IT WAS AROUND this time that Majdi el-Mangoush joined onlookers on a sidewalk in his hometown, Misurata, to witness an incredible sight.
Along Tripoli Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares, a municipal work crew with a cherry picker was methodically taking down the posters of Muammar el-Qaddafi that hung from every lamppost.
It was part of an attempt by the Libyan dictator to put a kinder, gentler face on his government. While ostensibly directed at the Libyan people, the campaign was really meant for Western consumption.
In the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq, there had been talk in President George W. Bush’s administration that once Saddam Hussein was dispatched, Qaddafi would be next on the American chopping block. Once that invasion got under way in March 2003, the Libyan dictator hurried to make nice with the Americans. Toward closing off two long-standing points of contention with Washington, he offered a settlement over his country’s role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland—without explicitly admitting guilt, the Libyan government agreed to set aside $2.7 billion in compensation to the families of the 270 victims—and began quietly dismantling his nation’s fledgling program for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Even more quietly, Libyan intelligence agents shared dossiers with their American counterparts on suspected Al Qaeda operatives and other Islamic fundamentalists in the region. Extending this rehabilitation campaign to the home front, the goal was to create at least the illusion of political liberalization, and one aspect was to remove some of the tens of thousands of posters and billboards of “the Leader” that wallpapered the nation.
But Qaddafi soon thought better of the whole egalitarian makeover, especially once the United States restored full diplomatic relations with his government in 2006. While officially a response to the abandonment of the Libyan unconventional-weapons program, certainly a contributing factor to this détente was a recognition that, amid the deepening quagmire of the Iraqi misadventure, there was not going to be any grand American crusade against the region’s other dictators—which also meant that Qaddafi could abandon the trappings of domestic reform. “It was just a bit of theater,” Majdi said. “Nothing really changed, and after a few months, I don’t think anyone even remembered it.”
But that day hadn’t yet arrived when the cherry picker made its way down Misurata’s Tripoli Street. Majdi was still observing the spectacle when an elderly man emerged from a nearby alley.
For a long moment, the old man stared slack jawed in amazement at the sight before him. He then rushed over to one of the discarded posters, removed a shoe, and—in a gesture of insult common throughout the Arab world—began beating it against Qaddafi’s likeness amid a torrent of curses.
A municipal worker came over to ask what he was doing.
“The bastard’s gone at last, no?” the old man asked. “There’s been a coup?”
When the worker set him straight, the man stammered out an explanation for his behavior—he’d been very ill lately, given to fits of lunacy—and then hurried away.