Exit the Colonel (4 page)

Geography, resources, population, and tribalism defined Libya's position vis-à-vis the outside world for centuries. Without water and before the discovery (and use) of oil in commercial quantities, Libya was too weak to resist external invasions. Tribal and regional fissures made it difficult for Libya to effectively respond to the invaders, though the regional tribal bond, combined with rough terrain in the east, facilitated the rebel movement so influential in fighting off the Italians. The discovery of oil in commercial
quantities in 1959 caused tremendous social dislocation, as the rural poor flocked to the cities in search of work, and encouraged a culture of corruption. These events were directly implicated in the rise of Gaddafi, as well as his demise.

The physical area currently known as Libya was, like much of the rest of the Middle East, a product of Ottoman Turkish empire building and the subsequent scramble by the West to pick up the pieces after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. The rough delineation of three Libyan provinces, Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan, dates from this period. Overall, a steady stream of invaders, each staying for a while, attempted to expand their influence over the coast and, to a lesser extent, the interior, until a combination of local opposition and/or outside aggression pushed them out. Not until independence in 1951 were Cyrenaica, Tripolitania, and Fezzan formally integrated into a single, independent but federated state. Libya played an important role in the history of trade and religion in Saharan and sub-Saharan (Sahelian) Africa and the Mediterranean.

Pre-Islam, the region was the location of several flourishing Greek and Roman settlements. Parts of Libya served as granaries for the Roman empire, as they would for fascist Italy thousands of years later. Writing in the fifth century BC, Herodotus referred to Libyans as “those to the West of Egypt.” Ethnic groupings in Libya at that time included the Nasamons in the east to the Gulf of Sirte, the Maces of the gulf to what is today Jebel Nafusa, and the Lotophages (the lotus eaters of Homer's
Odyssey
) on the coast.
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The Phoenicians and Greeks mounted the first organized, external settlement of coastal Libya in the seventh to sixth centuries BC. Traders from the eastern Mediterranean first set up seasonal settlements and then more permanent ones along the west coast, all of which were overseen from Carthage, in present-day Tunisia. The Greeks, straying in from the island of Crete some two hundred miles across the sea to the north, established a permanent outpost at Cyrene in 631 BC.
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The two areas, east and west, came under the same rule for the first time under the Romans.

Byzantine invasions in the middle of the sixth century scattered a few relatively short-lived Christian settlements, before Arab invaders arrived in
Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) from Egypt in 642, under the command of the original Saif Al Islam (literally, Sword of Islam, or divinely-sanctioned conqueror) Amr ibn al As. Inspired by the expansionist ethos of their new religion, Islam, the Arabs made reasonably quick work of the Byzantines, though it took them more than two centuries to pacify the local nomadic-pastoral Berber population, which, according to the great fourteen-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, refused them “more than a hundred times,” before finally submitting to their rule.
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The Berbers had built up the all-important trans-Saharan trade over the previous two hundred years.
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While part of that trade consisted of legitimate barter, they also made fortunes in the trade in people: historians estimate that over the course of a thousand years, millions of sub-Saharan Africans—most of them women—were transported along these routes and exported to the north and east. The slave trade, which wound down only in the late nineteenth century, conditioned or at least affected in various ways Libya's modern relationship with the rest of Africa, and helped perpetuate links between the northern and southern parts of the country.

Not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did trans-Saharan trade really take off, in no small part due to the expansion of the Senussi order, a puritanical Islamic brotherhood founded by Sayyid Mohammed ibn Ali El Senussi, born in 1787 in Mustaganem, in present-day Algeria. The Senussi order contributed substantially to the stability and connectivity of large portions of present-day Libya by moderating the behavior of the wild tribes, including the Zwei, whose predations made southern routes off-limits to regular trade. Senussi teachings promoted education as a core value and contributed to cross-tribal solidarity, as their lodges
zawaya
(plural of
zawiya
) were intimately interwoven into the tribal leadership structure.
¹²

While fundamentalist, in the sense that it advocated a return to the founding principles of Islam, after centuries of “innovations,” the Senussi order was never fanatical, in the manner of the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. The Senussi, like other mystical and quasi-mystical Islamic movements, stressed the notion of going beyond the actual words of the Koran to discover the subtext or revealed meaning. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw a direct connection between the past and continued influence of the Senussi—significantly weakened today—and some form of native immunity or resistance to jihadist ideologies, it is fair to say that the overall tradition in Libya did not welcome extremism, let alone movements that advocated violence against those professing alternate ideologies.

The Ottoman Empire first took interest in Libya in the early 1500s, when an Ottoman Sultan sent a contingent of troops to occupy eastern Libya and Tripoli, largely to keep an option on the region and ward off European powers starting to stake claims in the southern Mediterranean. It was not until the Karamanli dynasty (1711–1835) that the Turks took a more active interest in Libya. Even so, this was empire-by-correspondence. The Karamalis were small-time warlords who paid tribute to the sultan in Istanbul and conducted their affairs as they wished.

Much of the West's—and particularly the United States'—early relationships with the Libyan territories date to the late 1700s, and early 1800s, as immortalized in a phrase from the US Marine' Hymn, “From the Halls of Montezuma, to the Shores of Tripoli.”

