Exit the Colonel (53 page)

While Gaddafi was the cause of most of his and his people's problems, the United States and the West made some truly gargantuan mistakes in their dealings with the Great Jamahiriya and its leader: some were errors of omission and neglect. The US policy apparatus tends to be a reactive, not a proactive, organism. Thus, once Libya (and to a large extent, Iran) disappeared behind their respective sanctions-sealed curtains, the requisite American expertise disappeared with it. US foreign policy pays dearly for such discontinuities, some of which date back to Henry Kissinger's notion, somewhat crudely put, that diplomats should be generalists, lest they be at risk of “going native.” The Middle East during the Arab Spring provides stark examples of the costs of this short-termism. When a country deemed unimportant or isolated from frequent diplomatic commerce suddenly becomes critically important, the necessary expertise is simply not there—whether political, linguistic, or historical. The blank whiteboard leaves policy further open to manipulation by organizations and individuals whose interests are not necessarily at one with those of the nation.

In the case of Libya, the information gap with respect both to Libya and Iraq, and the Middle East writ large, allowed Gaddafi to run circles around many of his American and European interlocutors, while appealing to the
venal interests of individuals and organizations everywhere. The pure scope of postrapprochement extortion by the Gaddafi
after
his so-called redemption shows that many politicians and governments, in many countries, either were not paying attention or did not find it in their interests to pay attention. One cannot afford to be naive, but the sheer speed and size of the revolving doors between government, lobbyists, individual politicians, oil companies, arms dealers, and their counterparts in the Libyan government is truly astounding.

While the Libya case may be—and is being—explained as a kind of passive neglect, the relationships between the United States and Western Libya exhibited far more active abuses. While the US preached “good governance” under the administration of George W. Bush, it was simultaneously an egregious violator of these same principles, selling arms (or, practically as bad, allowing arms to be sold) to Libya, and worse, literally delivering individuals to Gaddafi's front door with all but the weakest of caveats against torture—without really knowing much about these people or their motives. The fact that so many weapons were sold with zeal by the West to Gaddafi in the lead-up to the revolution, and that the US, the UK, and other countries actually participated in a program to deliver some of Gaddafi's enemies to him on a plate for torture, should by rights be cause for far greater outrage by the American public than has hitherto been the case.

As the Libyan revolution unfolded, many argued that the United States had no business intervening militarily in Libya. Few, however, were aware of the scale on which “we,” the West, had been intervening in support of Gaddafi for the previous seven years. Is it better not to intervene or to try to level the playing field to correct past wrong? There are those who would argue that the Bush administration was right; the “War of the Worlds” thesis proved accurate. New ideas seeped in, and a revolution was born. This may be true, but at what cost in human lives? As I have argued in this book, the rapprochement with the West—and the US in particular—combined with Gaddafi's particular paranoid worldview, very likely sent the Gaddafi regime hurtling toward a nasty end. The problem, of course, is that it also led to huge casualties across the Libyan population. The estimates vary widely, but even on the low end, at the time of writing, top the single-country tallies in the Arab Spring: 25,000–50,000 dead, between 1,000 and 10,000 missing, and between 20,000 and 50,000 wounded, with a substantial number seriously wounded.
³
The US was the last hinge in Libya's acceptance back
into the international community, with commensurate rights and privileges, including the right to buy massive amounts of weaponry.

Many contradictory statements have been made about Libya's role in US foreign policy, the importance of the rapprochement process, and the Arab Spring. The WMD agreement has been called “[p]erhaps the greatest counter-proliferation success of our time,” yet the US intervention in Libya, part of a “strategic sideshow.”
⁴

Regardless of the motivations behind such claims, what happens in Libya over the next ten years will likely prove to be very relevant to the new Middle East, as it was to perceptions of the US support for limited change in the Middle East during the Arab Spring. While, again, nothing is certain, Libya has already shown its ability to produce discontinuities; if it continues on this path, change can be celebrated and used to motivate new changes in the region.

