Chorin, the author of a book about Libya called Exit the Colonel, explained to me that making a deal with Gaddafi was specifically attractive to the Bush White House as a follow-up to the invasion of Iraq.

You have the neoconservative cabal in Washington looking for the next move, essentially, and they really weren't interested in Gaddafi.

until essentially it dawned on a few people that the relationship with Gaddafi could actually solve several of the problems that the Iraq war was not solving.

As in, there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, but Gaddafi ostensibly had something that you could call such a program, and he was willing to give it

But

this is at the heart of the Libya problem, is that there was this sort of long, disjointed or absent period of many decades where the U.S.-Libya relationship was either non-existent or very stressed.

We didn't know who all the parties were.

There were certainly clues, but we didn't know whom to trust.