By Jay Holmes
This week, Zimbabwean Dictator Robert Mugabe, a long time friend of Qaddafi’s, stated to the international press that Moammar Qaddafi is now his guest in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwean opposition leaders claim that they have verified Momo’s presence. Mugabe’s people claim that Moammar flew out of his enclave at Sirte, but it’s just as likely that he flew out of an airstrip on the Algerian border.
The fact is that it is unlikely that anything other than shrapnel is flying out of Sirte without NATO’s acquiescence. It has not been confirmed by NATO authorities that Qaddafi or any of his principal family members are in Zimbabwe. If he is, I can only extend my condolences to the people of Zimbabwe for having to suffer yet another undeserved indignity. However, it is entirely possible that this is simply a rumor spread by Mugabe in an attempt to slacken the search for his buddy, Qaddafi, in Libya.
In honor of great work on the part of NATO and the Libyan rebels, I would like to repost this open letter I wrote to Qaddafi as a parting shot gift.
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My Open Dear John Letter to Qaddafi
By Holmes**
My Dearest Momo,
Perhaps you are surprised that I would write you now, but after all these years, I hate to see us break up this way. The lack of closure is emotionally draining for both of us. After all, my relationship with you has lasted even longer than my marriage thus far.
I was so young and impetuous when we first met. I know that some of the things that I have said and done may have hurt your feelings. Please accept that my friends and I always acted with sincerity and the best of intentions. I hope you can understand that some of the things you did were really hurtful to me and to many of my close friends, as well.
I am sitting here listening to Carol King sing Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow, and it brings me so many fond memories of our long and often exciting friendship. All those years. . . . So many cute hats, none of which ever fit you. . . . Those charming outfits. . . . That lovely fireworks display on a romantic spring night in 1986. . . . These memories all come flooding back to me as I sit here and laugh cry.
Seeing you in such painful difficulties these days has made me re-evaluate our long connection. I want this to all end for us on the best possible note. Although I know you have not always loved me, I am sure you have never questioned my sincerity or passion. It’s all been very real for me.
Based on my deeper understanding of our heart-felt connection, I am offering you a gift. . . . A gift from my heart. . . . In fact, in your honor, I have decided to offer this special gift to any deserving person in the world. . . . the Seventy-Two Virgins Golden Retirement Plan. In fact, out of my deep respect for you, I will ask potential retirees in the future to plan in advance by donating a small portion of their plunder to my special fund, so that I may be able to help as many needy souls as possible.
Because of all the years of joy you have brought me, I am offering this gift to you free of any of your normal financial arrangements. Unlike your other so-called friends, Gordon Brown and Silvio Berlusconi, I won’t take a penny from you. Yes Momo, I know about that gas pipeline you built to Silvio’s house, and look at how he has repaid you! But I forgive you. And I want you to know that my friendship with Markus Wolf* in no way detracted from all we have been to each other. “Mischa” never meant a thing to me.
My dear friend, stop struggling and give yourself the rest you deserve. Those seventy-two virgins will keep you happy for eternity. I know how picky you are about your meals so I have also arranged for a lovely, doting Ukrainian nurse to be your celestial mommy. Just stop for a moment and think of your future, Momo. Imagine being young again, imagine being attractive this time, imagine four exhausted recent virgins by your side, and your mommy’s voice entering that lovely silk tent. . . .”Ooo, Momo darling. . . . come to lunch Dear. Mommy made you your favorite lamb goulash. . . .”
Please come and visit soon so that we can implement your overdue, well-deserved gift. I want to finally repay you for our long years of friendship. Come what may, never forget that we had Paris in the spring, Rome in the fall, and those wonderful picnics on the Algerian border. Thank you for a lifetime of wonderful memories.
Sincerely,
Holmes, CEO, Celestial After-Care, Inc.
*Markus Wolf was the despised director of the foreign intelligence branch of the East German Stasi (secret police).
**Note by Piper Bayard:
Holmes, a man with experience in intelligence and covert operations, has a long and involved past with Moammar Qaddafi (“Uncle Momo”) so these events in Libya are especially moving for him. During the Cold War, Qaddafi allowed the Soviets, the East Germans, and the other Warsaw Pact countries to use Libya as a giant terrorist training camp. Sometimes there were upwards of 30 camps operating at the same time for the purpose of training terrorist groups to attack Israel and Western nations. Qaddafi even cooperated with the Irish Republican Army for a while, until the IRA decided he was too filthy even for them.
Holmes and many of his friends spent decades intimately involved in fighting the Soviets, the East Germans, and the various terrorist organizations they sponsored. The stories of their sacrifices will never be told, but they were numerous and deeply personal.
