Suzy Khimm talks to Randa Fahmy Hudome, one of the first American lobbyists to represent Qaddafi:
She readily acknowledges the stigma associated with her lobbying past. "It's a legitimate questionbeing a highly paid lobbyist working for a terrorist government, isn't that icky, icky?" she says. But she stresses that she worked for Qaddafi "with the political and legal approval of the Bush administration…[which] encouraged me to help Libya transition from their position as a rogue nation to entering back into the international community."
... When Qaddafi agreed to give up Libya's weapons of mass destruction in 2003so long as the US promised not to push for regime changethe Bush administration "was elated," Fahmy Hudome says. "Compare that to Iraq, where there were no WMDs. It was in the national security interest of the US to take WMDs out of the hands of a dictator."
After Libya gave up its WMDs, Washington lifted its political and economic sanctions on the countryand Fahmy Hudome successfully used the country's cooperation to convince American legislators to remove Libya from a federal list of countries sponsoring terrorism... "Libya had done everything that the US had wanted them to do," she says. "The US thinks about itself and its population and its people first. When we sometimes do that, other people are going to have to suffer."