UNITED NATIONS — Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy had a lot to gripe about: He was jet-lagged. There was no comfortable place to plant his tent. Some of the diplomats on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly were distracted.
“Please pay attention!” he said at one point during his more than 90-minute speech Wednesday, his first ever at the General Assembly.
Nevertheless, Khadafy offered a virtual valentine to U.S. President Barack Obama, praising him as a glimmer of hope for the next few years and suggesting he take a cue from Libya and become president-for-life.
“We are content and happy if Obama can stay forever as the president of the United States,” said Khadafy, the Libyan leader since staging a military coup in 1969.
Obama wasn’t in the room; he had left the hall after his own speech, as did Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice.
Khadafy veered from harsh denunciations of the Iraqi invasion — the “mother of all evils” — to the praise for Obama.
“We Africans are happy, proud that a son of Africa governs the United States of America,” said Khadafy, calling Obama’s U.N. appeal for global unity “completely different.”
But he expressed fears that when Obama’s presidency ends, the world could go “back to square one” if the wrong leader replaces him.
Like his speech, Khadafy’s visit to New York has been stormy. His plan to pitch a large Bedouin tent on a Libyan-owned estate in New Jersey was quashed when locals and state officials objected.
Wednesday, residents in Bedford, about 40 miles north of Manhattan, objected to the tent being erected there. According to The Associated Press, the Libyan mission also asked to pitch the tent in Central Park.
Eventually, he was housed at the Libyan diplomatic mission.