The Karamanli period overlapped the American struggle for independence and, subsequently, the first American commercial forays into the Mediterranean. European powers had been accustomed to maritime piracy by the North African emirates for years and pursued a dual (and highly ineffective) strategy of combining naval convoys with regular cash payments to protect their commercial ships from North African plundering. Rather than deal with the issue directly, militarily or otherwise, Britain and France chose largely to ignore the problem. One historian notes that “[h]ad London and Paris wished, their warships could have blown the pirate fleets out of the sea and bombarded the capitals of Barbary. But they refrained, in part because it was easier and cheaper to pay tribute.”
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Under President John Adams, the United States followed the same policy, more by necessity than choice. By 1797, the United States had paid out more than $1,150,000 in bribes to the ruler of Algiers, and US envoy Joel Barlow believed, mistakenly, that he had “bought” peace with Tripoli the same year for the sum of $56,486.
¹⁴

When Yusuf Karamanli discovered the discrepancy between what he was receiving from the Americans and what they were paying to the North African emirates, he swiftly abrogated the previous arrangement, demanding a fixed payment of $250,000 with a $20,000 annuity—the former paid within six months—or he would declare war against the United States.
¹⁵
While Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution gave Congress alone the power to declare war, the United States was not willing to rise to Karamanli's
bait, largely due to concerns about the budget. Adams's successor, Thomas Jefferson, sent four ships to blockade Tripoli's port, but under closely circumscribed rules of engagement:

Jefferson's early preference was for a negotiated solution.
¹⁷
As the seriousness of the situation sank in, Congress chose to amend the Tripoli mandate to include the protection of American shipping using “all necessary means,” thereby freeing the navy's hand considerably.
¹⁸
This would not be the last time Congress would object to presidential action in Libya on the basis of cost and the fear of resulting “quagmire.”

The tenor of US-Libya relations changed drastically in 1803, once Pasha Yusuf Karamanli managed to capture one of the American frigates, the USS
Philadelphia
, with its contingent of 307 officers and crew, after it hit a reef while trying to enforce the blockade.
¹⁹
Further empowered, Karamanli issued brazen demands that led the Americans to think they might need a more proactive approach, including a seemingly bizarre plan hatched by General William Eaton, a New England military strategist with an unusual determination to learn Arabic and a premonition that he would die young.
²⁰
In 1797, after pulling off an intelligence coup against the Spanish forces in New Orleans at the behest of then President John Adams (in office 1791–1801), Eaton had had his pick of assignments and opted to be US Consul General, based in Tunis.

In the context of growing concerns about the Barbary pirates—Karamanli in particular—Eaton described his plan to Jefferson's Secretary of State James Madison: Eaton would march six hundred miles from Alexandria, Egypt, to Derna in eastern Libya with a small contingent of American troops, defeat the local governor, and then put the “kindler, gentler” brother, Ahmed Karamanli, at the head of a large group of rebels, which would carry him to Tripoli. Channeling the ideas of professor Bernard Lewis and Paul Wolfowitz (two of the “neocon” idealogues associated with the Iraq invasion of 2003) two centuries later, Eaton would declare with conviction that “the defeat of one Barbary state in armed conflict would cause the others to behave more circumspectly.”
²¹

Eaton successfully took Derna in 1805 with barely a hundred American marines and sailors. In short order, he became the de facto governor of the eastern province, which according to his plan would serve as a platform for raising a local army to march on Tripoli, nominally under Ahmed Karamanli's command. Eaton was counting on starting a revolution against Yusuf Karamanli in Cyrenaica.
²²
In fact,

Madison's endorsement of Eaton's plan created two very interesting precedents—both demonstrated during the 2011 revolution—for future US military action not only in Libya, but globally: a president “engaging in hostilities abroad without a formal declaration of war,” and attempted regime change in the name of a “just war.”
²⁴
Eaton felt that the stronger a US reaction, the more likely it was Yusuf Karamanli might be coaxed into voluntary exile. Local populations in the west, however—as they would do in many future conflicts—waited to see which way the winds were blowing before they committed to one side or other. As Eaton paused before implementing the final stage of his daring plan, senior navy and consular officials (led by Tobias Lear, principal Consul General of the United States to the Barbary nations of North Africa) negotiated a backdoor deal, paying $60,000 to Yusuf Karamanli to end hostilities against the United States.
²⁵
This capitulation would, in a way, set the tone for future US and Western dealings with Libya.

Constantinople became increasingly concerned with the notoriety of the Karamanli warlords and the West's expansion into North Africa, and reoccupied Libya in 1835, determined to exercise greater military and financial control.
²⁶
Direct Ottoman control provoked violent resistance from the larger tribal groupings, particularly the Ouled Suleiman in the Fezzan and Berber strongholds in the Jebel Nafusa. It took the Turks decades to pacify these regions, as it would the Italians after them.

By the late 1880s, with France having already grabbed most of Algeria and Tunisia, and Great Britain well ensconced in Sudan and Egypt, Libya was the only North African claim open to the Italians, who in any case had
been trading regularly with the Ottoman territories for the better part of a century.
²⁷
As the Ottoman Empire began to disintegrate rapidly during the Young Turk revolution in 1908 and the deposition of Sultan Hamid, Libyans began to despair that the Turks would not be able to save them from an Italian assault.
²⁸
The Turks had given the Libyans a rudimentary administrative structure and had established the first inkling of unity across the territories that would become Libya. It was, however, too little, too late.

In the early 1900s, Italy, revisiting millennia-old aspirations, began to see Libya as a potential solution to its demographic and economic problems. Italian companies had spent much of the late 1800s priming the pump, so to speak, through the establishment in Libya of branches of Italian banks, Italian cultural centers, and so on. Libya thus became the object of an Italian version of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis in the United States. By creating new opportunities and lives for themselves, Italian colonists would reinvigorate a lagging economy at home while fortifying their international prestige. The formal Italian colonization started in 1911. By 1913, various coastal settlements had been established in the provinces of both Tripolitania (the west) and Cyrenaica (the east).