it now comes out, he apparently assembled — or had a minion assemble — a photo album of Ms. Rice. Which brings us to the matter at hand today, the ransacking of Colonel Qaddafi’s compound under way in Tripoli.

Rebels going through the Qaddafi compound have unearthed the photo album stocked with Ms. Rice’s visage on every page. There she is, in one, smiling off to the side, her flip-do accented perfectly for the camera. And there she is in another, smiling next to you-know-who during that visit to Tripoli. He is wearing a flowing white robe with purple sash and Africa pin; she looks more businesslike in a gray pinstripe suit with white pearls, her flip-do having given way to a pageboy bob.

Since seizing control of Colonel Qaddafi’s compound on Tuesday, rebels have made off with several of his prized possessions, including a gold-plated rifle and his golf cart, but perhaps nothing quite as personal as the deposed leader’s diplomatic look book.

[Source : thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com]