The United States is an important state in this world, and we can only seek to establish the best of relations with it in the framework of respect and mutual interests.
—UN Ambassador Ibrahim al-Bishari, 1993
We have called them the “rogue states” at certain stages, but basically what they are are states that feel that they not only have no stake in the system but, on the contrary, that their very being revolves around the fact that they want to undo the system, literally throw hand grenades into it to destroy it.
—Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, 1998
The 1980s closed with the victory of capitalist democracy over Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War. In the words of the historian Michael S. Sherry, “Those victories proved short-lived, unsatisfying, or contested, however—sufficient to shake the old order but not to define a new one.” Abroad, Americans still faced an “untidy world which provided only flickering points of reference.” At home, “they saw war’s passions surging . . . but there too the reference points were unstable.”1 President George Bush had spent a lifetime preparing to be America’s commander in chief in the Cold War, but he lacked the temperament and training to redefine his role and the conduct of the nation under changed circumstances. The desire and capacity of the Clinton administration to develop fresh doctrines and to move American foreign policy into unchartered waters was equally uncertain from the outset. The George W. Bush administration, on the other hand, offered some promise in its early days for improvement in American-Libyan relations. Qaddafi had greeted the advent of the first Bush presidency with cautious optimism in the erroneous belief that a new administration offered an opportunity for better relations between Libya and the United States. In a press conference in Tripoli in early January 1989, Qaddafi invited the incoming Bush administration to conduct talks aimed at resolving the issues that had dogged American-Libyan relations for many years. In his statement, the Libyan leader said he was willing to engage in disarmament negotiations and favored the inspection of weapons factories as long as all countries, including Israel and the United States, accepted the same conditions:
America must start by closing down the factories for atomic bombs, chemical bombs and napalm bombs which it has and end the Star Wars program.
Everyone must agree to abolish weapons and that peace should reign between people. Otherwise it’s just confrontation.
Everyone in the world has come to hate America, especially in the last eight years and American policy has suffered.
America must reform its policy and clean up its ruined image as much as possible in the era of the new Bush administration.2
In a conciliatory gesture, the Libyan government on 13 January 1989 returned to representatives of the Vatican the body of a U.S. airman shot down during the American raid in April 1986. Later in the month, Qaddafi indicated in a press interview that he was willing to discuss American-Libyan relations in official talks with the Bush administration and to work toward the release of American hostages held in Lebanon. Finally, Libyan Foreign Minister Jadallah Azzuz al-Talhi stated in October 1989 that Libya desired normal relations with the United States as long as they were based on mutual respect and without conditions on the American side.3
Even as Qaddafi talked of dialogue and reconciliation, the new administration in Washington moved to expand the policy of diplomatic and economic isolation put in place by its predecessor. Convinced that Libya remained a principal supporter of global terrorism, the Bush administration pressured Tripoli on the issue of chemical weapons development even as it maintained and expanded the U.S. sanctions regime already in place. Later, it orchestrated a UN Security Council resolution imposing an embargo on Libya. President Bush also supported a covert policy to provide military aid and training to several hundred former Libyan soldiers. Set in motion during the final months of the Reagan administration, this covert operation hoped to use Libyan volunteers captured during the 1988 border fighting between Libya and Chad to destabilize the Qaddafi government.4
At the same time, the Bush administration perpetuated the bifurcated policy of the Reagan government in which U.S. oil companies honored the sanctions regime yet continued their contacts with the National Oil Company of Libya. Both presidents justified the policy on the grounds that forcing U.S. companies to abandon their operations in Libya completely would result in substantial windfall profits for the Qaddafi regime. Outside observers in Europe and elsewhere took a less charitable view. They noted that U.S. policy toward Libya, despite the bombast and rhetoric, seemed inconsistent and perhaps more reflective of powerful lobbyists and American national interests than of a determined effort to punish Libya for its alleged support of terrorism.5
Prior to the decade of the 1980s, concepts and terms related to rogue or pariah states, backlash or maverick regimes, or nuclear outlaws were not in common use in academic or policy making circles. To the extent that such terms were applied, it was generally in the context of a few states, like Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Idi Amin’s Uganda, whose conduct was widely considered to be totally outside the pale of acceptable behavior. The immediate origins of what later became known as the Rogue Doctrine can be traced to the inauguration by the Department of State of its annual list of countries supporting terrorism, a listing mandated by the Export Administration Act of 1979. Regular issuance of this report during the Reagan administration focused increasing attention on the question of state-sponsored terrorism. In 1985, for example, President Reagan referred to Cuba, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, and North Korea as outlaw governments that sponsored international terrorism against the United States. Secretary of State Shultz throughout the Reagan era made the issue of state-sponsored terrorism a recurrent theme in his public diplomacy.6
By the end of the decade, U.S. policy makers were linking the issues of state-sponsored terrorism and weapons of mass destruction to selected Third World states. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative Washington-based think tank, issued a report in 1988 entitled Meeting the Mavericks: Regional Challenges for the Next President, which warned that a new class of Third World states, armed with modern weapons and hegemonic tendencies, could be expected to create new dilemmas for U.S. foreign policy. A few months later, in early 1989, Secretary of State-designate James Baker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that chemical weapons and ballistic missiles were already in the hands of governments with a proven record of aggression and terrorism.7
With the Soviet Union in irreversible decline and no equivalent adversary in sight, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were faced in 1989 with the difficult task of defining a new security policy that would maintain U.S. defense spending at near-Cold War levels until a credible threat appeared on the horizon. At the time, many congressional leaders were talking about the “peace dividend,” generally defined as a significant reduction in military strength and expenditure, sure to follow the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Responding to the challenge, General Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, initiated a search in late 1989 for a post-Cold War military doctrine that would justify the maintenance of superpower military capabilities in a world in which the United States was the only superpower.8
On 15 November 1989, General Powell presented his initial thoughts to President Bush. Given the diminished threat from the Soviet Union, Powell argued that the focus of American strategy should shift from a global war with the Soviets to regional responses to non-Soviet threats. Advancing a “base force” concept consisting of 1.6 million active-duty personnel, sixteen active Air Force tactical fighter wings, and 450 warships, he contended that the United States should retain sufficient military strength simultaneously to fight and win two regional conflicts. While Powell did not advance the rogue state concept or any comparable expression in this outline presentation, the central elements of an anti-rogue posture were present in the November briefing. In the next several months, Pentagon officials talked increasingly of the threat posed by aggressive, well-armed Third World states. Eight months later, General Powell and his staff presented a fully developed base force concept to President Bush and Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. The President formally approved the plan and instructed aides to prepare a speech outlining its essential parameters.9
Bush took advantage of a scheduled appearance at the Aspen Institute on 2 August 1990 to deliver an address introducing the new strategic doctrine. Reiterating the arguments developed by Powell and his associates, the president argued that the future size of American forces, in a world less driven by an immediate threat to Europe or a global conflict, would be shaped increasingly by the threat of regional conflict. Given this new challenge, the United States had to maintain the forces necessary to respond to such threats wherever they might appear around the world:
The changes that I’m talking about have transformed our security environment. We’re entering a new era: the defense strategy and military structure needed to ensure peace can and must be different. The threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe launched with little or no warning is today more remote than at any other point in the postwar period. And with the emergence of democracy in Eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact has lost its military meaning. And after more than four decades of dominance, Soviet troops are withdrawing from Central and Eastern Europe.
Our task today is to shape our defense capabilities to these changing strategic circumstances. In a world less driven by an immediate threat to Europe and the danger of global war, in a world where the size of our forces will increasingly be shaped by the needs of regional contingencies and peacetime presence, we know that our forces can be smaller. . . .
What matters now, then, is how we reshape the forces that remain.10
President Bush’s remarks in Aspen drew far more attention than otherwise might have been the case because they were delivered a few hours after Iraqi forces began pouring into Kuwait:
Outside of Europe, America must possess forces able to respond to threats in whatever corner of the globe they may occur. Even in a world where democracy and freedom have made great gains, threats remain. Terrorism, hostagetaking, renegade regimes and unpredictable rulers, new sources of instability—all require a strong and an engaged America.
The brutal aggression launched last night against Kuwait illustrates my central thesis: Notwithstanding the alteration in the Soviet threat, the world remains a dangerous place with serious threats to important U.S. interests wholly unrelated to the earlier patterns of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. These threats, as we have seen just in the last 24 hours, can arise suddenly, unpredictably, and from unexpected quarters.
In spite of our best efforts to control the spread of chemical and nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technologies, more nations—more, not less—are acquiring weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. Right now, twenty countries have the capacity to produce chemical weapons. And by the year 2000, as many as fifteen developing nations could have their own ballistic missiles. In the future, even conflicts we once thought of as limited or local may carry farreaching consequences.11
Because he referred to the Kuwait situation in his Colorado address, many commentators viewed the speech as a spontaneous response to the Iraqi invasion. On the contrary, the regional strategy incorporated in what became known as the Rogue Doctrine was a response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and not to the more recent Iraqi aggression of August 1990. Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, most members of Congress soon discontinued discussion of a “peace dividend” and abandoned any serious plan for a significant reduction in military expenditure. The sustained effort of the Bush administration after 1989 to reorient American defense policy from global containment to regionalism eventually culminated in the publication of Secretary of Defense Cheney’s Regional Defense Strategy in January 1993.12
Conceived initially as an interim measure, a means to justify defense spending at near-Cold War levels pending the appearance of a more credible threat, the Rogue Doctrine became the defining paradigm for American security policy for the remainder of the decade. As Army Chief of Staff General Carl E. Vuono later put it, “the second of August 1990 will be remembered for generations to come as a turning point for the United States in its conduct of foreign affairs—the day America announced the end of containment and embarked upon the strategy of power projection.”13 As such, the Rogue Doctrine had a significant influence on American foreign policy toward those governments defined by Washington as rogue states, most especially Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. Michael T. Klare in a succinct and perceptive analysis later explained why the doctrine eventually became, and continues to be, popular in Washington.