In 1986, Qaddafi was blown away (pun intended) that his vaunted, high-tech Soviet Air Defense System proved useless against a rather limited air attack by less than two dozen aircraft from the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy. Rumors circulated that clandestine operations had simultaneously been carried out against military assets in Libya. In addition, Qaddafi’s Syrian allies had sent their best naval unit to the Gulf of Sidra with the intention of guaranteeing damage to the U.S. 6th fleet. That Syrian ship exploded shortly after casting off from its dock in Libya. Both Syria and Libya were left unenthusiastic about the prospects of any future engagements with the U.S. 6th fleet, despite the best cheerleading the Soviets could bring to bear.
Piper Bayard 
It would be unfortunate for Zimbabwe, but at least the growth-promoting material would be collected into the same cesspool for when the plumber comes to call.
Hi Dave.
Poor Zimbabwe. They have had to put up with Mugabe and his goons for a long time. I hope Momo and his spawn don’t make their way there. Zimbabweans have more than enough misery.
let us not forget how quickly rumors fly out of Syria these days…. one tweet had Gadaffi’s son being at that very moment transported to the Hague where he would stand trial for all his crimes…. i hated to inform the guy, via a reply tweet, that alas, the entire story was fabricated, and once again, the Press prints stuff nowadays not on hearsay or even rumor, but wholesale fabrication… and the poor guy who did the tweeting? a legitimate diplomat for the UN!!! so here is a guy supposedly in the know being upstaged by a ferret… i didn’t rub it in too bad, after all, my uncle freddie has an extensive system of critters stationed around the world, we sometimes set up a control center on my balcony, where we can take our morning snack in the bright sunshine, and get messages flown in from birds, rabbits, occasionally even a double agent squirrel posing as the enemy.
so this is not surprising at all. i had Momo offering a few feints, counter thrusts of misdirection, and false reports i think about two weeks ago… not found in his tunnels? no kidding. no where to be found in his compound? oh gosh, how surprising! the best was when he told his loyal followers to “attack the foreign rats and scum, we will prevail, we will drive them from our land…” meanwhile, he’s schlepping off somewhere dressed as Madonna in sunglasses shooting more heroin… that was funny… only surpassed by how hilarious it was for CNN to deliver those statements deadpan, unable to smirk on camera.
i tweet from my command post, Col Sir Samuel Zeus Clemons at @Samuel_Clemons
Hi Samuel. Anything any normal politician says requires a grain of salt to put the truth in solution so that you can extract it. Anything said by Mugabe requires a truck load of salt and three fire hoses.
If any of your Special Forces Ferrets could slip an exploding acorn into Momo’s drink we would appreciate it. There’s a statue missing in Libya tonight and I am sure that the people of Libya would be happy to fill the space with a likeness of a heroic ferret.
Well, now there is a couple that was meant to shack up together. Maybe Momo can help Mugabe fix the Zimbabwe currency. Add a zero. Or ten. Also makes me wonder which tent city they set him up in.
Great post!
Hi gene. I think you are right. they do belong together, just not adrift in anyone’s country. I understand that they both share a passion for penguins and we have a few abandoned research locations in Antarctica.
So sorry, we forgot fuel for the heaters and generators…..
Wow–great kiss-off, Holmes. Though perhaps instead of the authentically lovely Ukrainian nurse, you might have given him Charlotte Diesel from High Anxiety or maybe BigNurse, whenever she’s done working at the nursing home where my mother was recently incarcerated–er–I’d put a more appropriate word here, but there isn’t one.
My memories of the cold war include some perfectly loony exercises at school, during which we cowered under our desks as waves of Soviet atomic bombers buzzed through our imaginations. The instructions to hide behind hanging laundry (look it up kids, key word: clothes line) to avoid being toasted by the light from an atom bomb detonation, which, our teachers assured us, was the primary danger from an A-Bomb. The envy I felt at seeing films of ranks of soldiers lined up to witness the bomb tests in the Nevada desert–oh, how I wished to be there, to see it! Living near a SAC base, feeling the irresistible pull of a B-52 on short final directly over our house. Finding a parachute, but no parachutist, in my grandmother’s pasture. The misery of seeing the Russkies get into space before us. All that was heavy in my childhood.
The big events were the construction of the Berlin Wall, the Berlin Airlift (My father-in-law has medals from that business, and my husband flew the corridor a few times, much later.), Kennedy’s speech and then his death. Boys disappearing from our neighborhood. Learning they had gone to ‘Nam. What’s ‘Nam and why did they go there? We are at war! We are? My classmates’ brothers are drafted, so we must be at war! Self-immolating monks. Naked napalm children. Walter Cronkite deciding to end the Viet Nam war, and making good on it. I will always hate him for his perfidy, and I will always hate the government for wasting the lives of soldiers while the fat butts in DC proclaimed rules of engagement that prevented victory. (Victory is also a way to end a war, though we don’t practice that method any more.) I will always hate the government, because it will never change, but I learned to hate it during the Cold War. We we in the right? Hell yes. So why didn’t we act like it?
