I first visited Libya in 1977, and over the next few years I enjoyed opportunities to travel through much of the country. At the time, only a handful of books were available in English on this North African state. To better understand the environment in which I was living and working, I began to conduct my own primary and secondary research, an effort that later led to the publication of three books and two dozen articles. Over the last few decades, the number of publications available on Libya has increased a hundredfold, but most of them focus on the Qaddafi era, paying little or no attention to the years preceding the 1969 revolution. This is unfortunate because a thorough understanding of the policies pursued by Libya, the Western powers, and the Arab states before the revolution is essential to an understanding of the direction Libya moved after 1969.
The purpose of this book is to show, within the framework of a conventional historical narrative, the experience and interaction of the governments and peoples of Libya and the United States over the last two centuries. I have drawn on a wide range of material, much of it new or unfamiliar, in an effort to convey to the fullest extent the depth, breadth, and complexity of this bilateral relationship. In particular, I have consulted all the published diplomatic correspondence between Libya and the United States in the modern era as well as a wide range of recently declassified documents.
I owe special thanks to numerous Libyan and non-Libyan friends and acquaintances who have facilitated access to materials and information in many different ways. The library staffs at Bradley University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Knox College have been especially generous of their time and talent over a prolonged period. I would also like to acknowledge a few individuals whose inspiration, counsel, or scholarship have made important contributions to this work. They include Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, Tony Allan, Lisa Anderson, Mary-Jane Deeb, Mansour O. El-Kikhia, Kola Folayan, René Lemarchand, Dirk Vandewalle, and John Wright.
In addition, I want to acknowledge several individuals who were kind enough to read and comment on earlier drafts of the present work. They include Tony Allan, Massimiliano Cricco, William L. Eagleton, Jr., Oliver Miles, Tim Niblock, J. Peter Tripp, and Dirk Vandewalle. I also want to thank Clive Schofield at the International Boundaries Research Unit for the map of Libya. Finally, I would like to thank my wife and two sons for the support they have given me. A work of this order requires an enormous amount of time and energy, much of which would otherwise have been devoted to them. For this reason, I gratefully dedicate this volume to my loving wife, Carol.
Needless to say, none of the above institutions or individuals bears any responsibility for errors of omission or inaccuracies found in the present work. I have aspired to the traditional principles of sound scholarship, which include clarity, accuracy, completeness, and adequate documentation. I ask the reader to judge it on the basis of these criteria.