The Rogue Doctrine remains popular in Washington because it points to a clearly identifiable set of enemies—no easy feat in this time of ambiguous threats and shifting loyalties—and because it can be used to justify the preservation of the existing military establishment, which no one in authority would like to alter. In addition, special interests, including the military think tanks and organizations, the manufacturers of high-tech weaponry, and so on, share a common interest in maintaining the status quo. So entrenched has this strategy become that none of its proponents feel the need to subject it to any sort of systematic reassessment based on a considered analysis of the existing world security environment; instead, the Doctrine is treated as unshakable wisdom, sufficient onto itself.14
Despite the durability of the Rogue Doctrine and the prominence of rogue rhetoric in the American political system, little real consensus developed as to the essential characteristics of a rogue state. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, in an address at Howard University in April 1998, described rogue states as a major policy challenge because their sole purpose was to destroy the system. More to the point, she argued that rogue states constituted one of four distinct categories of post-Cold War countries, the other three being advanced industrial states, societies in transition, and “basket cases” or failed states. Other Clinton administration officials promoted related efforts at classification, but they were unable to develop consensus inside or outside the U.S. government as to required policy objectives, appropriate strategies, or acceptable policy instruments in regard to the so-called rogue states. On the contrary, as Robert S. Litwak rightly concluded, “the rogue state designation—that is demonizing a disparate group of states” distorted policy-making and perpetuated “the false dichotomy” that established “containment and engagement as mutually exclusive strategies.”15
This failure to build consensus on the concept of rogue states as a distinct class of nations in the post-Cold War international system was not surprising. The designation from the beginning remained useful primarily as a tool to win domestic political support for punitive action, as opposed to being a rational path for sound policy development. In effect, Washington took a disparate group of states and demonized them for purposes of political mobilization. An official of the Clinton administration, according to Litwak, “conceded that unless the United States appears ‘completely maniacal’ about Iran and the other rogue states in multilateral forums, such as the G-8, the Europeans and Japanese will take no meaningful actions to address behavior of concern.” As a result, where the Clinton administration talked of a differentiated policy toward rogue states, in practice the political dynamic “pushed it toward a one-size-fits-all strategy of containment and isolation.”16 The governments of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea were most commonly associated with the term “rogue state,” but occasionally Cuba was added to the list. Washington typically accused the rogue states of four wrongdoings: development of weapons of mass destruction, support for international terrorism, domestic human rights violations, and overt animosity toward the United States. This package of real or alleged transgressions proved a near perfect fit for Libyan foreign policy throughout most of the decade.17
On the issue of chemical weapons production, the Libyan government responded to pressure from the Reagan administration with an aggressive diplomatic initiative in 1988–89 that linked the question of chemical weapons development in the Third World to known stockpiles of similar weapons by several major powers. Although it refused to acknowledge the development of such weapons and continued to refer to the facility at Rabta as a pharmaceutical plant, the Qaddafi regime pointed out that there were no international instruments in existence that prohibited their development and that Libya deserved to be treated like any other member of the international system. As long as other nations possessed chemical weapons, together with the more dangerous nuclear weapons, Libyan spokesmen argued, Libya should have the right to consider such weapons as part of its military arsenal. Finally, Libya linked its anti-Israel policy to the issue of chemical and nuclear weapons in a position credible within the context of contemporary Arab politics. A representative example of the Libyan argument was found in a January 1989 statement by Foreign Minister Jadallah Azzuz al-Talhi:
The United States knows very well where the chemical and nuclear weapons are in the Middle East. The United States knows that the Zionist state is an arsenal of chemical and nuclear weapons, yet has not raised a single question about it. Furthermore, is it not Washington which gives Israel the aid and the capabilities needed for producing such weapons and is it not the Zionist state which, with U.S. backing and knowledge, refuses to abide by the international laws and treaties concluded in connection with these types of weapons?
The whole world knows that Washington is the party which aids and supports Israel so that it can produce and develop nuclear, chemical, and bacteriological weapons and that there is a U.S.-Israeli military treaty under which the enemy state’s capabilities in this connection are developed. We therefore urge the world public to ask the United States the meaning of its artificial uproar against us.18
The U.S. government in fall 1988 called for an international conference to address questions related to the development and use of chemical weapons especially in the Middle East. While a variety of states including France and the Soviet Union supported the initiative, most Middle Eastern governments were not enthusiastic, arguing that the issue was global in scope and not limited to a single region. French President Mitterrand agreed to host the meeting, and the Paris Chemical Weapons Conference opened in early January 1989. Representatives of 149 nations, including Libya, attended the week-long conference, which unanimously approved an innocuous document as a final declaration. Most observers agreed with Thomas C. Wiegele, an American expert on the development of chemical weapons in Libya, that the results of the meeting were underwhelming:
If the United States conceived of the conference as a mechanism to alert the world to general problems of chemical weaponry, the conference was probably a success. If, however, the aim of the conference was to put pressure on Libya to halt its activities at Rabta, the conference must be considered something short of successful.19
At the same time, the Paris gathering reportedly crystallized Arab reluctance to forgo chemical arsenals as a counterbalance to the nuclear weapons believed to be stockpiled by Israel. The Arab position, toned down in the interests of a unanimous communiqué, emerged as a real concern for Washington policy makers, given the combination of ballistic missiles and chemical weapons potentially available to a growing number of Arab states.20
American concern with the weapons delivery systems available to Qaddafi heightened in the immediate aftermath of the Paris conference, when reports of a pending sale of Soviet long-range bombers to Libya first surfaced. The Soviet deal, which reportedly involved the delivery of as many as fifteen Sukhoi-24D fighter-bombers, together with refueling capability, would greatly increase Libyan capacity to attack the state of Israel. Around the same time, Libya reportedly concluded a $250 million arms deal with Sudan that involved aircraft, tanks, artillery, and trucks. Collectively, these initiatives reinforced the Bush administration’s determination to thwart what it viewed as the terrorist policies of the Libyan government. Consequently, the subsequent efforts of the Qaddafi regime in summer 1989 to woo the Bush administration fell on deaf ears.21
In the wake of the German government’s admission in 1989 that several German companies had been involved in the Rabta project, the issue of chemical weapons development in Libya lay dormant for almost a year until reports surfaced in early 1990 of new activities at Rabta. Once more employing the New York Times as a medium of communication, the U.S. government released information from a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report suggesting that Libya had begun production of limited quantities of mustard gas and aimed to reach full-scale production as soon as possible. The same report suggested that small quantities of the highly toxic nerve agent Sarin were also being manufactured at Rabta. The DIA study estimated that thirty tons of mustard gas had been produced in 1989, and that an expansion to the Rabta facility had been completed which would enable the mustard gas to be loaded into plastic containers. Consistent with the policy of the Reagan administration, President Bush called on the world community to support vigorous efforts to stop the manufacturing operations at Rabta. The White House also highlighted the secondary danger that the chemical weapons produced at Rabta might find their way into terrorist hands, and, like Reagan, Bush refused to rule out the possibility of a military attack if the operations in Libya did not cease.22
The U.S. government in mid-March 1990 revealed that the Rabta complex appeared to have been damaged by a massive fire, an announcement that pleased many in Washington as well as in the international community. When the Libyan press agency, JANA, later confirmed this report, it blamed Israel, the United States, and West Germany for the incendiary act. Other sources attributed the fire to a variety of terrorist organizations with at least one Libyan dissident group claiming responsibility for the incident. With independent verification impossible, early assessments of the damage at Rabta varied from minor to very extensive. Officials in the Bush administration initially suggested that the fire had rendered the plant inoperable but soon revised their estimates to suggest the plant was not seriously damaged and that the entire incident might have been a hoax. President Bush, on 19 March 1990, told an audience on National Public Radio, “I am absolutely convinced that the plant was manufacturing bad chemicals, chemicals that would be used for killing people, chemicals that would be used for chemical warfare. And therefore I don’t lament what happened, but I can’t tell you I know the cause of it”.23 In response to the fire, the Libyan government detained several people, indicating it planned to execute those responsible on the spot where the fire occurred. In addition to denouncing the United States for what it termed “an aggressive campaign of American imperialism,” Tripoli also suspended currency transfers to West Germany on the grounds that West German agents might be responsible for the sabotage. The French government, on the other hand, chose this moment to supply three Mirage fighter planes to Libya, an action long opposed by the United States because of Libya’s alleged support for terrorism and its armed intervention in Chad.24
U.S. intelligence sources later confirmed that the reported fire at the Rabta complex was a hoax, the precise objective of which was never clear. Spy satellite photographs ordered by the Pentagon showed burn marks had been painted on the buildings in an elaborate deception. The available evidence suggested that the Libyans had started a controlled fire, exaggerated its consequences, and later painted portions of the facility to simulate fire damage. After the deception fire, activity at Rabta slowed, possibly in an effort to add credibility to Tripoli’s claim that a massive fire had rendered the plant inoperable. Qaddafi did not announce the reopening of the Rabta plant until shortly after Operation Desert Storm. Observers speculated at the time that Qaddafi appeared to think the distraction offered by the withdrawal of coalition forces from Iraq offered him an opportunity to engage in more controversial policies.25
Even though the reported fire did little or no damage, the exact nature and scope of chemical weapons activities at Rabta remained unclear. In any case, the lack of concrete evidence that Libya was actually producing mustard and nerve gas at Rabta did not prevent the Bush administration from charging in mid-1990 that China might be selling Libya the chemicals needed to make chemical weapons. Beijing emphatically denied it was helping Libya or any other state to develop chemical weapons and reiterated its policy in favor of a comprehensive prohibition and complete destruction of chemical weapons. Washington later reported that it had received assurances from China that it would not sell chemicals for weapons to Libya. A West German businessman and former executive at Imhausen-Chemie pleaded guilty in mid-June 1990 to a charge of secretly assisting Libya to construct the chemical factory at Rabta and confirmed that the plant was build to manufacture poison gas. The Bush administration, one week later, suggested that Libya might be building a second chemical weapons factory at a remote underground location several hundred miles south of Tripoli in an effort to disperse its overall production capability.26
The alleged fire at the Rabta complex defused temporarily the chemical weapons issue; however, the Bush administration by 1991 was again charging that Libya was producing poison gas at Rabta. Washington also suggested that the Qaddafi regime was widening its chemical weapons program and increasing its capacity to manufacture such weapons. The Bush administration in January 1992 cited new evidence that Libya was expanding its chemical weapons program and dispersing chemical stockpiles to avoid detection. American officials suggested the stockpiles were being dispersed out of fear of possible U.S. airstrikes and in preparation for a much-touted international inspection of the Rabta facility. Libya in early 1993 denied subsequent American charges that it was constructing a chemical weapons plant outside Tripoli and invited a neutral international group to inspect the construction site in question. Later in the year, the United States warned its Asian ally Thailand that Thai contractors appeared to be the major companies involved in the construction of chemical weapons plants in Libya. When Bangkok moved to investigate U.S. charges of Thai involvement, the Libyan government, in retaliation, ordered the expulsion of several thousand Thai workers. Libya later pledged, during a visit of the Thai deputy foreign minister to Tripoli, to stop discriminating against Thai workers.27
With the Rabta controversy at its height in the spring of 1990, reports surfaced in the world press indicating that the former communist government of Czechoslovakia had shipped 1,000 tons of Semtex explosive to Libya in the 1980s where it was later distributed to terrorist organizations. The substance, manufactured in Czechoslovakia, was described as a pliable, odorless, and high-yield explosive; and some experts suggested, without providing substantive detail, that 1,000 tons would supply the world’s terrorists for 150 years. The former communist government had said earlier that it stopped exporting Semtex in 1982, but news reports suggested it had continued to make deliveries to East Germany and Hungary until 1989. Semtex showed up in Northern Ireland in 1985 as part of a Libyan consignment of weapons to the Irish Republican Army. Reports of Semtex shipments to Libya made headlines in 1990 because the explosive was thought to have been used in the terrorist attacks on Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 and UTA Flight 772 in 1989.28
At the same time, Michael Gordon reported in the New York Times that Libya had successfully tested a system to refuel fighter-bombers in flight, an achievement that reportedly represented a major advance in extending the range of the aircraft as well as increasing their ability to carry heavier loads. When combined with allegations that the Rabta facility was a chemical weapons plant, these new revelations conveniently reinforced the antiterrorism component of the Bush administration’s Libya policy. The ousture of President Hissène Habré of Chad at the end of the year by Libyan-supported rebels led by Idriss Deby only reinforced Washington’s determination to challenge Libyan foreign policy at every turn.29
On a more positive note, Libya joined the Arab Maghrib Union in February 1989, concluded integration pacts with the Sudan in March 1990, and forged a regional grouping intended to promote stability and economic development in the Mediterranean region with five Western European and four North African countries in October 1990. Qaddafi also initiated a policy of reconciliation with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, visiting Egypt in October 1989 for the first time in sixteen years; and by the end of 1990, bilateral relations between Egypt and Libya were flourishing. The resumption of relations with Egypt was an especially significant foreign policy decision as it signaled the return of Libya to the Arab fold and the pursuit of a more moderate course vis-à-vis the Arab world. Qaddafi also announced at the end of the decade a new round of political reforms, but the net result here appeared to be more continuity than change. Collectively, this disparate grouping of external and internal initiatives served to enhance Qaddafi’s domestic position and greatly reduce his isolation abroad both in the Arab world and in Africa.30
The Libyan government also emphasized the economic programs initiated in the late 1980s, focusing on the Great Manmade River (GMR) project. The initial phase of this mammoth $25-billion scheme was finally inaugurated in August 1991. The first part of the second phase of the GMR project was celebrated five years later with the introduction of the first desert water supplies into Tripoli. American participation in the construction of the Great Manmade River, through the British subsidiary of Brown and Root, continued throughout this period. Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, following the electoral defeat of George Bush in 1992 and a stint at the American Enterprise Institute, became in 1995 the Chief Executive Officer of the Halliburton Company, an energy technology and construction giant that had merged with Brown and Root in 1962. Ironically, the author of the Regional Defense Strategy and one of the earliest proponents of the Rogue Doctrine was thus by the middle of the decade indirectly engaged in commercial relations with Libya, as well as with Iran and Iraq to a lesser degree.31
The Bush administration relaxed its ban on travel to Libya in spring 1990 to allow American experts to participate in a campaign to eradicate the screw-worm fly, a deadly pest threatening African livestock and wildlife. However, this positive initiative proved the exception to an American policy of intransigence toward Libya. A State Department spokesman, in responding to a question about Libyan support for Iraq, captured the essence of U.S. policy toward Libya as 1990 closed:
Libya’s support for terrorism is nothing new. Libya has been on the U.S. Government’s list of state-sponsors of terrorism since 1979. Libya continues to offer extensive support to notorious international terrorist groups such as the Abu Nidal organization.
