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Moammar Gaddafi leaned across the couch and surprised me with the question he posed, squinting as he searched my face for reaction: "Why do you drink poison?"

I could guess where the Libyan dictator was headed but asked him to explain. During a news conference, we had just engaged in a verbal confrontation over terrorism, and he had asked to see me alone -- perhaps, I thought, to articulate his position better, or just to arrest me. "Alcohol," he said through an interpreter. "You people in the West poison yourself with alcohol. You are fools."

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That 1973 interview in Tripoli and an even more venomous conversation with Gaddafi 14 years later accustomed me never to be surprised by anything he does. And no one -- beginning with the...