The US and the West do not have to wait to implement change—they should deliver as much technical assistance as Libya is able, and willing, to accept (and pay for). And they should accept the lesson Libya's recent history offers with respect to the link between human rights and international security. As the late Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov said, “A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors.”
⁵

THIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE without the assistance of literally hundreds of people—Libyans, Americans, and others—who took real personal risks in speaking with me, both before and after the Revolution. I would like to thank, in particular, Maria Sturgis for her patience and support, innumerable conversations about related experiences, and extremely helpful challenges to my arguments over the course of the year it took to write this book; my father and my good friend David Grudoski for their patient readings and helpful comments on numerous drafts; my trusted partner Omar Benhalim, with whom I embarked on a complex and emotional series of return trips to Libya while the revolution was still under way. I am greatly indebted to Professor Dirk Vandewalle of Dartmouth College, who encouraged an interest in Libya since we were both residents at the American Institute for Yemeni Studies in Sana'a in the late 1990s, and whose work is the basis for any study of modern Libyan politics and economy.

In no particular order: Khaled Mezran, Karim Mezran, Safa Naili, Professor Saad Al Ghariani, the Hon. Abdelmoula Lenghi, Ambassador Aref Nayed, Husni Bey, Jalal Husni Bey, Adel Husni Bey, and Najat Husni Bey, for their interest and conversations on Libyan politics and commerce; Sandra Charles for her immense help with referrals and for speaking with
me at length about her own experiences and impressions of Libya pre-2004; Ahmed Ibrahim Al Fagih, whose fiction served as an inspiration for my first book on Libya. Basem Tulti, Maged Mahfouz, Fawzi and Ali Tweni, Nurredin Tulti, Mohammed Binlamin, Shaib Agila, Ibrahim Sahad, Ahmed Shebani and Youcif Megaryaf. Professor Robert Springborg, Professor Chris Taylor, Dr. Laila Bugaighis and Dr. Fathi Jehani at Benghazi Medical Center, Professor Claude Ghez; Dr. Issam Hajjaji, Burhannedin Al Muntasser, Allaedin Al Muntasser, Khaled Mezran, Hafed Alghwell, Professor Tarik Yousef, Professor Grigory Barenblatt, The Volk family, Dr. Diana Pickworth, Judy Schalick, Peter Michael Kuchkovsky, Peter Lenhardt, and Anne O'Leary, for their long-term friendship, support, and encouragement.

I appreciate conversations with Assistant Secretary Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary David Welch, Tom Sams, Cherie Loustaunau, Assistant Secretary Martin Indyk, Assistant Secretary Richard Murphy, Ambassador Charles Cecil, Ambassador David Mack, Alan Makovsky, Ambassador Chris Stevens, Dr. Martin Quinn, Wayne White, Dr. Greg Berry, Anne O'Leary, Robert Waller, Leslie Tsou, Cecile Sakla, Virginia Ramadan, Rashidah Ellis, and Heather Kalmbach. A word to honor Dr. Salma Al Gaeer, a friend who was killed during the Revolution by people who knew nothing of her personal sacrifices, only their own; and my friend, Mohammad Binlamin, who spent most of the Revolution incarcerated in Abu Selim prison. At Human Rights Watch, Fred Abrahams and Sidney Kwiram were both particularly helpful, and inspirational; Andrew Feinstein, Karim Sadjadpour, Dr. Claudia Gazzini, Dr. Igor Cherstich, Gordon Church, Will Ward, and the inimitable and highly resourceful JF Hulston.

Writing this book was a constant struggle against time, inconsistent reports, and a subject that kept moving and twisting from the date I started research, in April 2011, to submission of the final manuscript in July 2012. There will necessarily be mistakes and omissions, for which I alone bear full responsibility. I hope that this book will encourage others to look into aspects of the US-Libya relationship in even more detail, and ask even tougher questions.

On the production side, sincere thanks are due my editor at PublicAffairs, Brandon Proia, for his insight and skill in helping shape the book, and Lisa Kaufman, Melissa Raymond, and Jaime Leifer, for both their hard work and navigation of a range of unforeseen complications. Last but not least, I would like to thank my excellent research assistant, Bashir Megaryaf, upon whose resourcefulness I relied on many occasions; W. Scott Chahanovich, for assistance
with formal transliteration of Arabic sources; and Omer Abu Saleh at the Saudi Research and Publishing Company, for his archival assistance.