Further, last May a Libyan-sponsored terrorist group, the Palestine Liberation Front, attempted a terrorist attack on public beaches at Tel Aviv. And as you know from the information we’ve provided, the attack was launched from Libya and received extensive support from the Qaddafi regime.
The head of the Palestine Liberation Front, Abu Abbas, has publicly threatened to engage in terrorism in support of Iraq in the event of hostilities.
Just to reiterate our policy, we continue to hold terrorists and their state sponsors responsible for acts of terrorism.32
In early 1991, officials of the Bush administration acknowledged the failure of a two-year-old covert policy to destabilize the Qaddafi regime with U.S.-trained Libyan commandos. Set in motion during the final months of the Reagan administration, the secret paramilitary program had provided military aid and training to some six hundred Libyan soldiers at a base outside Ndjamena, the capital of Chad. The Libyans were captured during the border fighting between Chad and Libya in 1988 and volunteered for the covert force in exchange for freedom from prisoner of war camps. The operation disintegrated in December 1990, when Libyan-backed guerrillas orchestrated a successful coup in Chad and the commando group was forced into a floating exile. The United States first transferred the Libyans to Zaire; when their welcome there wore thin, most were shifted to Kenya. The State Department originally linked the release in February 1991 of $5 million in military aid to Kenya to an improvement in its human rights record, but it later admitted that the money was granted as an expression of gratitude for providing the Libyans temporary refuge. According to the Bush administration, the force never launched a serious military operation, and in fact, may not have seen any combat at all. In a rare show of candor, American officials quietly admitted that the flawed commando policy had handed Qaddafi a propaganda victory. While some of the Libyan soldiers elected to return to Libya, the majority feared persecution, qualified for the U.S. refugee program, and were eventually resettled in the United States.33
The Bush administration continued into 1992 its policy of isolating and pressuring the Qaddafi regime in an effort to diminish Libya’s alleged support for international terrorism. In response, a growing number of analysts and observers expressed concern that additional pressure on Libya, especially economic pressure in the form of an oil embargo, would be counterproductive. Many feared the ultimate aim of the American and British governments was the overthrow of Qaddafi, an event that could lead to increased instability in North Africa and the Middle East. One diplomat was quoted anonymously as saying, “If you destabilize Libya, you destabilize North Africa.” Qaddafi’s well-known aversion to Islamic fundamentalists, whom he had suppressed in Libya, thus forming a barrier to the spread of militant Islam, was at the center of much of the concern. With no clear successor, observers feared the overthrow of Qaddafi could lead to chaos in Libya, where tribal loyalties remained strong and the body politic weak. Other commentators worried that the Bush policy toward Libya was targeted more at domestic U.S. consumption during a presidential election year than at containing terrorism. Analysts pointed out that the evidence available suggested that Libya had reduced or halted its support for many terrorist organizations. Some bases of the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, for example, were said to have been shut down. American officials bristled at this last suggestion, maintaining that Abu Nidal was still in Libya, where Qaddafi continued to operate at least five terrorist training camps and appeared to be making only cosmetic concessions to Western demands that he cease support for international terrorism.34
The Libyan government was linked publicly to the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, as early as January 1989, when London newspapers reported the alleged existence of a letter from a former Libyan diplomat to Qaddafi praising the latter for taking revenge against American and British imperialists. Subsequent reports, attributed to U.S. intelligence services, suggested that the bombing was conceived during a meeting of Qaddafi, a radical Palestinian group, and Revolutionary Guards from Iran. Nonetheless, for almost two years after the incident, inquiries into the bombing, focused on evidence that Iran hired a Syrian-sponsored terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command. In October 1990, newly discovered evidence, in the form of a computer chip found in the wreckage, indicated for the first time that Libyan intelligence agents might have assembled and planted the bomb that destroyed the plane. The computer chip, lodged in the bomb’s detonator, matched a bomb part carried by a Libyan agent arrested in Senegal in February 1988, ten months before the Pan Am bombing.35
In November 1991 the United States and United Kingdom charged two Libyan agents with the 1988 Pan Am bombing and sought their extradition. At the same time, the two governments called on the Qaddafi regime to accept responsibility for the actions of the two agents, make public all it knew about the bombing, and pay compensation to the relatives of the victims. Shortly before, in October 1991, a French magistrate had issued international arrest warrants for four Libyan officials for their alleged involvement in the 1989 UTA bombing. The American, British, and French governments also demanded that Libya cease all terrorist actions. The two sets of indictments formed the basis for American, British, and French demands that the named Libyans be remanded for trial in the United States, United Kingdom, and France according to the indictments.36
Qaddafi at first ridiculed the charges in the Lockerbie indictments, describing them as “laughable.” He refused to surrender the two Libyan suspects on the grounds there were no operative extradition treaties between Libya, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which was true; however, he did promise to bring them to trial in Libya. In an interview on Italian television, Qaddafi later argued that meteorological conditions, not an explosion, had caused Pan Am Flight 103 to crash. Qaddafi enjoyed public support from the Arab League, which backed Libya in the dispute and warned against economic sanctions or military action. The Group of 77, on the other hand, in a November 1991 meeting refused to adopt a resolution supporting the Libyan position. A few weeks later, the Organization of the Islamic Conference issued a statement affirming full solidarity with Libya and opposing any economic or military action.37
Following the indictment of two Libyan citizens as the perpetrators of the attack that brought down the plane, Washington and London aggressively pushed for UN Security Council Resolution 731, eventually passed in January 1992, which called for Libyan cooperation in the investigations in progress over the destruction of both Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772. Condemning the destruction of flights 103 and 772, Resolution 731 deplored the fact that Libya had not responded to requests to cooperate in the investigation and urged it “to provide a full and effective response to those requests so as to contribute to the elimination of international terrorism.” Finally, the resolution requested the UN Secretary General “to seek the cooperation of the Libyan government” and urged “all states individually and collectively to encourage the Libyan Government to respond.”38
When Libya failed to meet all the conditions in Resolution 731, the UN Security Council on 31 March 1992 adopted Resolution 748, which imposed limited sanctions against Libya, including an embargo on aircraft and arms sales and air travel as well as a reduction in the staff of Libyan diplomatic missions abroad. Resolution 748 was adopted under chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which provided for action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression, together with article 25 of the Charter, which made it mandatory for UN members to accept and carry out decisions of the Security Council. This was only the second time (the first followed the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) that the Security Council had imposed sanctions on a state for flouting Security Council demands. Earlier, the Bush administration had announced that it was freezing the U.S. assets of forty-six business that it said were ultimately controlled by Libya. None of these commercial concerns, which included multinationals involved in banking, industry, investment, and petroleum, were headquartered in the United States, but several were based in countries that were close allies, including Britain and the France, cosponsors of Resolution 748. In November 1993 the Security Council passed Resolution 883, which toughened the sanctions in place by freezing Libya’s overseas assets, with the exception of petroleum-related assets, banning some sales of oil-related equipment, and tightening the earlier decision to end commercial air links. As it supported the UN sanctions, the U.S. government continued to maintain and extend its own ban on direct economic activities with Libya, which had been in place since December 1986.39
Responding to the adoption of Resolution 748, the Libyan foreign minister denounced the UN sanctions and accused Britain, France, and the United States of “leading a crusade against Arabs and Muslims.” The Arab League also issued a statement that expressed regret over the Security Council’s decision, but at the same time it denounced “international terrorism in all its forms” and signaled its readiness “to cooperate in ending it.” The Arab League’s half-hearted attempts to settle the dispute, coupled with the tepid support of individual Arab states, added to the growing disillusionment of Qaddafi and the Libyan people with the ideal of Arab unity. Qaddafi later called for compromise, but his government adamantly refused to remand the two suspects in the context of a trial in Britain or the United States. Following several futile Libyan attempts to prevent the imposition of sanctions, the United Nations on 15 April 1992 applied the sanctions provided for in Resolution 748, expelled Libyan diplomats, and turned back Libyan airliners seeking to defy the flight ban. In a generally moderate statement issued in May 1992, the foreign ministers of the Non-Aligned Movement welcomed Libyan acceptance of the UN resolution, calling on Tripoli to cut all links with terrorist movements and urging all parties to settle the dispute peacefully. At the end of the year, the Arab Maghrib Union appealed to the Security Council to revise its resolutions and lift the embargo. Given the limited and selective support Libya received from African and other Third World states, it was hardly surprising that the year 1992 marked the beginning of seven long years of international isolation for the Qaddafi regime.40
Qaddafi projected an air of detachment during the 1992 American presidential campaign. In response to a question as to which U.S. presidential candidate he supported, he responded that he supported the will of the American people.41 However, once the returns were in and Bill Clinton was declared the winner, Qaddafi could hardly restrain his glee. After eight years of Reagan and four years of Bush, he obviously believed that a Democratic administration offered an exciting new window of opportunity to improve American-Libyan relations. In a long address to political science students at al-Fatih University in Tripoli, delivered on 31 December 1992, he roundly condemned the Republican Party and the Reagan and Bush administrations and lauded the Democratic Party and the incoming Clinton administration, which he hoped and expected would take American policy in a new direction. In so doing, Qaddafi displayed a disturbing lack of understanding of the American political system and the platforms of the two major parties. Consequently, it was not surprising that he completely misread the future direction of American foreign policy:
Actually, the results of the American elections showed the emergence of a new page and a new state in the world. We toiled and persevered, we mustered our courage, and we stood our ground until the Republican era, the era of the American Republican Party, had ended. It used to antagonize us. It took part in the aggression against us in 1986. We persevered with patience and courage for four more years after the Republican Party had been in power. . . . We were expecting Bush and not Clinton to win, with the Republicans thus continuing in power for four more years. We said: Well, we will have to endure another four years until this American nightmare is over.
