HE IS A DELUSIONAL NARCISSIST who will fight until his last breath. Or an impulsive showman who will hop the next flight out of town when cornered. Or maybe he’s a psychopath, a coldly calculating strategist - crazy, like a desert fox.

The endgame in Libya is likely to turn in large part on the instincts of Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, and any insight into those instincts would be enormously valuable to policy makers. Journalists have formed their impressions from anecdotes, or from his actions in the past; others have seized on his recent tirades.

But at least one group has tried to construct a profile based on scientific methods, and its conclusions are most likely to affect American policy. For decades, the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States Department of Defense have compiled psychological assessments of hostile leaders like Colonel Qaddafi, Kim Jong-il of North Korea and President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, as well as allies, potential successors and prominent officials. (Many other governments do the same .)

In a profile of Colonel Qaddafi for Foreign Policy magazine, Dr. Jerrold Post, a psychiatrist who directs the political psychology program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and founded the C.I.A. branch that does behavioral analysis, concludes that the dictator, while usually rational, is prone to delusional thinking when under pressure ? “and right now, he is under the most stress he has been under since taking over the leadership of Libya.”

At his core, Colonel Qaddafi sees himself as the ultimate outsider, the Muslim warrior fighting impossible odds, Dr. Post argues, and he “is indeed prepared to go down in flames.”

Diplomats, military strategists and presidents have drawn on profiles to inform their decisions ? in some cases to their benefit, in other cases at a cost.

The political profile “is perhaps most important in cases where you have a leader who dominates the society, who can act virtually without constraint,” said Dr. Post. “And that has been the case here, with Qaddafi and Libya.”

The official dossiers are classified. But the methods are well known. Civilian psychologists have developed many of the techniques, drawing mostly on public information about a given leader: speeches, writings, biographical facts, observable behavior. The resulting forecasts suggest that “at-a-distance profiling,” as it is known, is still more an art than a science. So in a crisis like the one in Libya, it is crucial to know the assessments’ potential value and real limitations.

“Expert profilers are better at predicting behavior than a blindfolded chimpanzee, all right, but the difference is not as large as you’d hope it would be,” said Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania . The method with the longest track record is modeled on clinical case studies, the psychobiographies that therapists create when making a diagnosis, citing influences going back to childhood. The first one on record, commissioned in the early 1940s by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the C.I.A., was of Adolf Hitler; in it, the Harvard personality specialist Henry A. Murray speculated about Hitler’s “infinite self-abasement,” “homosexual panic” and Oedipal tendencies.

Analysts still use this approach but ground it far more firmly in biographical facts than on Freudian speculation or personal opinion.

Characterizations of this type have been invaluable in the past. In preparation for the Camp David peace negotiations between Israel and Egypt, the C.I.A. provided President Jimmy Carter with profiles of both nations’ leaders, Menachem Begin and Anwar el-Sadat.

Yet the assessments can also be misleading. Profiles of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq that circulated in the early 1990s suggested that he was ultimately a pragmatist who would give in under pressure.

Intelligence specialists have grown cautious , supplementing case histories with “content analysis” techniques, which look for patterns in a leader’s comments or writings. A software program developed by a researcher at Syracuse University in New York, Margaret Hermann, evaluates the relative frequency of certain categories of words (like “I,” “me,” “mine”) in interviews and speeches and links the scores to leadership traits.

A technique used by David G. Winter, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, draws on similar sources to judge leaders’ motives, their need for power, achievement and affiliation. The sentence “We can certainly wipe them out” reflects a high power orientation; “After dinner, we sat around chatting and laughing together” rings of affiliation.

“Combine high power and high affiliation, the person is likely to reach out, whereas power and low affiliation tend to predict aggression,” said Dr. Winter . “That’s the idea, though of course you can’t predict anything with certainty.”

At least one group of political profilers has incorporated that flaw itself - uncertainty - into its forecasts.

The researchers have compared communications leading up to the outbreaks of World War I and the Korean War with those that led to a peaceful resolution, like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. And the higher the level of acknowledged uncertainty, the less likely the leader is to pursue war, Peter Suedfeld, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, said.

He has not yet analyzed Colonel Qaddafi’s comments, but it doesn’t take an expert to observe that the Libyan leader sounds very certain, if not always coherent.


By BENEDICT CAREY