Joe Bob Briggs has a terrifically informative (and funny) piece in the National Interest about everyone’s favorite homicidal dictator with the warped sense of style: The Q-man.

Of course, Qaddafi has always been the most mysterious of all pariahs. He has homes all over Libya, but chances are you’ll find no Saddam-style golden saunas or hideaways for assignations with porn stars. Qaddafi is the Ward Cleaver of international dictators. He had that first brief marriage in the 1970s, then he found the girl of his Islamic dreams and stayed with her through five children who went through angst-ridden teenage years. If he’d had his heart in being a true Mohammedan super-despot, he would have had five wives and attendant offspring spread out all over the desert. Instead, he’s got all these disappointing sons who are bored by the idea of being the next “Guide of the Revolution” and want to open car dealerships and go to football games instead. The only family member with an eye for politics is his daughter Aisha, who shops in London and Paris and could actually run the country—the Arab heads of state like her that much—but Muammar would have to go through some kind of sharia hell to make that happen.

Still, everything we know about Qaddafi is seen through a fuzzy curtain. He’s always been so exotically remote to us that he even has a name that’s impossible to pronounce or write in English. The man is a Google nightmare. Various attempts have been Gadhafi, Gadaffi, Gadhafi, Gadhdhafi, Kaddafi, Kadhdhafi, Khadafy, Qadaffi, Qaddafi, Qadhafi, Qadhdhafi and Qathafi, but no one really knows whether it’s a “G”, a “K” or a “Q”, not to mention where all the h’s go. His official biography is remarkably devoid of details about his early years—probably because they were spent organizing various cells plotting murder and revolutionary mayhem—but it always begins with “born in a desert tent near Surt.” I’ve always suspected that the constant mention of Surt is an attempt to identify Qaddafi with the nation’s main source of wealth—its oil fields—which lie in and around Surt and were not discovered until 1959, but were obviously squandered until a proper Surtite could marshal their economic power, primarily by seizing everything the Brits and Americans had built there. (The only American company, by the way, that stood up to Qaddafi’s nationalization of the oil fields was the privately held Hunt Oil of Texas. Nelson Bunker Hunt harassed Libya in every court in the world until the Colonel finally wrote him a check to get rid of him. Apparently Bunker and Muammar understand each other.)