Moammar Kadafi

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, the United States may be facing a new challenge from Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi, this time in the form of a heightened campaign against Libyan dissidents with American connections. Over the last week, the Clinton Administration has appealed to the Egyptian government "at many levels," even to the office of President Hosni Mubarak, to intervene in the case of missing Libyan dissident Mansur Kikhiya, U.S.

A Libyan general has switched sides in one of two fiercely contested western cities that have been strongholds of the opposition to Moammar Kadafi, state television said Tuesday. Fierce fighting continued in the city of Zawiya, which has emerged as one of two key battlegrounds in the area around the capital, Tripoli. Although Kadafi controls the capital, his opponents have seized much of the eastern part of the country and are working on forming a competing government. In an "urgent" on-screen caption, a state-controlled television station reported that Maj. Gen. Khalid Shahmah had joined the rebels in Zawiya.

Col. Moammar Kadafi's decision to expel 30,000 Palestinians from Libya has been greeted with dismay in the Middle East, where Arab countries have no intention of opening their doors to the would-be settlers. Lebanon already has denied entry to several thousand Palestinians who arrived on two ships from Cyprus and Athens without Lebanese travel documents, and Friday it banned maritime transport from Libya in hopes of cutting off the flow of deportees.

He has exasperated the world for decades and, now, amid gun battles and artillery smoke, Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi's whereabouts are a mystery. The fight for the Libyan capital,Tripoli, seems far from over as Kadafi loyalists mount counterattacks that have pricked the air of invincibility that enveloped advancing rebels just days ago. But it should be no surprise that the eccentric man with the outsized sunglasses and ego to match would not...

In the think-tank argot popular in foreign policy circles, "mission creep" is an idiom for one of the garden-variety mistakes most people were warned against at their mother's knee. Think "don't throw good money after bad" and you've pretty well got the essence of the thing. Predictably, though, mission creep is what's occurring in Libya. Each halting step the United States and its NATO allies take deeper into a morass none of them really understands makes it more likely that this ill-considered intervention will end in precisely the event it set out to prevent: Moammar Kadafi's massacre of his political opponents.

It was a bad year for the villains of the world. Three of the biggest bad guys met their ends: Osama bin Laden, killed by U.S. commandos who stormed his villa in Pakistan in May; Moammar Kadafi, killed by Libyan insurgents who captured him (with the help of a NATO airstrike) in October; and Kim Jong Il, the ruler of North Korea, who died Dec. 17, reportedly of a heart attack. Bin Laden was the most important. Americans remember him, of course, as the architect of the terrorist attacks of Sept.

Moammar Kadafi's many vanities led the Libyan leader and his intelligence network into miscalculating the breadth of outrage against him in his own land. Long one of the Arab world's most perplexing personalities, Kadafi has traveled the globe with a tent, warning against foreign intervention while polishing his image at home as the country's "Brotherly Leader. " But the unrest sweeping the tribal nation is a sign that after four decades in power, Kadafi has lost the support of key clans and loyalists, and has steadily relied on repression to stay in power.

The nascent rebel effort in eastern Libya, sustained for weeks by revolutionary passion and zeal, has begun to fray in the face of chaotic battlefield collapses and ineffective leadership. Many of the idealistic young men who looted army depots of gun trucks and weapons six weeks ago believed the tyrannical 41-year reign of Col. Moammar Kadafi would quickly collapse under the weight of a mass rebellion. Now those same volunteer fighters, most of whom had never before fired a gun, have fled a determined onslaught by Kadafi's forces, which have shown resilience after being bombarded and routed by allied airstrikes a week ago. Photos: Rebels pushed back to Benghazi Some exhausted rebels capped a 200-plus mile retreat up the Libyan coast by fleeing all the way to Benghazi, the rebels' de facto capital, to rest and regroup.

The five rebel gunmen crept tensely along the side road's shuttered storefronts, past the dark furniture shop with the broken windows and the streetlamps decorated with plastic flowers. Perpendicular to them was Tripoli Street, the heart of Misurata, where Moammar Kadafi's snipers hide in office buildings and rake the city with bullets. Their feet crunched the concrete and metal debris scattered on the ground, but the men were otherwise silent. They'd done this before. At the intersection with Tripoli, one of the men darted into the traffic circle, now filled with sand berms, truck frames, tires and a torched tank.

A convoy of Libyan military vehicles carrying troops loyal to ousted leader Moammar Kadafi arrived late Monday in this desert town in central Niger, one of Libya's southern neighbors, military sources said. The convoy of between 200 and 250 Libyan military vehicles included officers from Libya's southern army battalions, said the French and Nigerien sources. It probably crossed from Libya into Algeria before entering Niger, they said. It was not immediately clear whether the convoy included any members of Kadafi's family or other high-level members of his government.