Moammar Gadhafi got blindsided, and felled, by the Arab Spring
LIBYAN LEADER UNABLE TO WITHSTAND POWER OF ARAB SPRING
DURING THE FINAL DECADE of his 42-year reign, Col. Moammar Gadhafi was enjoying an unlikely renaissance. He had been unseated as the world’s most notorious terrorist patron by Osama bin Laden. Western corporations were lining up for access to Libya’s under-exploited reserves of oil and natural gas. He showed himself willing to make some public amends for past misdeeds. The man that Ronald Reagan once called “the mad dog of the Middle East” was well on his way to being forgiven when it all imploded in 2011.
The West had largely indulged Gadhafi’s peccadillos and provocations until Libyan agents blew up Pan Am Flight 103, killing all 270 aboard and a further 11 on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland, just before Christmas 1988 and, less than a year later, a French UTA airliner over Niger, killing 170. The United States responded with strict economic and diplomatic sanctions.
In 1999, when Gadhafi turned two intelligence officers over for trial in a Scottish court and agreed to pay compensation to victims’ families for the Lockerbie incident, restrictions were loosened. (Though Libya was held responsible by a French magistrate in the UTA case, nobody has ever been arrested.) Thus, the scramble was on for Libyan oil and gas, and Gadhafi returned to the world stage, a venue he had always relished playing.
“Western actions in Libya would never be wholly about Libya,” remarked Ethan Chorin in Exit the Colonel, his account of Gadhafi’s last years and the popular uprising that felled him.
Along came 9/11, and George W. Bush’s “with us or against us” foreign policy took shape.
As during the Cold War, when any despot professing anti-Communism could count on U.S. support (including Afghan jihadis), so could any Muslim ruler promising to stand as a bulwark against Islamic extremism in the war on terror. In exchange for commercial and diplomatic relations with the U.S., Libya offered intelligence on Islamists, accepted prisoners swept up in the CIA’s renditions and abandoned its fledgling weapons of mass destruction program. In 2006, Bush removed Libya from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Chorin had a ringside seat to developments when he arrived in Tripoli in 2004 as the economic/commercial officer at the U.S. Liaison Office, which was established as a precursor to the opening of a formal embassy. He served for two years and has continued to work on Libyan issues since, as a member of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisory group in 2008 and with a Dubai-based multinational.
“Whatever the views of those on the outside, there was never any discernible sign that Gaddafi had fundamentally changed his way of thinking,” Chorin wrote. Ultimately, that was the cause of his downfall. With the spread of the Arab Spring in 2011, the pressure for reform arose out of the disastrous situation within Libya, which was barely an afterthought to western interests.
Once his regime began to totter, Gadhafi was easy to discard on the pretext of supporting reform and the aspirations of the Arab people. When he bombed urban centres, NATO came forward to impose a no-fly zone to the advantage of rebel forces. Gadhafi wasn’t, like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, whom the Obama government was hesitant to abandon, a dependable ally over decades. Nor did Libya occupy a geopolitically sensitive position, as does Syria, where the West continues to resist intervention despite that government’s aggressive campaign against civilians.
Exit the Colonel is a timely, if rushed, affair. It includes details from as recently as this past summer, which proves just how quickly a publisher is able to get a book into print. However, it would have benefited from a more careful editorial eye to clear up some incomprehensibly structured sentences and glaring typos.
Chorin’s coverage of Gadhafi’s fall has more substance than his speculations about the regime that is emerging in his wake. He sometimes overreaches as he tries to grasp a highly fluid situation. The Libyan incarnation of the Arab Spring remains highly volatile, with dissatisfaction and optimism both running high.
It would be easy to conclude that the new leaders wouldn’t have to do much to be an improvement, but those who assumed the risk of rising up are expecting a lot. The trouble is that the Arab Spring remains unfinished and any analysis depends on a broader consideration of historical forces than is presented here.
For me, it is Gadhafi’s erstwhile rehabilitation that is the most intriguing part of the book. It would have benefited had Chorin drawn more insights from his own diplomatic experience. The short-sighted selfinterest (do the two necessarily go together? but I digress) of U.S., British, French, Italian, and German leaders is something to wonder at. The very real prospect that Gadhafi’s rule could have become dynastic, with the succession of his son, was only forestalled by the homegrown opposition. In that, maybe the West was saved from its own worst instincts and practices.