The best academics Qaddafi’s money could buy

from David Ruccio

Qaddafi spread his money around liberally, in both England and the United States, to create a liberal image of his regime.

The London School of Economics was apparently not alone in receiving Qaddafi’s money. The Monitor Group, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had a $3 million-per-year contract with Qaddafi. According to Mother Jones,

In February 2007 Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr., who developed the concept of “soft power,” visited Libya and sipped tea for three hours with Muammar Qaddafi. Months later, he penned an elegant description of the chat for The New Republic, reporting that Qaddafi had been interested in discussing “direct democracy.” Nye noted that “there is no doubt that” the Libyan autocrat “acts differently on the world stage today than he did in decades past. And the fact that he took so much time to discuss ideas—including soft power—with a visiting professor suggests that he is actively seeking a new strategy.” The article struck a hopeful tone: that there was a new Qaddafi. It also noted that Nye had gone to Libya “at the invitation of the Monitor Group, a consulting company that is helping Libya open itself to the global economy.”

Nye did not disclose all. He had actually traveled to Tripoli as a paid consultant of the Monitor Group (a relationship he disclosed in an email to Mother Jones), and the firm was working under a $3 million-per-year contract with Libya. Monitor, a Boston-based consulting firm with ties to the Harvard Business School, had been retained, according to internal documents obtained by a Libyan dissident group, not to promote economic development, but “to enhance the profile of Libya and Muammar Qadhafi.” So The New Republic published an article sympathetic to Qaddafi that had been written by a prominent American intellectual paid by a firm that was being compensated by Libya to burnish the dictator’s image.

Other academics mentioned in recent reports (here, here, and here) include Francis Fukuyama, Richard Perle, Benjamin Barber, and Robert Putnam.

Monitor promised the Libyan regime that it would secure a “regular flow of high quality visitors” to Tripoli who would be selected for the appeal of their ideas and for “the strength of their influence in guiding US foreign policy”.

Monitor proposed to write a book about Gaddafi’s philosophy that would include transcripts of conversations between those western experts and the Libyan leader. It would show the world that he was “a man of action and a man of ideas … Gaddafi is well known but poorly understood, particularly in the west”.

To complete the circle, Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi noted that his thesis—”The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions: From ‘Soft Power’ to Collective Decision-Making?” [pdf]—was made possible due to the assistance of a “number of experts. . .especially Professor Joseph Nye” of Harvard, while the Monitor Group was paid to conduct 40 interviews as part of the research for his dissertation, the same group for which the LSE’s former director Sir Howard Davies serves as a senior adviser.

The LSE has since announced an independent inquiry headed by Lord Woolf to examine its relationship with Libya, including:

• The £2.2m contract to train Libyan civil servants and professionals. £1.5m of this money has been received.
• A payment of £20,000 for tuition of the head of the Libyan investment authority.
• A payment to the university of $50,000 after Davies gave advice to Libya’s sovereign wealth fund in 2007.
• An award from Gaddafi’s charity of £22,857 to cover academic speakers’ travel to Libya.

Both the Monitor Group and the LSE, after having received millions of dollars to clean up Qaddafi’s image, will now have to devote significant resources to cleaning up their own images.