But thanks be to God, what happened during one year of patience, courage, resistance, flexibility, and wisdom? The results of the American elections were announced. They spelled the end of the Republican administration with the Democrats scoring a victory. We and the world which is on our side believe that the American Democratic Party will lead America, America’s foreign policy, in the opposite direction to that of the Republican leadership.
In the Reagan era, America began to lose its direction. It made historic mistakes, gripped by recklessness and a lack of foresight. . . . This policy spells danger, and the American nation and the American people, because of this imperialist foreign policy, are being driven to disaster.
When Clinton emerged along with the Democratic Party, he started to say that America must be saved, that one had to look inward, that the American wealth must not be wasted on imperialist policies, that half the American forces in Europe should be brought home, that the military bases should be wound up, and that Reagan’s Star Wars program must be abolished.. . . . He raised slogans like these and said that a political revolution should take place in America to make America look inward and that the American people should be saved.
. . . Clinton won and the Democratic administration succeeded. The whole world believes that America will change during the era of the Democratic administration.
The Democrats originally consisted of minorities, the oppressed. We have been defending these people during the Reagan era. Because of this, Reagan’s vengeance against us increased, because we used to back the blacks, the Red Indians, the minorities, the workers, and the oppressed, who actually were the foundations of the Democratic Party.
In actual fact, the force that formed the Democratic Party to which Clinton belongs, this force actually is our ally. When it was in opposition, we used to back it.
We thank God for this result and give a deep sigh and the whole world feels really satisfied.42
Qaddafi’s hopes were soon dashed, as the Clinton administration from the beginning articulated a policy toward Libya that was difficult to distinguish in tone and content from its predecessor. In the course of the campaign, Clinton had promised to adopt radically new foreign and military policies in the wake of the Cold War. In an effort to make good on this promise, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin ordered a bottom-up review of U.S. defense policy. While Aspin suggested that the review would produce a major change in U.S. strategy, the end product bore a striking resemblance to the base force concept developed by General Powell in 1989, The revised doctrine called for sufficient American military force to fight and win two major regional conflicts. The only significant difference between the Aspin and Powell plans was that Aspin called for a capability to fight two major regional conflicts nearly simultaneously where Powell had called for them to be fought at the same time.43
The bottom-up review completed by the Clinton administration resulted in the articulation of the Rogue Doctrine in its mature form. Secretary Aspin declared that the new strategy was a product of the need to contain rogue leaders set on regional domination through military means, rogue leaders who were also pursuing biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons capabilities. To meet these threats, the Pentagon intended to project American power into regions important to the United States and to defeat potentially hostile regional powers like Libya. Thereafter, opposition to the policies of rogue states became a defining theme in the foreign policy of the Clinton administration.44
Substituting the term “backlash” for “rogue” states, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Anthony Lake captured the essence of the Clinton administration’s policy toward the rogue states in an article published in Foreign Affairs in 1994:
our policy must face the reality of recalcitrant and outlaw states that not only choose to remain outside the family but also assault its basic values. There are few “backlash” states: Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. For now they lack the resources of a superpower, which would enable them to seriously threaten the democratic order being created around them. Nevertheless, their behavior is often aggressive and defiant. . . .
These backlash states have some common characteristics. Ruled by cliques that control power through coercion, they suppress basic human rights and promote radical ideologies. While their political systems vary, their leaders share a common antipathy toward popular participation that might undermine the existing regimes. These nations exhibit a chronic inability to engage constructively with the outside world, and they do not function effectively in alliances—even with those like-minded. They are often on the defensive, increasingly criticized and targeted with sanctions in international forums.
Finally, they share a siege mentality. Accordingly, they are embarked on ambitious and costly military programs—especially in weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missile delivery systems—in a misguided quest for a great equalizer to protect their regimes or advance their purposes abroad.45
Emphasizing that the U.S. government had a unique responsibility to oppose such regimes, Lake then stated that this opposition would be communicated by the Clinton administration in a multitude of overt and covert ways:
As the sole superpower, the United States has a special responsibility for developing a strategy to neutralize, contain and, through selective pressure, perhaps eventually transform these backlash states into constructive members of the international community. . . . In each case, we maintain alliances and deploy military capabilities sufficient to deter or respond to any aggressive act. We seek to contain the influence of these states, sometimes by isolation, sometimes through pressure, sometimes by diplomatic and economic measures. We encourage the rest of the international community to join us in a concerted effort. In the cases of Iraq and Libya, for example, we have already achieved a strong international consensus backed by U.N. resolutions.
The United States is also actively engaged in unilateral and multilateral efforts to restrict their military and technological capabilities. Intelligence, counterterrorism and multilateral export control policies, especially on weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems, are all being employed.46
In the Foreign Affairs article and other public statements, Lake and his colleagues in the Clinton administration linked domestic structure and foreign policy and suggested that nondemocratic regimes appeared most likely to violate international norms of behavior. A key element of their analysis was that external behavior, as opposed to internal policy, was the key component for inclusion in the category of rogue states. In the Libyan case, for example, it was Qaddafi’s alleged support for international terrorism and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, not the oppressive political climate in Libya or Qaddafi’s questionable record on human rights, that guaranteed Libya membership in the elite circle of rogue states.47
U.S. intelligence agencies reported in mid-February 1993 that Libya was building a subterranean chemical weapons plant near Tarhuna capable of producing and storing poison gas. Clinton administration officials described the new project as a source of significant concern, especially since the Libyan government had failed to sign a UN convention banning chemical weapons. The Libyan foreign minister had attended the January 1993 Paris conference convened to sign the accord, but at the last minute refused to add his name to the convention. One month later, Secretary of State Warren Christopher threatened Libya with a global oil embargo because of its refusal to hand over for trial the two Libyans accused of the 1988 Pan Am bombing. With Libya totally dependent on crude oil exports, an oil embargo would have dealt a severe blow to the Libyan economy. It would also have negatively affected several European countries, notably France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, that imported significant quantities of Libyan oil. The UN Security Council renewed the air and arms embargo against Libya in April 1993 but rebuffed U.S. efforts to tighten the sanctions. Qaddafi’s public reaction to the renewal of sanctions was predictable as he ordered the masses into the streets to protest. In private, he was reportedly relieved that Europe had resisted U.S. pressure to extend the measures to include an embargo on oil or related technology.48
Thereafter, the Clinton administration continued to exert pressure on the Qaddafi regime whenever and wherever possible. In June 1993 Washington moved to block the shipment of rocket fuel ingredients from Russia to Libya, the latest in a series of Russian exports to worry the administration. Two months later, Britain, France, and the United States collectively issued a new warning to Libya to turn over the two suspects in the Pan Am 103 bombing or face new and tougher sanctions. In an unexpected move that highlighted the international complexities of the case, Russia later threatened to veto new Security Council sanctions against Libya unless Britain, France, and the United States agreed to give Russia an interest-free loan to cover a $4 billion debt that Tripoli owed Moscow. In November the Clinton administration again pressed for a global oil boycott if Libya failed to hand over the suspected terrorists. But the new sanctions passed by the Security Council, while they froze assets and banned imports of some forms of oil equipment, again stopped short of a total ban on Libyan oil exports. Under the new sanctions, Belgian, French, Italian, and other foreign oil companies were also free to maintain lucrative gas and oil drilling and exploration contracts in Libya.49
Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, the actions of the Libyan government throughout most of 1993 suggested that it continued to believe it could work with the Clinton administration. The Libyan news agency announced on 14 May that Libya was prepared to take three steps to comply with UN Resolution 748: (1) cut all ties with organizations involved in international terrorism; (2) deny the use of its territory for terrorist acts and punish severely anyone involved in such acts; and (3) invite UN representatives to see that there were no training camps in Libya. Two months later, Ibrahim al-Bishari, Libyan representative to the Arab League, reiterated many of the arguments developed by Qaddafi in his 1992 address at al-Fatih University:
The United States is an important state in this world, and we can only seek to establish the best of relations with it in the framework of respect and mutual interests. . . . The two Republican administrations of (Ronald) Reagan and (George) Bush were characterized by using the logic of force in resolving international disputes. Fortunately, President Clinton has arrived amid different conditions. The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the U.S. President is from a generation which has not participated in any wars, whether World War II or the Vietnam War, in which he refused to participate because of his belief that war achieves no solution. He is an intellectual young man whose vision differs from that of the Republican administration. He belongs to the Democratic Party, which includes minorities, including the blacks, Hispanics, Arabs, and Jews, and sympathizes with the cause of small peoples. We saw in the days of President Jimmy Carter how there were no bloody conflicts between the United States and other states.50
Qaddafi in December 1993 termed Libya the “mecca of freedom fighters and their natural ally.” The Clinton administration in the same week asked Egyptian President Mubarak for assistance in finding Mansour Kikhia, the former Libyan diplomat and prominent dissident, who had mysteriously disappeared in Cairo a week earlier. His disappearance coincided with a call by basic popular committees in Tripoli to crush traitors and spies and followed a November speech by Qaddafi in which he said that opponents of the regime who had escaped to America were worthy of slaughter. Kikhia lived in Columbia, Missouri, where he operated a real estate agency. His wife and four children were American citizens, and he was scheduled to be granted citizenship in April 1994. His disappearance focused renewed international attention on the alleged terrorism and human rights violations of the Qaddafi regime and also damaged its relations with neighboring Egypt. While Kikhia was never found, the available evidence led many observers to conclude that he had been abducted in Cairo by Libyan intelligence agents and removed to Tripoli. Six months later, his wife reported that a Libyan official had recently offered her money to modulate her campaign of criticism of the Qaddafi government. When taken together, events in late 1993 and early 1994 left no hope for improved American-Libyan relations in the foreseeable future.51
