Waiting for Gadhafi: Former US Congressman Cools His Heels in Tripoli

Trying to convince a rabid dictator to relinquish power -- or even get a face-to-face meeting with him -- is more difficult than even some can-do U.S. politicians might think.

That's the lesson former GOP congressman Curt Weldon learned this week when he landed in Libya confident that his old contacts with Moammar Gadhafi and his son might trigger a breakthrough in the Libyan leader's armed standoff with rebels and the West. Weldon arrived in Tripoli on Wednesday on a self-described private mission to urge Gadhafi to stand down.

"I have met with Gadhafi more than any other American," Weldon said confidently.

Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who served two decades in Congress, has indeed traveled to Libya and met Gadhafi several times before. He was part of a bipartisan U.S. congressional delegation that visited the country in 2004 after Gadhafi agreed to abandon his nuclear program. During that visit, which also included then Sen. Joe Biden, Weldon gave a speech to a pro-Gadhafi forum. He lost his House seat in 2006, amid an FBI probe into his dealings with defense contractors. He was never charged.

Later, it emerged that a company Weldon once worked for, Defense Solutions, at one point proposed selling weapons to Libya under Gadhafi. Weldon denies any wrongdoing. He told CNN on Thursday that he has no ties to Defense Solutions, but his LinkedIn profile still lists the company as his current employer.

Weldon returned to Libya last year to study U.S. business opportunities and says he's kept in touch with Gadhafi's son Seif al-Islam all along. In 2008 he called himself a "friend of Libya."

Announcing his current trip to Libya, Weldon wrote an op-ed in The New York Times saying he's going to Tripoli to "engage face to face" with Gadhafi. "I've met him enough times to know that it will be very hard to simply bomb him into submission," Weldon wrote. He said he was personally invited this time by the Libyan regime.

But Gadhafi seems to have other plans.

After nearly two full days, Weldon has yet to meet the Libyan leader. He told a local New York TV station that the meeting was scheduled for Wednesday, but it apparently never happened.

Now it appears Weldon may simply give up and go home.

"We're going to give them until tomorrow. We're not going to stay beyond that," Weldon told CNN on Thursday night, referring to a deadline of midday Friday. "We've given them some suggestions, and we expect a response by midday tomorrow."

Attempts by AOL News to contact Weldon on his personal cellphone and Yahoo email address were unsuccessful, raising the possibility that he could already be on a flight home.

Weldon told CNN that he knows from previous experience that Libyan officials sometimes make people wait for hours before meetings, which often take place in the middle of the night.

"They always make you wait until 30 minutes before the meeting, and then you go," Weldon said. "And some of those meetings were at 10 at night, some were at 5 in the afternoon."

The former congressman also seemed to make excuses for Gadhafi, saying that he's not offended by the fact that the Libyan leader has made him wait in Tripoli and that he understands the reasons for the delay.

"There's a lot of security concerns, and they're very concerned about where Gadhafi is at any given moment. That's one of the issues," Weldon said. In the meantime, he's been holding "a lot of back-channel meetings with friends and associates" he has in Libya. He did not elaborate.

While Weldon has been waiting it out in Tripoli, Gadhafi decided to reach out to a slightly more prominent American -- President Barack Obama himself. The Libyan leader sent a letter to the White House asking Obama to stop the NATO bombing campaign in his country, what he called the "unjust war against a small people of a developing country."