When the Berlin Wall came down, I was standing near my desk across the street from the Chinese Theater. I said to my supervisor and her boss, “The world just ended.” They, being younger than me, and native Californians, laughed. I said, “Now there will be no order in the world.”
When you’re the Good Guys, as we are, there is never an end to conflict, only a rotation of attackers. Huh. Who’d a thunk it? History so far has been like a bad ninja movie. It’s different now. Feels different. Rather than attacking one at a time, like evil imbeciles, the bad ninjas are attacking in mass formation.
Perhaps if I had known the truth about the Cold War, I’d feel less nostalgia for it. But for someone whose political intrigue quotient is near zero, the Cold War seems like the good old days.
Hi “Whiteovertan” “perhaps instead of the authentically lovely Ukrainian nurse, you might have given him Charlotte Diesel from High Anxiety or maybe ‘BigNurse’,..”
Perhaps Nurse Ratchet from “One Flew Over the Coo Coo’s nest” or the bride with the machine guns in her breasts from the Austin Powers movie.
On a serious note I am grateful to your husband and father-in-law for their service.
The Viet Nam war left a lot of us angry at our government. That anger has evolved for me over time. I’ve settled on the idealist view that in a democracy (of sorts) government is us and that it is up to us to own it and change it. I think that in democracy the laziness of the many enables the greed and destructiveness of the few. It seems to me that many adults in our nation prefer obedience to one fake easy ideology or another.
The good news is that it only takes a few to change that. Not all the sheep need to awaken to make the world a better place. Just a few.
Holmes, my parents were adamant that “we are the government.” They believed it, and for a long time, so did I. But when you look at the fact that it truly doesn’t matter which party is in power, you just have to look elsewhere for the truth. Administrations come and go (though Senators and Representatives seem to stick around well past natural death) but the underlying bureaucracies don’t change at all. This country is now run by career bureaucrats whose goals are not in the least geared toward keeping the country strong or supporting good or even whacking evil. Politicians lie–which astonishes me–but bureaucrats just procrastinate and stonewall and continue to be the invisible ruling class. That’s the only explanation I can find for the inexorable creep toward disaster that I’ve observed over the past thirty years or so. The creep probably predates me, too, or certainly predates the prickling at my peripheral awareness. It makes me angry, and getting older is no cure for it.
I hope the people of Libya can get their act together and build a fair, civilized country. If so, they will be the shining city on the hill.
Good post, Holmes. Maybe you could save a place for our own Muslim leader.
Hi David, glad you liked the post. Obama and his assistant weasels have done much to earn the jab. Although I admit I enjoy the image, I don’t quite think he has earned a free vacation to Guantanamo. For one thing he is already breaking records for presidential vacations, let’s not encourage him along those lines. Honestly, it appears to me that our troubles with all the quasi-Islamic fascists can be blamed on both ruling parties. Selfish vermin from both sides of the isle have hurt us.
I honestly think that our political problems are deeper than “Republican” or “Democrat”. For nearly two decades we have been remarkably indecisive about both foreign and domestic policy. It has become an outlandishly expensive practice. We should have learned from outcome of President Johnson’s asinine “war without being rude to anyone” theory that we end up doing more damage to ourselves and others with prolonged ineffective half measures.
I am willing to slap Democrats but I want to slap Republicans as well.
Oh Holmes. You are too rich. I can see you are heartbroken, losing Uncle MoMo. But he is not gone. Like all freakish dick-taters, well… I suspect he’s going to surface somewhere at some point. Though he will probably be incognito, so I’m guessing his glorious tiny hat collection might be lost.
You made me think of Karen Carpenter’s lyrics: “So far away/Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?”
It is truly sad. (Not.)
Hi Renee. If we find him would you mind delivering a bomb in a baby carriage?
“Like all freakish dick-taters,…” The best thing to do with a tater is peel it, slice it and deep fry it at a high temperature.
Very convincing Holmes. I think he might take you up on the offer.
So far he seems to be resisting the great deal that I’m offering. I’m playing hard sell now. I’ll throw in a freebee retirement for Saif-a two for one special.
Well, this thing is as horrible as having the Marcoses escape the People’s Revolution in my country and sequester themselves in the U.S. In other words, I’m not fond of it.
Hi Marilag,
What I am proposing to Momo is more along the lines of celestial relocation assistance as opposed to political asylum. But if some lives of innocent people can be saved by Momo being allowed to leave with his skin intact then I would say that there is more value in ending the bloodshed sooner than in capturing Momo. Without his oil cash he is harmless.