The U.S. government after 1993 called repeatedly for a global embargo on Libyan oil sales; however, it was unable to win the support of key European states, especially Germany and Italy, which were heavily dependent on Libyan oil supplies. The Italian government, for example, argued that its refineries could not easily be converted to handle types of crude oil different from that supplied by Libya. Even such a close ally and interested party as the United Kingdom appeared to adopt a more liberal interpretation of the sanctions in place. The Bank of England, after initially refusing to allow British oil companies to send cash to Libyan subsidiaries, began in 1995 to allow them on a case-by-case basis for exploration operations. Equally significant, after Qaddafi threatened to deny the flight ban and quit the United Nations, the United Nations agreed in April 1995 to relax the ban to allow Libyan pilgrims to join the Muslim pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.52
Faced with growing opposition at home, especially from Muslim fundamentalists, Qaddafi later moved to deport thousands of Arab and African workers. His expulsion of Palestinians stemmed officially from his unhappiness with the Palestine Liberation Organization for holding peace talks with Israel, but informed observers suggested the expulsions were also linked to reports of domestic unrest. In addition, the expulsion campaign appeared designed to pressure the United Nations for relief from the sanctions regime, now in place for three years. In a speech that reflected his growing isolation in the Arab world as well as in the West, Qaddafi in November 1995 castigated Arab leaders from Morocco to Saudi Arabia, indicating that he could no longer trust any of them. At the end of the year, Britain expelled the head of the Libyan interest section at the Saudi Arabian embassy in London for having engaged in activities incompatible with his diplomatic status. Foreign Office officials denied that the expulsion was tied to the murder in London the previous month of a prominent Libyan opposition leader; however, Libyan experts pointed out that the expelled diplomat was in charge of monitoring the acts of Libyan dissidents.53
In February 1996 the Clinton administration again accused Libya of constructing a chemical weapons plant at Tarhuna, some forty miles southeast of Tripoli. The Libyan government continued its refusal to sign the 1993 convention banning the use, development, and storage of chemical weapons; according to the CIA director, it was one of eighteen nations, including most of the countries in the Middle East, working on chemical weapons programs. U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry later warned that Washington would not rule out military action to prevent the plant from becoming operational. In April, in a move that mirrored American requests to remand the two Libyans indicted in the Pan Am bombing, Qaddafi demanded that the United States surrender the pilots and planners involved in the 1986 air raids on Benghazi and Tripoli, insisting the United Nations take up the case. Coincidentally, the relatives of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103 filed a $10 billion lawsuit against Libya the same month.54
The U.S. House of Representatives in June 1996 passed controversial legislation intended to discourage new foreign investment in the Libyan and Iranian petroleum industries. Although Libya was not the main target of the U.S. move, industry executives and analysts said that the U.S. action would likely deter a number of international oil companies from making new investments in Libya. The legislation angered some of Washington’s key European allies, who complained about the extraterritorial reach of the sanctions, maintaining the United States was imposing its foreign policy goals on them. When President Clinton signed the controversial bill into law in early August, the European Union rejected the legislation and vowed to fight it. The legislation required the U.S. president to impose sanctions on foreign companies that invested $40 million or more within a year in the energy sectors of Libya or Iran. Specifically, President Clinton was required by law to impose at least two sanctions from a list of six that included import-export bans, lending embargos from U.S. banks, denial of U.S. export financing, and a ban on U.S. procurement of goods and services from sanctioned companies. Members of the European Union, especially France, condemned the legislation on the grounds it established the unwelcome principle that one country could dictate the foreign policies of another.55
As the Clinton administration increased pressure on the Qaddafi regime, evidence accumulated that the negative impact of the sanctions was fanning discontent within Libya. Islamist militants clashed with regime forces on several occasions in 1995–96. A football riot in mid-July 1996 in which crowds shouted anti-Qaddafi slogans left up to fifty persons dead. One month later, Libyan opposition groups, not always a reliable source, reported the ambush of a military convoy in which more than two dozen people were killed. Qaddafi responded with renewed emphasis on revolutionary activity at home together with a crackdown on private business, in an apparent attempt to maintain what one observer termed a perpetual state of organized confusion. Even though Qaddafi later expanded efforts to contain internal dissent, reports of alleged assassination attempts surfaced regularly over the next few years.56
By 1997 the UN sanctions, were beginning to crack, with African leaders taking the lead in opposing them. In February the secretary general of the Organization of African Unity called for an end to the sanctions, on the grounds that African states felt Libya had taken several positive steps toward a resolution of the Lockerbie issue. In March the Vatican established full diplomatic relations with Libya in part to recognize what it termed recent “positive results” in Libya in the area of religious freedom. Later in the month, a Libyan Arab Airlines plane carrying Muslims on the annual pilgrimage landed in Saudi Arabia in defiance of UN sanctions. Meeting in Cairo in late September, the Arab League adopted a resolution that invited Arab countries to take measures to alleviate the sanctions on Libya until a just and peaceful solution to the issue could be found. In an explicit rejection of the sanctions, the resolution also called on Arab countries to authorize flights to Libya for humanitarian as well as religious reasons and invited them to lift the freeze on Libyan accounts in Arab banks with the exception of oil funds. South African President Nelson Mandela, an old friend of Qaddafi and the initial recipient in 1989 of the Qaddafi International Prize for Human Rights, visited Libya in October to thank Qaddafi for his support during the years of South African struggle against white minority rule. Although Mandela completed the last leg of his journey by car to avoid violating the UN sanctions, he called during his visit for a lifting of the sanctions and said that the Lockerbie case should be handled by an international tribunal, a view shared by the OAU and the Arab League. The presidents of Gambia, Liberia, Tanzania, and Uganda, among others, also visited Tripoli in this time frame.57
The International Court of Justice ruled in February 1998 that it would grant Libya a full hearing into its complaint that the United Kingdom and the United States were forcing Tripoli to surrender two suspects for trial in Scotland for the downing of Pan Am Flight 103. The Libyan government termed the ruling of the court, which rejected arguments by Britain and the United States that it did not have jurisdiction in the case, a clear victory for the Libyan people and for justice. In March a Libyan plane carrying 105 Libyan Muslims arrived in Saudi Arabia, again in clear violation of the UN ban on flights from Libya, and the Libyan news agency reported in April that two Italian planes had landed in Tripoli. In May the Clinton administration 1998 reached a deal with European leaders to ease U.S. restrictions on multinational companies doing business with Cuba, Iran, and Libya. And in July the UN sanctions committee temporarily lifted the air embargo to allow Egyptian President Mubarak to fly to Tripoli to inquire into the health of Qaddafi, who had reportedly been injured in an assassination attempt in June. Finally, in mid-July, the Department of State announced that Britain and the United States would consider the creation of a special court in the Netherlands to try the two Libyan suspects for the 1988 Pan Am bombing. This joint initiative represented a major compromise on the part of the Clinton administration since Qaddafi had been willing to accept its core component, trial in a third country, for several years.58
In August 1998 the Libyan government accepted the joint British-U.S. proposal to try the two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing case at The Hague under Scottish law. Two months later, the UN General Assembly adopted a Libyan-sponsored resolution, aimed at the United States, that called for the immediate repeal of laws that unilaterally imposed sanctions on companies and nationals of other countries. The vote was 80 in favor and only 2 (Israel and the United States) against, with 67 delegations abstaining, an unusually large number in a vote of this kind. In the interim, African delegations, including officials from Chad, Gambia, Nigeria, and the Sudan, visited Tripoli in violation of the UN ban. In the wake of intense diplomacy by representatives of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa, together with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Libyan government eventually handed over the two Lockerbie suspects on 5 April 1999. Once Libya had remanded the two suspects, the United Nations suspended its sanctions against Libya, allowing air travel and the sale of industrial equipment to resume.59
The complex rationale behind Qaddafi’s decision to remand the Lockerbie suspects after resisting that action for seven years was not immediately clear, but it probably included the following considerations. As Mary-Jane Deeb has emphasized, by 1998 Qaddafi seemed to have the domestic political situation under control in Libya and was faced with a stagnant or deteriorating economic situation. Consequently, he no longer feared the domestic political repercussions of remanding the two suspects, on the one hand, and needed to open and invigorate the economy, on the other. A less tangible motive could well have been Qaddafi’s love of the international limelight and his weariness with a prolonged period of political isolation. This logic helped explain the mid-1999 diplomatic offensive he unleashed in Africa. Strategically, as Ray Takeyh suggested, Qaddafi may also have been motivated by a desire to rebuild alliances in Africa and elsewhere to prevent Libya from being isolated in any potential future conflict with the United States. Finally, the opportunity to renew and enhance ideological and strategic ties with key African states clearly positioned Libya to pursue longer term objectives in the region.60
That said, an objective evaluation of the effectiveness of the UN sanctions on Libya suggests that the results were at best mixed. Even though Qaddafi eventually agreed to the extradition of the two Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing, the framework for the trial proposed by the United States and the United Kingdom was very similar to a proposal advocated by Libya as early as 1992. The Western powers also sought an end to Libyan support for international terrorism; however, the evidence suggests that Tripoli had largely, if not totally, ended such support at the end of the previous decade. As for broader issues related to the promotion of the conditions and values required for a more stable international environment, there is no evidence the UN sanctions had any impact on Libyan policy or behavior. The Qaddafi regime ended the decade in power with no noticeable improvement in its respect for human and democratic rights. Quite the contrary, central controls in Libya appeared to tighten at a time when deteriorating socioeconomic conditions increased the dependence of most Libyans on the state.61
Once the United Nations suspended its sanctions on Libya, Qaddafi moved quickly to end Libya’s diplomatic and economic isolation. As a procession of African heads of state traveled to Libya to pay their respects, he unveiled a series of diplomatic initiatives designed to resolve disputes in the Congo, Horn of Africa, Sierra Leone, and the Sudan. Qaddafi brokered a cease-fire agreement between the presidents of the Congo and Uganda in April 1999 and later hosted a five-nation summit on the Congo. In the interim, he dispatched a controversial peacekeeping force to Uganda. In South Africa, he was welcomed in June 1999 as the last official guest of the Mandela administration and saluted by the South African president as “one of the revolutionary icons of our times.” In the Horn of Africa, Eritrea and Ethiopia reportedly accepted a Libyan peace plan to end their border conflict; however, a final solution to the dispute here proved as elusive as in the Congo. Qaddafi also dispatched an envoy to the Sierra Leone peace talks in Togo and met with government and opposition leaders in Sudan in an effort to end the civil war there. Although there was little sign that any of these diplomatic initiatives would yield practical results, Qaddafi clearly sought to take advantage of the sympathetic response he received from African governments when the UN sanctions were in place to play a wider role in regional issues.62
