Exit the Colonel (3 page)

Much of what happened to Libya over the last few decades is the result of negligence—on the part of Libya's leadership and the international community, including the US and Europe, which paid attention to what was happening in the country only when it was politically or economically expedient. Despite its veneer of irrelevance to US policy makers, Libya had and continues to have a significant impact on the West, even if that impact is diffuse. In the 1970s, Gaddafi sparked a revolution in oil pricing, wresting pricing power away from the major oil companies and putting it into the hands of the oil-producing countries. Gaddafi's money and meddling caused political havoc in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, particularly during the 1980s, as he supported a range of terrorist groups and revolutionary movements. Libya was almost certainly responsible for blowing up two Western civilian aircraft and their passengers and crew, and for cosponsoring acts of terror that caused Presidents Carter and Reagan to label Libya a “significant threat” to US interests. More recently, Libya became the field on which the West was able to take a decisive public stand in support of the Arab Spring, despite opposition from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and others who argued that the United States had no significant policy interests in the country.

 

I AM ONE OF THOSE WHO BELIEVE that the Obama administration, supported by the Europeans, did the right thing by intervening in Libya, even if the intervention was preconditioned by a host of factors that were not at all transparent. The US did have critical interests in Libya—as poorly explained as they may have been—and also moral obligations. US actions in the years 1998–2004, and the process of rapprochement itself, as I will describe in detail, set in motion a whole series of actions that made a bloodless revolution less, not more, likely. I also believe that had this process been managed differently, the result might well have been different, and the West's strategic and moral obligations to intervene less clear.

What foreigners tend to overlook is that those who fought in the revolution—largely young men between the ages of seventeen and thirty—clearly believed a clean break from Gaddafi was worth the grave risks they took to topple the regime. In other words, even though Libya was looking a bit shinier, and there were promises of jobs and new housing, there was no sense, particularly in Eastern Libya, that this process would benefit any but the top layers of society or that there would be fundamental change. In my many pre-Revolution conversations with Libyans of all kinds, I sensed that, in all this talk of weapons of mass destruction, and foreign investment, ordinary Libyans felt they had been betrayed by perhaps the one country that had the power to save them from further decades of rule by Gaddafi(s).

 

I RETURNED TO LIBYA for the first time since the revolution, in late July 2011, almost five years to the day after my first visit to Benghazi. My colleague and I arrived on a UN transport literally hours after the assassination of rebel commander Abdelfattah Younes. One had the sense, in this highly charged atmosphere, with multiple hours-long gun battles raging across the city, that the residents of the epicenter of the Revolution were starting to feel—not for the last time—that perhaps they had miscalculated, that the forces of darkness, whether they be embodied in regime “fifth columnists,” in foreign meddling, or simply man's morbid attraction to chaos, were possibly too great to overcome. I had experienced this atmosphere of collective angst twice before—in Aden, Yemen, just before the USS
Cole
bombing, and in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1999, during an escalation of the hugely bloody Eritrean-Ethiopian war; the National Transitional Council was struggling to control renegade militias, which it feared remained loyal to Gaddafi. At the same time, the city was alive with as many opinions as weapons. People were proud of what they had accomplished and in the
sacrifice of the martyrs and the
mafqoodeen
(the missing), whose images were posted everywhere, along with the newly-revived monarchy flag. My colleagues and I witnessed a country in the throes of shedding the influence of Gaddafi and quickly remaking itself.

The book begins by looking at the historical and sociological context that produced Gaddafi in the first place, his early influences and stated aspirations, and the increasing difficulty he faced motivating a population that moved quickly from ecstasy to apathy to open hostility toward his ambitions. I then look at Gaddafi's turn to rejectionism, and decision to play spoiler to the international (and particularly Arab and Western) community, largely at the expense of the livelihood and comfort of his own people.

I explain how, for the better part of twenty years, Gaddafi became an international pariah, a status reinforced by a series of particularly heinous acts of state-sponsored terror. I describe how Gaddafi managed, for many years, to keep most of his internal and external opposition at bay, even as predominantly Eastern-based Islamists became an increasingly serious threat to the regime. I describe the odd alignment of internal and external circumstances that paved the way for a rapprochement dialogue with the West (and the US in particular). This rapprochement offered real opportunities for Libya and the US, subject to a well-structured deal, for which Libyan reform was not an afterthought. In reality, the process moved forward in an astoundingly ad hoc manner, producing a series of incompatible narratives, that, instead of saving Gaddafi and providing the US with a viable model for engagement with problem states, effectively preconditioned a very messy outcome, once the Arab Spring was under way. In the last chapters I look at how the US and the West came to intervene in the Libyan uprising on the side of the rebels, and why, and what prospects Libya has for becoming a productive, prosperous member of the international community.

CHAPTER 1

Libya's Lot

I
f asked what comes to mind when hearing the word
Libya
, most Westerners under the age of sixty would probably say “Gaddafi” and “oil.” Reminded of Alan Moorehead's reporting on the famous World War II Allied battles with Rommel's forces at El Alamein and Tubruk, older people might pull up images of a vast, dusty desert—which, in fact, Libya is.