Appreciation goes to Lynn Gaspard at Saqi Books, for her interest in the then-just-begun Libyan Revolution, during an interval when many were not sure how interesting a story it would be, to Rukhsana Yasmin at Saqi for comments on an early draft, and to Professor Tony Sheldon and the Yale School of Management, for hosting me on an unrelated project but accommodating a trip to Libya during that time.

I spent many hours in many places writing this book. In that context, I'd like to thank for their hospitality the very friendly and indulgent staff in Berkeley at Teance, Imperial Tea Court, Café Strada, O Chamé, and Nefeli; and Gale Garcia, who rented me an exceptionally pleasant space to write for several months.

 

Ethan Chorin

Berkeley, California, July 2012

1
aṣ-Ṣādiq an-Nayhūm, The Sultan's Flotilla (‘An Markab Assultan') in
Translating Libya
, Ethan Chorin, trans. (London, England: Saqi Books, 2008), p. 95–102.

1
Projected capital and running costs for fifty years. See
http://www.temehu.com/great-man-made-river-gmmr.htm
.

2
Chorin conversations with Dr. Saʿd al-Ġariyānī in 2005.

3
This was a variant on a set of proposals dating back to the 1960s to divert the Ubangi to create new agricultural regions from reclaimed land.

4
Which puts the $1 trillion US expenditure on the Iraq War in some context.

5
See
http://205.254.135.7/countries/cab.cfm?fips=LY
.

6
CIA World Factbook
, 2012–2013.

7
Judith Gurney,
Libya: The Political Economy of Oil
(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 87.

8
Danielle Bisson, Jean Bisson, and Jacques Fontaine,
La Libye: A la Decouverte d'un Pays
, Tome 1: Identite Libyenne, L'harmattan Paris, 1999, p.21.

9
Ibid., p. 26.

10
Ibn Ḫaldūn,
Muqaddimah
.

11
John Wright,
A History of Libya
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 67.

12
Ibid., p. 93.

13
Samuel Edwards,
Barbary General: The Life of William H. Eaton
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968), p. 61.

14
Russell D. Buhite,
Lives at Risk
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Reources Books, 1995), p. 11.

15
Ibid., p. 12.

16
Gregory Fremont-Barnes,
The Wars of The Barbary Pirates
(Oxford, England: Osprey Publishing, 2006), p. 39.

17
Edwards,
Barbary General: the Life of William H. Eaton
, p. 89.

18
Barnes,
The Wars of the Barbary Pirates
, p. 41.

19
Ahlam Abu Zeida, and Abdulrizaq Qarira, Mabnā al-Qunṣuliyyah al-Amrīkiyyah, Manšurāt Mašrūʿ Tanẓīm wa Idārāt al-Madīnahal-Qadīmah bi-Ṭarāblus.
Idārat at-Tawṯīq wa ad-Dirāsāt al-Insāniyyah, Tripoli, 2004
.

20
Edwards,
Barbary General: the Life of William H. Eaton
, p. 28.

21
Joshua E. London,
Victory in Tripoli: How America's War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005), p. 113.

22
Ibid., p. 219.

23
Ibid., p. 117.

24
Barnes,
The Wars of The Barbary Pirates
, p. 41.

25
London,
Victory in Tripoli
, p. 233.

26
Dirk Vandewalle,
A History of Modern Libya
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 16–18.

27
Ibid., p. 21.

28
Ibid., p. 22.

29
Wright,
A History of Libya
, p. 112.

30
Ibid., p. 128.

31
Ibid., p. 133.

32
Ibid., p. 130.

33
Ibid., p. 131.

34
Issam Hajjaji, “Healthcare in Libya,” unpublished, January 2012.

35
Bisson, Bisson, and Fontaine ,
La Libye
, p. 86.

36
John Wright,
The Emergence of Libya
(London, England: Silphium Press, 2008), p. 330.

37
Ibid., p. 333.

38
Issandr El Amrani, “Is There A Libya?”
London Review of Books
33, no. 9, 2012, pp. 19–20.