The new initiatives in Africa were part of a major shift in Libyan foreign policy from the Arab world to Africa, a shift rooted in part, according to Libyan diplomats, in the reluctance of Arab leaders to support Libya in its conflict with the United States and the United Kingdom over the Lockerbie issue. In what became a motif of the new diplomacy, Qaddafi repeatedly proclaimed that the future was for big spaces, and that Libya was part of the African space. Qaddafi attended the OAU summit in Algeria in July 1999, where he was feted as a long-lost brother by fellow African heads of state. Reviving his vision of African unity, he called at the meeting for creation of a Pan African Congress to boost unity and an Integration Bank to push forward the process for implementation of a treaty for the Economic Community of Africa. He also invited African leaders to attend an extraordinary OAU summit in Tripoli, timed to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the September 1969 revolution, to discuss ways to restructure the OAU charter to strengthen relations among member states. In turn, the summit in Algiers called for the complete and immediate lifting of all sanctions against Libya.63
Before the September meeting in Libya, most African diplomats voiced caution and emphasized that their leaders had agreed to attend out of respect for a veteran revolutionary whose steadfast support of liberation movements had helped end colonialism on the continent. Few expected concrete actions to emerge from the meeting. In advance of the extraordinary summit, Qaddafi called for creation of a United States of Africa, and he pressed the issue in his address to the conference of foreign ministers that met in advance of the summit. African leaders later fell well short of endorsing his call for a United States of Africa, but they did agree to create a Pan-African Parliament in 2000 and an African Union as early as 2001. The Union was to be based on the OAU charter and the 1991 Abuja Treaty, which had called for creation of an African Economic Community together with related financial institutions by 2025. Qaddafi later reiterated his call for African unity at the EU-Africa summit in Cairo in April 2000.64
Representatives of the United Kingdom and United States met with the Libyan ambassador to the United Nations in June 1999, the first official meeting of American and Libyan diplomats in eighteen years. When the Libyan diplomat pressed for a permanent lifting of the UN Security Council sanctions as opposed to a temporary suspension, the U.S. representative opposed the move on the grounds that the Lockerbie trial had not yet begun. In the meeting, the U.S. diplomat reportedly outlined tough conditions for American support for a permanent lifting of the Security Council sanctions. The conditions included an end to Libyan support for terrorism, payment of appropriate compensation to the families of Pan Am Flight 103 victims, acknowledgment of Libyan responsibility for the actions of its officials, and cooperation with the investigation and trial. A few days later, the U.S. Supreme Court, without comment or dissent, rejected an appeal by Libya which argued that the relatives of the victims of the Pam Am 103 bombing could not sue Libya in federal court because U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction in the case. The Clinton administration later announced it would not follow Britain’s example, when the latter announced resumption of full diplomatic relations with Libya, and threatened to veto any attempt to lift permanently the UN sanctions against Libya.65
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs Ronald E. Neumann detailed the administration’s position in testimony to the House subcommittee on Africa on 22 July 1999. After describing Libya as an area of the world where “patience and our diplomatic initiatives have brought a significant success,” he recognized that “sanctions fatigue” had set in and was making it increasingly difficult for the United States to maintain, let alone expand, the existing sanctions regime. Neumann then detailed the difficult negotiations that led Libya to remand the two suspects and the United Nations to suspend its sanctions. In so doing, he emphasized that UN Secretary General Annan was called upon to report to the Security Council members, within ninety days of the suspension, on Libyan compliance with the remaining Security Council requirements as outlined in three separate resolutions. These now familiar requirements called on Libya to renounce and end all support for terrorist activities, acknowledge responsibility for the actions of its officials, cooperate with the trial, and pay appropriate compensation. As a practical matter, Neumann pointed out that no one could be sure that Libya was cooperating fully with the trial until such time as the proceedings were substantially underway. When the secretary general made his report to the Security Council on 30 June 1999, the Council responded with a statement that welcomed the positive signs from Libya, but confirmed the Libyan government had not complied fully with all the necessary requirements and that the sanctions would not be lifted permanently until it had done so. Neumann concluded his statement to the House subcommittee on Africa with a challenge to the Qaddafi regime:
We acknowledge Libya’s recent declarations of its intention to turn over a new page, but, given its history, such statements are not enough. Positive actions are essential if Libya is to be re-integrated into the international community, beginning with full cooperation in the Pan Am 103 trial, and full compliance with the remaining UNSC [United Nations Security Council] requirements. We recognize that Libya has publicly declared its intention to play an active, constructive role in regional conflicts. It will be important to test that this rhetoric is supported by constructive and consistent actions. . . .
We expect Libya to fulfill all of the UNSC requirements. . . . Only when Libya has complied fully will we be able to consider lifting U.S. sanctions against Libya. Right now, such steps would be premature. At the same time it is important to make clear that we have no hidden agenda. We have given Libya clear, specific benchmarks that it must meet if it is to become a responsible and constructive member of the international community. We have set goals Libya can meet if it has the will to do so.66
U.S. policy toward Libya for the remainder of the year was an intricate mixture of carrot and stick. In mid-July the Clinton administration, under heavy pressure from the U.S. agriculture industry to boost exports to offset a depressed domestic market, modified its sanctions regime against Libya, as well as Iran and the Sudan, to allow the sale of food, medicine, and medical equipment to the three states. Responding positively to the U.S. initiative, the Libyan government four months later made its first purchase of U.S. wheat in more than fifteen years. The Clinton administration in late July approved a request from Occidental Petroleum to visit Libya to inspect assets the company had earlier been forced to abandon and subsequently entertained similar requests from the Marathon Group, Conoco Inc., and Amerada Hess Corp. Conoco completed its inspection of oilfields and production facilities in December 1999. On the other hand, Washington renewed a ban on the use of U.S. passports for travel to Libya and forcibly reiterated its intent not to follow the British lead in reestablishing diplomatic relations with Libya. The Clinton administration also intervened to block the sale of twenty-four airplanes to Libya by the European consortium Airbus on the grounds some of the engine parts and electronic equipment were U.S.-supplied and their sale would violate the provisions of the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act.67
At the same time, the Qaddafi regime continued to expand its commercial and diplomatic ties inside and outside the region. The European Union announced in mid-September 1999 that it was lifting its sanctions against Libya to reward signs that the latter had renounced terrorism, although, much to Libya’s dismay, leaving in force an arms embargo. A large UK trade mission visited Libya in early October; and in mid-December Britain’s first ambassador to Libya in fifteen years arrived in Tripoli. In early December Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema 1999 became the first Western head of state to visit Libya in eight years. The Italian government in recent times had increasingly assumed the role of European interlocutor with isolated or rogue states, and its foreign minister had visited Tripoli the day after the United Nations suspended sanctions in April. At the time, Qaddafi was quoted as saying that “Libya will become Italy’s bridge to Africa and Italy will be for Libya its door into Europe.”68
D’Alema and Qaddafi, in the course of the Italian prime minister’s visit to Libya, issued a joint statement that strongly denounced terrorism but said that the United States should take the next step in improving ties. When the Department of State responded to the joint statement with an indication that it would continue to monitor the Libyan government’s policy toward terrorism, the Qaddafi regime rejected any monitoring of its behavior by the United States or any other government. Boosting Italy’s trade relationship with Libya, the Italian prime minister reportedly argued that it was important for Italy to have a dialogue with a country like Libya that was on the way to returning fully to the international community. At the same time, D’Alema ruled out a visit by Qaddafi to Rome in the near future, an event that many observers expected would follow his visit to Tripoli, on the grounds that a Qaddafi visit to Rome would have to wait until the Lockerbie trial had ended and the UN sanctions were permanently lifted. Even as the Qaddafi regime emerged from an extended period of international isolation, a variety of human rights groups continued to condemn the oppressive political climate in Libya, detailing reports of torture and summary executions and calling for the release of prisoners of conscience as well as political prisoners.69
The Clinton administration announced toward the end of 1999 that it was continuing the sanctions in place, on the grounds that the crisis with Libya had not yet been fully resolved. The logic behind the U.S. decision was contained in an address by Deputy Assistant Secretary Neumann to the Middle East Institute on 30 November 1999:
In consulting with other nations, we have acknowledged the positive steps that Libya has taken and some of the changes in Libya’s public posture. But the picture of Libya’s current actions is only slowly coming into focus, and our understanding of Libyan intentions or how the Libyan government sees itself in the world remains quite unclear.70
Neumann did acknowledge that Libyan support for terrorism had declined. In support of this observation, he cited the expulsion of the Abu Nidal organization from Libya together with associated steps taken by the Libyan government, including new visa restrictions, to prevent terrorists from entering Libya or using Libyan territories as a safe haven. He also welcomed the transfer of Libyan support from the Palestinian rejectionists to the Palestinian Authority and Chairman Arafat, viewing it as a strong signal of Libyan support for the peace process. On the other hand, Neumann expressed concern that the inflammatory rhetoric from the Libyan leadership remained unchanged which raised questions as to their real intentions. Drawing what he termed a “mixed picture,” Neumann concluded as follows:
The chief, current goal of the U.S. government with respect to Libya is full compliance with the remaining U.N. Security Council requirements. These requirements are payment of appropriate compensation, cooperation with the Pan Am 103 investigation and trial, acceptance of responsibility for the actions of its officials, and a renunciation and end to support of terrorism and terrorist groups.
If Libya complies fully with all these requirements, it will have met the demands of the Security Council. We have said consistently that Libya can and should comply with these requirements. . . . Any consideration of lifting U.S. sanctions before Libya has complied fully with international demands would be premature.
While U.S. sanctions were imposed because of concerns about Libyan support for terrorism, there have been other sources of contention in U.S.-Libya relations over the past three decades, including Libyan efforts to obtain missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). . . . We continue to want Libya to find a way to address these concerns. . . .
That said, Libya is not Iraq. We do not seek to maintain sanctions until there is a change of regime in Tripoli. We have seen definite changes in Libya’s behavior, specifically declining support for terrorism and increasing support for peace processes in the Middle East and Africa. We hope such changes signal Libya’s willingness to behave as a responsible member of the international community.
