It certainly looked like the same Libyan leader, even if he was clad in a black robe rather than brown, and he had swapped his black lapel pin of the African continent for a green one. But the low-key, almost contemplative Col Muammar Gaddafi who turned up at the Council on Foreign Relations on Thursday had nothing to do with the flamboyant, discursive provocateur who riveted, offended and finally exhausted the United Nations General Assembly a day earlier.

For an hour, Gaddafi offered polite answers to polite questions from an audience of New York financiers, business people, academics and a few journalists, in a conversation that ranged from the roots of Islamic terrorism to Libya’s desire for better relations with the West.

“It is in our interest for Libya to have good relations with the US,” Gaddafi said through an interpreter, speaking Arabic in a low monotone that barely registered above a whisper.

There was no mention of prosecuting those responsible for the “mass murder” in Iraq, as he had demanded at the General Assembly. No call for an investigation of the assassinations of John F Kennedy and the Martin Luther King Jr No pawing through a pile of scrawled notes or waving of the UN charter.

If the standing-room-only crowd had turned up for another display of geopolitical performance arts, they were sorely disappointed.

“Yesterday was theater; today was a give-and-take,” said the council’s president, Richard N Haass, who looked pleasantly surprised to have presided over a seminar rather than a circus. “You might disagree with him, but there is no question it was a legitimate debate.”

... contd.