New York- I’m featured in this week’s episode of Noiser Podcasts‘ Real Dictators series about Gaddafi’s escalating feud with the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom in the 1980s. The north African strongman had famously, if inaccurately, become Ronald Reagan’s “mad dog of the Middle East.” The American actor-turned-president warned of Gaddafi spreading Islamism around the globe while his administration was deeply involved in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Yet at the time going after mostly secular Arab world leaders who might feign an Islamic veneer was in vogue in foreign policy circles. Actual Sunni Islamists were seen as fellow travelers in the grander Cold War narrative the fomented a largely binary world view.