The new millennium opened with fresh allegations that the Libyan government was continuing efforts to develop ballistic missile capability to deliver biological or chemical weapons outside North Africa. The evidence concerned thirty-two cases of parts for SCUD missiles, a weapon capable of hitting targets in Europe from Libya. The SCUD components, discovered on a British Airways flight at Gatwick airport in transit to Tripoli via Malta in the course of a joint search by customs and intelligence officers, were allegedly sent to Britain from Taiwan in the name of a knitwear company. Paperwork with the parts suggested that earlier shipments from Taiwan had traveled through Britain undetected and arrived safely in Libya. Widely viewed as an embarrassment to both countries, any attempted export of missile technology to Libya was clearly illegal as it breached the European Union arms embargo and violated an international treaty preventing the proliferation of ballistic missiles. The British government protested as “unacceptable” the use of a London airport as a staging post to smuggle missile parts to Libya in defiance of the EU arms embargo. In response, the Qaddafi regime denied it was trying to import banned long-range missile components. The Spanish newspaper El Pais later reported that Libya was also attempting to purchase ballistic missiles from North Korea.71
After the Libyan government agreed to remand the two suspects in the Pan Am 103 bombing, reports persisted throughout much of 1999 that UN officials, as part of the deal, had promised Qaddafi that senior officials in the Libyan government would be immune from prosecution in the Lockerbie bombing case. In late December the chairman of the House International Relations Committee, for the third time, sought assurances from Secretary of State Albright that UN Secretary General Annan had not given Qaddafi assurances that Lockerbie prosecutors would not attempt to undermine the Libyan government. The issue concerned a letter and annex that Annan had sent to Qaddafi in February 1999, the contents of which were not immediately made public, that led Libya eventually to turn over the suspects in April. Secretary Albright responded in mid-February 2000, with a statement denying that the letter contained “any external or negotiated limits to the authority” of Scottish prosecutors; however, she refused to release the letter on the grounds it was private UN correspondence that had subsequently been classified by the Clinton administration. Under mounting pressure, Secretary General Annan eventually released copies of the letter and the annex in late August 2000. In the correspondence, Annan assured Qaddafi that the trial would not be used to undermine the regime, but he also made it clear that normal prosecutorial procedures would be followed.72
Throughout spring 2000, the U.S. government emitted a number of policy signals that collectively suggested that it was no longer actively opposing Qaddafi’s reentry into the international community and might even be willing to work more closely with Libya in the future. Deputy Assistant Secretary Neumann was quoted in late January as saying that change in regard to U.S. policy toward Libya could now be imagined. One month later, Washington elected not to block Libyan participation in a UN mission to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the first time in a decade that Libya had joined in an international peacekeeping effort. In March the Department of State dispatched four consular officials to Libya on a lightning tour to assess travel safety for Americans. This decision was announced only three weeks after Department of State press spokesperson James Rubin had emphasized that the passport restriction extended at the end of 1999 was not intended to be a sanction but rather was based on a judgment about security. Assessment of travel safety to Libya for Americans thus appeared to be a necessary first step in the potential lifting of the travel ban. Following the return of U.S. officials, a mission that marked the first announced official U.S. visit to Libya since diplomatic relations were broken in the early 1980s, Secretary Albright said she would be inclined to lift the travel ban on Libya if the safety assessment team recommended the action. The decision to investigate travel safety in Libya generated considerable criticism in Congress and elsewhere; therefore it came as no surprise that months passed with no decision announced.73
Even as relations between Libya and the United States seemed to improve, Qaddafi took a number of actions that raised questions as to the direction and intent of Libyan domestic and foreign policy. In early March 2000 the General People’s Congress announced yet another major reorganization of the Libyan government that abolished people’s committees and transferred their functions to provincial organizations. The energy ministry was one of twelve ministries to be scrapped; and in a surprise move that followed more than two decades of devolution, Qaddafi declared that Libya must have a head of state. Billed as a new step in the popular revolution, most observers agreed that the reorganizations were intended to tighten Qaddafi’s grip on power. The Libyan leader then jolted a summit of African and European leaders in Cairo in early April with an anti-Western tirade that embarrassed European Commission President Romano Prodi, who had just praised Qaddafi’s newfound moderation. A London-based Islamist group charged in the same week that the Qaddafi regime had recently executed three Islamic militants extradited from Jordan. Later in April, Swiss authorities arrested a man in Zurich airport carrying SCUD missile parts from Taiwan to Libya. The director of the U.S. National Security Agency disclosed at about the same time that the People’s Republic of China was also transferring long-range missile technology to Libya. Taken together, this collection of erratic events left many observers in and outside the Clinton administration wondering, as one reporter put it, whether Qaddafi was ready to act civilized. Reflecting such thinking, the Senate on 28 April 2000 passed a nonbinding resolution asking the Clinton administration not to lift the ban on travel to Libya until the end of the Lockerbie trial at the earliest.74
The Lockerbie trial finally opened at Camp Zeist, a former U.S. air base in the Netherlands, on 3 May 2000, almost twelve years after a bomb downed Pan Am Flight 103 and killed 270 people. Scottish prosecutors charged the two Libyans on trial, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, with the murder of 270 people in an alleged conspiracy traced back to 1985. The accused faced three alternative charges—conspiracy to murder, murder, and contravention of the 1982 Aviation Security Act. A common feature of the three charges was that the accused were charged with acting in concert together and with unnamed others. If it was shown in the proceedings that more than one person acted in concert, it then became unnecessary to identify which individual carried out the specific unlawful act or omission, provided it was shown they were acting in concert and that the unlawful act or omission was carried out by one of the group.75
Under the conspiracy to murder charge, the accused were alleged to have conspired with others to destroy a civil passenger aircraft and to murder its occupants to further the purposes of the Libyan intelligence services by criminal means, namely the use of explosive devices in the commission of acts of terrorism. In addition to the 259 people on the aircraft, the charge included the eleven Lockerbie residents killed when the jumbo jet crashed on the town. In contrast, the murder charge referred to the completed crime, not merely involvement in a conspiracy to commit murder, and required a higher degree of evidence for conviction. Possible reasons for including both the charge of conspiracy and the completed crime were to allow the evidence of conspiracy to be brought forward and to provide a safeguard in the event that the completed crime could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt. To prove murder, prosecutors were required to demonstrate a physical link between the accused and the explosion and to prove that the accused actually caused the death of the 270 victims. The third alternative, contravention of the 1982 Aviation Security Act, Section 2 (1) and (5), involved the intentional destruction of an aircraft in service, damaging the aircraft so badly that it could not fly or was no longer safe, or committing an act of violence on board an aircraft likely to endanger its safety. The accused could be convicted of only one of the three alternative charges; while punishment for conspiracy to murder was discretionary, the other two charges carried mandatory life sentences.76
The accused, who pleaded “not guilty” before the trial began, were alleged by the prosecution to have been members of the Libyan intelligence services who used false identities and fake passports to establish a fake tour business as a cover for obtaining some twenty electronic bomb timers in Switzerland in 1985. One-time employees of Libyan Arab Airlines, the accused allegedly later placed a Semtex bomb, built into a Toshiba RT SF 16 “Bombeat” radio-cassette recorder and activated by one of the electronic timers, in a suitcase stuffed with clothes purchased at a Maltese shop called Mary’s House. Programmed to detonate aboard Pan Am Flight 103, the suitcase with the bomb was purportedly placed on an Air Malta flight to Frankfurt, where it was transferred to the Pan Am flight destined for New York with an intervening stop at Heathrow Airport in London. The indictment detailed trips, addresses, hotels, and events in Czechoslovakia, Germany, Libya, Malta, Senegal, and Switzerland. It alleged that the bomb timers had been supplied by a Swiss firm, Mebo Telecommunications, and tested at a special forces training camp at Sabha in the Libyan desert. Beyond suggesting the bombing was intended to further the purposes of the Libyan intelligence services, the indictment made no reference as to a precise motive for the attack on Pan Am Flight 103.77
A total of three verdicts were competent in the Lockerbie case under Scottish criminal procedure. In addition to a decision of “guilty” or “not guilty,” judges could return a verdict of “not proven” if they believed that the accused were guilty but the evidence was insufficient to convict. An oddity of Scottish law, a verdict of “not proven” was the equivalent of an acquittal and required the accused to be set free. It thus proved ironic that the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, by insisting on a trial under U.S. or Scottish law, eventually placed themselves in a system of justice that demanded a higher burden of proof than if the trial had been held at the International Court of Justice at the Hague as the Qaddafi regime had proposed. Decisions in criminal cases in Scotland are decided by a majority, and the rules governing the Lockerbie case specifically stated that all decisions, including the verdict, were to be taken by at least two of the three judges.78
As the Lockerbie trial opened, Qaddafi launched a well-coordinated campaign to distance himself from the proceedings. In an interview with Sky Television just hours before the start of the trial, Qaddafi dismissed as “absurd” any suggestion that the two Libyans on trial were acting under his direct orders. Emphasizing that he had held no administrative or political responsibility in Libya since 1977 when he handed over all authority to the Libyan people, he said that the court in the Netherlands would try only the two Libyan defendants and that the accused would bear individual responsibility for the bombing if found guilty. Describing the issue as a legal as opposed to a political one, he stressed that he would not accept further investigations into the bombing in Libya even if the suspects were found guilty.79
Qaddafi repeatedly argued over the next few weeks that Libya had modified its policies in the post-Cold War world; and he encouraged the Clinton administration to follow suit. In the colorful language so often characteristic of the Libyan leader, he encouraged the U.S. government, in an interview published in USA Today, to stop “chewing its cud and thinking about the past.” Although he occasionally lapsed into old complaints about “Zionism” and “American imperialism,” Qaddafi’s remarks were generally upbeat and optimistic during the interview, as he emphasized the challenges and opportunities of globalization and the younger generation taking charge around the world. The previous week, U.S. sanctions had prevented American oil companies from participating in a meeting of some forty international oil companies, hosted by the Libyan National Oil Corporation to discuss new oil exploration and production sharing agreements in Libya. In drawing attention to the importance of the Libyan market in the post-sanctions era, the Qaddafi regime appeared to be attempting to marginalize the Lockerbie trial through the lure of new oil blocks and first gas exports. In a subsequent interview at the end of May, Qaddafi accused the United States of cruise missile diplomacy and dismissed the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing as something of the past.80
After a twelve-year investigation and eighty-four days of trial, the three Scottish judges sitting in the special court at Camp Zeist found only one of the two Libyan defendants guilty of murder in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence agent, was found guilty, but Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, a former airline manager, was freed. In an eighty-two-page written decision, the three judges admitted that the case of the prosecution contained “uncertainties and qualifications,” but concluded unanimously that there was “nothing in the evidence that left” them “with any reasonable doubt as to the guilt” of al-Megrahi. The American and British governments welcomed the verdict but said that sanctions against Libya would only be lifted when Tripoli abided by outstanding UN resolutions. The Libyan government, which quickly expressed its dismay with the verdict, tried to walk a fine line between saying it respected the court deliberations and distancing itself from a twelve-year issue it hoped the case would close. The Libyan ambassador to the United Nations, for example, commented that his government respected the verdict but denied any involvement in the bombing.81
As President Clinton neared the end of his second term, the policy of his administration toward Libya appeared poised for major change, yet the future direction of that policy remained unclear. In the 1999 annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report, issued on 1 May 2000, the Qaddafi regime received a decidedly mixed assessment:
In April 1999, Libya took an important step by surrendering for trial the two Libyans accused of bombing Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
. . . At yearend, however, Libya still had not complied with the remaining UN Security Council requirements. . . . Libyan leader Qadhafi repeatedly stated publicly during the year that his government had adopted an antiterrorism stance, but it remained unclear whether his claims of distancing Libya from its terrorist past signified a true change in policy.
Libya also remained the primary suspect in several other past terrorist operations, including the La Belle discotheque bombing in Berlin in 1986 that killed two US servicemen and one Turkish civilian and wounded more than 200 persons. The trial in Germany of five suspects in the bombing, which began in November 1997, continued in 1999.
In 1999, Libya expelled the Abu Nidal organization and distanced itself from the Palestinian rejectionists, announcing that the Palestinian Authority was the only legitimate address for Palestinian concerns. Libya still may have retained ties to some Palestinian groups that use violence to oppose the Middle East peace process, however, including the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] and the PFLP-GC [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command].82
In responding to questions about the report, Ambassador Mike Sheehan, the Department of State counterterrorism coordinator, discussed what the Libyan government needed to do to improve its record:
The key issue for Libya is the trial of Pan Am 103, which the Secretary [Madeleine K. Albright] said starts this week. There were UN resolutions put on Libya in 1992 regarding the bombing of Pan Am 103, and Libya, in fact, is not in compliance with two of those aspects of that resolution: first, to cooperate throughout the extent of the trial—and since it hasn’t started it would be impossible to gauge their full cooperation in that trial, a trial that should have started a long, long time ago for an event that happened December 21st of 1988; and, secondly, for full compensation of the families. So Libya will remain on the list. Libya must comply with the UN Security Council resolutions. If and when they do, we’ll then look at that issue and then we’ll look at other issues in the future.
