Editor's Letter

Meeting Muammar

It is pleasing to record that Vanity Fair won the award for General Excellence in the 400,000to-1-million circulation category at the annual prize-giving of the American Society of Magazinc Editors. Our foreign correspondent, T. D. Allman, was not present in New York to hear his praises also sung at the awards ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria for his article on Panama's General Noriega last June. He was sitting in a Bedouin tent in Libya, across a white tablecloth from Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.

And Allman was reflecting, as the self-styled Leader of the Revolution talked of bombing the United States, that for the first time in his foreign assignments for Vanity Fair he was finding the conventional wisdom to be correct: the bogeyman of the Western world was proving every bit as bizarre as his reputation. Just when it was being put about that a new, moderate Qaddafi wants to be friends with everyone, Allman found himself being regaled with such pleasantries as the imminent overthrow of the Egyptian government and the extinction of Israel by nuclear weapons. But, contrary to expectation, he did not find a country pulsating with excitement on the Glorious Third Anniversary of the Total Victory of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Great Jamahiriya over the U.S. Imperialist-NATO-Terrorist Conspiracy, i.e., the third anniversary of Reagan's bombing raid. He found the inert scruffiness of Qaddafi's military compound to be a metaphor for Libya itself—a lackluster country in solitary isolation where the entire population seemed to be "under treatment for some chronic, symptomless disease'' (page 84).

Twenty years after his coup d'etat, Qaddafi still seems to confuse "posturing with revolution," and assume that "theatrical gestures can change the course of history." And he has managed to close the eyes and minds of the Libyan people to everything except his own vision. Allman's article is a rare synthesis of a man and his country and a vivid contribution to our appreciation of the realities of foreign affairs.

Editor in chief