More than 90 percent of Libya's surface area is inhospitable to agriculture and thus to human settlement. Though one of the largest countries in Africa, Libya is home to just over 6 million people. This number is miniscule when compared to neighboring Egypt (81.1 million) and Saudi Arabia (27.4 million). The vast majority live along the coast, concentrated in the two largest cities, Benghazi in the east (approximately 1 million), and Tripoli in the west (approximately 2 million). By contrast, the largest city in the south, Sebha, has a population of only 130,000. Libya is like an archipelago, with a series of population centers along the coast: roads through the southern desert are like shipping lanes, connecting the people to outlying islands in the sand, which themselves link to traditional trading and immigration routes to Sub-Saharan Africa.

The implications of Libya's geographical and demographic features, in the context of an oil state, are more profound than might first appear: water and oil were the two forces that pushed the limits and constrained what
Libya's leaders could do, respectively. The availability of water dictated overall population size, patterns of settlement, and the potential for self-sufficiency in food (and exports). A small population meant that resources could have a great impact: oil money could be spent to increase human capital through education, medical care, or social services; conversely, the money could buy control and loyalty. Gaddafi initially opted for the former, then switched gears to ensure the latter. He certainly tried to exert as much control over both water and oil as humanly possible.

Gaddafi attempted to rectify the fact that Libya has little water with a more than $33 billion project called the Great Man-Made River (GMMR), which brought water from southern underground aquifers to the north at a rate of 6.5 million cubic meters per day.
¹
Dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by Gaddafi, the GMMR was a metaphor for Gaddafi's approach to most things: grandiose, functioning for a while, but ultimately not viable. Gaddafi was so proud of this achievement—implemented by Korean firms under contract to foreign subsidiaries of the US contracting firm Kellogg Brown & Root—that he assigned to the GMMR project its own minister, Abdelmajid Al Ghoud (prime minister from 1994 to 1997). In 2004, Al Ghoud proclaimed at a conference in Tripoli that the aquifers were effectively “limitless,” while Libya's most distinguished hydrologist privately predicted the resources would be exhausted within ten years.
²
There were indications that the water was contaminated by nitrate leaching, which some speculated might contribute to Libya's anecdotally high cancer rate.

Apparently aware of the GMMR's failings, in 2005 Gaddafi requested a feasibility study for a proposal to divert water from the Ubangi River (which runs through parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and the Republic of Congo) and push it over the Tibesti Mountains along the Chad-Libya border using massive turbines. The diversion would simultaneously refill the Tazerbo and Kufra aquifers, turning swampland in the Ubangi basin (encompassing parts of the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Republic of Congo) into vast agricultural areas. All this would make Gaddafi a hero on the African continent by feeding tens of millions of central Africans.
³
The cost of the project was estimated at between $60 billion and $120 billion.
⁴
The GMMR would reveal something telling about Gaddafi, a future refrain: whatever the cost to himself, the budget, or people's lives, Gaddafi would never admit defeat and would redouble his efforts to outdo himself to make the earlier diversion seem irrelevant.

Oil, of course, played a tremendous role in Libya's development, since the discovery of commercially viable deposits in 1959. The vast majority of Libya's known oil reserves—at 47 billion barrels, the largest in Africa—are located in the Sirte Basin, a five hundred to seven hundred kilometer-wide desert depression separating eastern and western Libya, containing the oil fields Sarir, Messlah, and Bu Attifel. Oil from this region is refined at Ras Lanuf and exported from Marsa Brega, both of which became key battlefields in the 2011 revolution. Libya is rich in natural gas as well, ranked twenty-second in global reserves, with 55 trillion cubic feet in known reserves,
⁵
or 0.81 percent of the world total (compared with 8.5 percent for Qatar, which is ranked fourth).
⁶

While eastern oil dominates Libya's production and exploration, other parts of Libya also have significant resources such as the Ghadames and Murzuk basins in the country's south-southwest and in Kufra to the southeast. The offshore Bouri field, near the Libyan-Tunisian border, is one of the largest in Libya, assessed at 2 billion barrels.
⁷
The geographic distribution of resources was not fully known at the time of Gaddafi's coup, but would certainly play a subterranean role in the building of resentments in how those resources were applied and distributed.

In terms of religion and ethnicity, Libya, unlike Iraq and Syria with their patchworks of Shi'a–Sunni Muslim and sectarian divides, is quite homogenous: the people are overwhelmingly Sunni Arabs, apart from an 8 percent Berber minority (who are Ibadi Muslims, a denomination shared with the majority of Omanis). One characteristic that Libya shares with Iraq and Syria is a strong tribal tradition: by various estimates, there are more than 140 tribes in Libya. Among the major groupings are the Warfalla, Bani Walid, Obeidat, Ouled Suleiman, Zwei, Megaraha, Tarhouna. Some tribes are large—the Warfalla, number more than eight hundred thousand; others, like Gaddafi's own tribe, the Gaddafa, are quite small. As with oil and water, Gaddafi did his best both to control and to attenuate tribal allegiances.