But clearly—let me just say this about Libya. I believe that the political pressure and the sanctions that were associated with the UN resolution since ’92 have helped drive Libya out of the counter-terrorism business. Although, if you read the report, they do not get a clear—there are some issues remaining—their links to terrorism have dramatically declined since the 1980s.83
Observers noted that Ambassador Sheehan was careful not to suggest that Libyan compliance with the UN Security Council resolutions in itself would necessarily be sufficient to remove them from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. In answering a question later in the press conference, he expanded and clarified the administration’s position on this point: “For Libya right now, the road map that I will get into at this point is complying with the UN Security Council resolutions. Beyond that, we will think about road maps after that. But for right now on Libya, we are focusing on those Security Council resolutions.”84
Shortly thereafter, Deputy Assistant Secretary Neumann outlined the core elements of U.S. policy toward Libya in a detailed statement on 4 May 2000 to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Describing U.S. policy toward Libya as a continuing story whose ending was not yet clear, Neumann began by emphasizing that U.S. policy goals vis-a-vis Libya had remained consistent throughout the last three presidential administrations. Those goals consisted of ending Libyan support for terrorism, together with preventing Tripoli’s ability to obtain weapons of mass destruction; containing Qaddafi’s regional ambitions; and ending Libyan opposition to the Middle East peace process. In the wake of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, a fourth policy goal was added: to bring to justice those persons responsible for the Lockerbie disaster. Acknowledging that Libya had reduced its support for terrorism and sought to distance itself from terrorist groups, Neumann added that more needed to be done:
On our key concerns—terrorism, opposition to Middle East peace, and regional intervention—Libya no longer poses the threat it once did. On WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and missiles, our efforts to impede Libya’s programs have had substantial success. That said, we must continue to watch Libya closely and will maintain pressure until all of these concerns are fully addressed. Our goal continues to be to deter Libyan policies of concern. An improved bilateral relationship is not, in itself, an end. We will oppose lifting UN sanctions against Libya until we are satisfied that Libya has met all the relevant UN Security Council requirements. The provisions of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act regarding investment in Libya’s petroleum sector will continue to be considered until, as the statute prescribes, the President has determined and certified to Congress that the UNSCR requirements have been met. Also until that time, we expect to maintain core unilateral economic sanctions prohibiting U.S.-Libyan business.85
Although Neumann’s statement contained nothing new in terms of American policy toward Libya, it was increasingly clear by mid-2000 that the Rogue Doctrine was no longer in vogue in the Clinton administration. After years of directing suspicion and sanctions at so-called rogue states, Secretary of State Albright declared on 19 June 2000 that in effect such states no longer existed. The entities once know as rogue nations had now become “states of concern.” The shift in official nomenclature, according to Secretary Albright, signaled an important change in the administration’s approach to the unofficial gallery of nations that included Libya. In depicting an evolution in the behavior of states formerly designated as rogue, the Clinton administration adopted the concept of states of concern in the belief that internal reforms might be advanced through the application of a more nuanced vocabulary. The Libyan decision to turn over to the United Nations the two suspects in the Pan Am bombing case was cited by American officials as one example of the new willingness of states formerly designated as rogue to address issues of primary concern to the U.S. government. The Qaddafi regime welcomed the decision in Washington to cease classifying Libya as a rogue state, describing the move as a rational one which symbolized the return of the United States to more just criteria.86
In actuality, a number of factors contributed to the decline in popularity of the Rogue Doctrine. First of all, the nations loosely grouped as rogue states for more than a decade had little in common in terms of geographic area, ideology, military capability, or population. While many of them possessed weapons of mass destruction or appeared to be developing them, the available evidence seemed stretched in some cases, including that of Libya. Application of the doctrine relied largely on policies of isolation and punishment of the offending rogue states, policies that proved difficult both to enact and to maintain effectively. The use of unilateral sanctions by the U.S. government to obtain its objectives was checkered at best over the past decade. And multilateral sanctions depended on the ability of Washington to persuade its allies around the world to take diplomatic and economic actions that were often unpopular with their own domestic and international constituencies.87
One of the last official acts of the Clinton administration was to notify Congress that it was continuing the state of emergency with Libya declared in January 1986. Citing ongoing concern for Libyan support for terrorism and its noncompliance with UN Security Council Resolutions 731, 748, and 883, President Clinton declared it “necessary to maintain in force the actions taken and currently in effect to apply economic pressure” on the Libyan government. In turn, the George W. Bush administration, after less than two weeks in office, indicated that it intended to move cautiously toward any relaxation of economic sanctions. Under pressure from the relatives of the Lockerbie victims, the new administration stated that Libya must accept responsibility for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and also indicated that the United States would not halt efforts to convict any others who played a part in the operation. In a ceremony welcoming home Al-Amin Khalifa Fhimah, the released defendant in the Lockerbie case, Qaddafi later rejected calls for compensation and railed against the U.S. government and its policies in the Middle East.88
In late February 2001, the White House issued a joint statement in which President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Libya to comply with all relevant UN Security Council resolutions. Representatives of both governments later held talks with the Libyan envoy at the United Nations aimed at spelling out what steps Libya should take to end UN sanctions. In exploratory discussions, London and Washington boiled down a series of Security Council resolutions into two core demands—acceptance by Libya of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and payment of appropriate compensation to the victims of the families—that had to be satisfied before sanctions would be lifted. Pan Am Flight 103-related discussions between American, British, and Libyan representatives continued throughout the year. When the Canadian government announced its intent to reestablish diplomatic relations with Libya, the White House in July stated that it saw nothing negative in the decision and welcomed having an ally like Canada represented in Libya.89
Even though President Bush had emphasized that he had no intention of easing sanctions on Libya, a White House energy policy plan unveiled in May 2001 recommended a review of current unilateral sanctions and their impact on energy policy. A major issue in this regard was the 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA), which was up for renewal in August 2001. The White House favored a renewal of ILSA for two years only, on the grounds it would give the administration more flexibility in dealing with Iran and Libya, but Congress voted overwhelmingly for a five-year extension, arguing the shorter extension would send the wrong message. Lawmakers contended that any move to limit the sanctions would signal a lack of resolve by the United States to combat terrorism and the states suspected of supporting it. The House version of the act, which passed by a 409–6 vote, offered a small concession to the administration in that it provided for a review of the law after two years. Both the House and Senate bills imposed tougher sanctions on Libya. Where the existing law was directed at companies that invested more than $40 million annually in Libyan energy production, the new bills reduced the limit to $20 million, the same limit in place for Iran.90
ILSA had long been opposed by America’s allies in Europe as well as by American oil companies. Extension of the sanctions, on the other hand, was strongly supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and many relatives of victims of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, who accused the Bush administration of hypocrisy. Many observers saw the decision to extend sanctions on Libya and Iran as a setback for the Bush administration, which had launched a review of U.S. sanctions policies as one of its first initiatives after taking office. Administration officials argued that sanctions were too often ineffective and needlessly hurt U.S. companies. A Libyan spokesperson termed the ILSA renewal a “cause for dismay and condemnation” and attributed it to “illusions created by Zionist propaganda.”91
Qaddafi swiftly condemned the 11 September terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, expressing sympathy with the many innocent victims. “Despite political differences and conflicts with America, this should not become a psychological barrier against offering assistance and humanitarian aid to U.S. citizens and all people in America, who suffered most from these horrific attacks.” In a televised address later in the month, the Libyan leader stated publicly that the United States had a right to take revenge for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Qaddafi also condemned the use of anthrax in the United States, terming it “the worst form of terrorism” and calling for international action to tackle a “very dangerous situation.”92
Soon after its inauguration on 20 January 1989, the George Bush administration initiated work on an interim security policy intended to continue U.S. defense spending at approximately Cold War levels until such time as a more credible threat surfaced. The product of this initiative, the so-called Rogue Doctrine, argued that regional conflict would shape the new world order in the foreseeable future. To respond to this threat, the doctrine called for the maintenance by the United States of a military force capable of reacting simultaneously to regional contingencies in two different parts of the world. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait occurred, by coincidence, at precisely the moment the Bush administration was beginning to sell the wisdom and viability of the new doctrine to the American people. The brutality of Saddam Hussein’s violation of Kuwait was a great help in marketing the Rogue Doctrine, which was soon widely accepted in the United States with little dialogue or dissent.
At the same time, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait served to stifle discussion of a possible peace dividend in the form of reduced military spending arising from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union. The prevailing circumstances also worked to restrain serious dialogue and analysis of the Rogue Doctrine as a meaningful policy statement. Consequently, little consensus developed as to what constituted a rogue state or what actions were necessarily appropriate and effective when one was encountered. The governments of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea were most commonly associated with the doctrine; however, they shared very little in the way of background, goals, or ideology. This was clearly demonstrated in their inability to work together or for most of them to work in concert with any other state for any appreciable period of time.
Conceived as an interim measure, the Rogue Doctrine defined American security policy as well as American policy toward the rogue states, especially Libya, for the remainder of the decade. After a cursory review of U.S. defense policy, the Clinton administration wholeheartedly embraced the core elements of the Rogue Doctrine to the extent that the transition of American policy toward Libya from Bush to Clinton was virtually seamless. In regard to Libya, the central concerns of policy makers in Washington for most of the decade were terrorism, opposition to Middle East peace, and regional intervention. These were the same issues that had troubled the Reagan administration as well as earlier American governments. American concern with the potential Libyan development of biological and chemical weapons, together with the ballistic missile systems required to deliver them, was a manifestation of these broader policy issues. The Lockerbie disaster later added a fourth issue to the bag of concerns that determined U.S. policy toward Libya after the mid-1970s. While often treated as a separate question, the Lockerbie issue did not exist as an isolated event but rather was a manifestation of the three central concerns of American policy.
Beginning with the Reagan administration, unilateral sanctions were a key element in the American response to Libyan foreign policy. The first Bush administration pushed for multilateral sanctions after unilateral sanctions proved ineffective, and the Clinton administration later continued the policy of multilateral sanctions as a tactical weapon to substantiate and enforce the Rogue Doctrine. While the Clinton administration hyped multilateral sanctions as an effective means to change the behavior of the Qaddafi regime, declining support for them after 1997–98, coupled with the considerations detailed earlier that compelled the Libyan leader to remand the Lockerbie suspects, suggested that multilateral sanctions were no more effective than their unilateral counterparts. On the contrary, one of the lessons to be learned from the application of UN sanctions against Libya was the difficulty in sustaining Third World support for such actions against a Third World country for any appreciable period of time. The second Bush administration displayed more flexibility on the sanctions issue, but Congress thwarted any substantial change in U.S. policy.
The Qaddafi regime, on the other hand, was guilty of totally misreading the American political scene after 1988. The Libyan leader saw windows of opportunity for improved relations with the United States where none existed. And he believed there was a constituency in America interested in improved relations with Libya where none existed in either the Democratic or Republican parties. On the contrary, the utility of the Rogue Doctrine as a means to justify military spending at something close to Cold War levels was contingent upon maintaining the viability of Libya and other rogue states as credible threats to American and global security. Any form of American rapprochement with Libya thus threatened to undermine the new, post-Cold War security doctrine embraced in the 1990s by the Bush and Clinton administrations. In this milieu, the erratic, often irrational, character of many of Qaddafi’s domestic and foreign policies only played into the hands of those American policy makers reluctant to chart a new course toward Libya.