Chapter Four

LYING DOWN WITH LIBYANS

On December 19, 2003, Libya came in from the cold. After almost thirty-five years of defying the world, the Libyan government announced that it would cease its efforts to develop and acquire chemical and nuclear weapons, would eliminate its existing stocks, and would open its facilities to inspection.1 The turnabout was quick. Inspectors arrived in January 2004 and within two months had certified Libya’s compliance with its agreement. While Iraq became symbolic of the chaos resulting from war, Libya became Exhibit A to prove the efficacy of American engagement with rogue regimes.

From Ally to Enemy and Back Again

Libya was a close American ally until September 1, 1969. Early that morning, while the moderate King Idris was abroad, a group of junior officers seized power. The twenty-seven-year-old Muammar Qadhafi soon emerged as the prime power within the Revolutionary Command Council, and then became the unquestioned dictator.

As they would with Iran a decade later, the State Department’s regional experts welcomed the Libyan revolution. Some may even have betrayed the names of counterrevolutionaries who had Qadhafi in their sights.2 Adopting a mix of Arab nationalism and anti-Western rhetoric, Qadhafi demanded the expulsion of Westerners, and even went so far as to exhume European and Jewish graves.3 He evicted U.S. forces from Wheelus Air Base, the largest American base in Africa. “The United States has made itself an adversary to the legitimate objectives of the Arab nation,” Qadhafi said. “We are faced with a hostile policy and we resist it.”4 Nevertheless, the Libyan regime announced its willingness to talk, if only the United States would change its foreign policy. Qadhafi advised Nixon to rid Washington of Zionist influence, and Qadhafi’s press minister blamed the failure of dialogue on a lack of White House interest.5 There was no change during Ford’s administration, so Qadhafi celebrated Jimmy Carter’s election and hoped that the new president might send an ambassador.6

It was not an ambassador who would eventually come, however, but Carter’s younger brother Billy. The president distanced himself from his brother’s antics, while behind the scenes he defended Billy and denied any impropriety.7 The U.S. embassy in Tripoli, for its part, viewed the visit positively. “There has been no negative fallout from Billy Carter’s visit,” the senior American diplomat in Tripoli reported. “In fact, on the local scene we would rate it a very positive event which has opened some doors for this embassy.”8

The doors would not be open for long. In December 1979, a Libyan mob attacked the embassy, inspired by the Iranian revolutionaries who had seized the embassy in Tehran a month earlier. Carter was not about to make the same mistake twice. He ordered U.S. diplomats withdrawn and shuttered the mission, although he let the Libyan embassy continue to operate in Washington, an inconsistency which the Reagan administration rectified in May 1981. Today, diplomats urge the United States to send ambassadors to engage rogues the world over, but during Carter’s presidency there was a bipartisan understanding that dialogue might continue at a lower level, though the dispatching of an ambassador was a reward for adversaries to earn.

Over subsequent years, relations between the United States and Libya reached their nadir. U.S. Navy jets downed two Libyan fighters that fired on them over the Gulf of Sidra, international waters claimed by Libya, in August 1981. Libyan support for terrorism increased throughout the decade. Investigators found Libyan fingerprints on the 1985 terrorist attacks at the Rome and Vienna airports, which killed nineteen and wounded 138. The following year, the U.S. Air Force bombed several targets in Libya after Qadhafi sponsored the bombing of Berlin’s La Belle disco, popular with U.S. servicemen.9 Finally, on December 21, 1988, Libyan intelligence officers bombed Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 on board and eleven on the ground.

Under Reagan, there was little direct diplomacy between Libya and the United States. What dialogue occurred was by bullhorn, as Reagan and Qadhafi publicly lambasted each other. Reagan, for example, called Qadhafi “the madman of the Middle East” and described him as part of “a new, international version of Murder Incorporated.”10 To Qadhafi, Reagan was “the vile actor” and, after a retaliatory bombing allegedly killed Qadhafi’s young daughter, a “child murderer” as well.11

Rather than seek dialogue, Reagan favored sanctions to penalize U.S. companies investing in Libya, a move that many American detractors called a “nuisance” more than a “heavy blow to either.”12 By 1988, the White House had concluded it could not get rid of Qadhafi, and decided instead to isolate him.13 To that end, U.S. officials began to show their European counterparts satellite and aerial photos of a huge Libyan chemical facility under construction at Rabta, forty miles south of Tripoli.14 A mysterious fire destroyed the plant the following year. Twenty years later, after Qadhafi acquiesced to inspections, the Libyan regime was still converting Rabta from a chemical weapons facility to a legitimate pharmaceuticals plant.15

It was the bombing of Pan Am 103, however, that dominated Libyan relations with the United States. The investigation was painstaking. Other countries had motive and means. Before settling on Libya, investigators theorized that Palestinian terrorists working for Iran may have targeted the flight in retaliation for the accidental downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the USS Vincennes the previous summer. But investigators had a gold mine of evidence because the Pan Am flight left Frankfurt late, so the time bomb detonated while the plane was over land rather than ocean; and that evidence pointed to Libya.

Reagan had considered the disco bombing in Berlin an act of war, and he responded in kind. The Pan Am bombing, however, occurred during the twilight of his presidency. Vice President George H. W. Bush, the president-elect, took the lead and chose to treat the Pan Am bombing as a crime. This may have been partly a policy decision and partly inevitable, since the weeks between the bombing and the investigation’s conclusion created a barrier to anything other than diplomacy. Both Washington and London demanded that Tripoli surrender the suspects to a Scottish court. They backed this demand with a cascade of UN Security Council sanctions and resolutions calling for Libya to surrender the suspects, cooperate with investigators, and pay compensation. The United Nations also imposed an arms embargo, restricted air travel to and from Libya, banned export of oil equipment to Libya, and froze some Libyan assets.

Qadhafi initially refused to accept UN jurisdiction because both the United States and the United Kingdom sat on the Security Council. Instead, Libya tried to shift jurisdiction to the International Court of Justice, which did not have the power to impose national sanctions.16

The process for hammering out jurisdiction was itself engagement. Ronald Bruce St. John, a Libya scholar, argued that Qadhafi hoped to reconcile with Bush. In October 1989, Libya’s foreign minister, Jadallah ‘Azzuz al-Talhi, expressed a desire to normalize relations with Washington without preconditions.17 This would have meant turning back the clock and welcoming diplomatic ties as if the Lockerbie bombing had never happened. Diplomacy’s advocates might seize upon such an olive branch, but doing so would have meant rehabilitating Libya without requiring it to pay any consequences for Lockerbie. The White House concluded that the cost of engagement under such terms was too high.

Over the next years, U.S.-Libya relations remained moribund. Diplomatic exchanges were sporadic, usually conducted through third parties, and limited to discussions over Lockerbie and Libya’s weapons programs. The erratic Qadhafi, however, craved direct contact. “The Bush administration must sit face to face with Libya so that we can agree on the issues in dispute,” he told reporters in 1989.18 Neither the elder Bush nor Bill Clinton after him would submit to Qadhafi’s demand. Both understood that if they were to allow direct diplomacy, Qadhafi would be the winner. Qadhafi need never give a concession nor engage sincerely, for the moment he met an American diplomat, he would have all he craved. Not only would the White House have legitimized his rule, but he could then humiliate U.S. leaders through words and actions, enhancing his own stature in the process.

U.S. rejection of engagement did not stop Qadhafi from trying. In February 1992, a man claiming to be a naval attaché at the Libyan embassy in Athens approached Gary Hart, the former senator, who was then traveling in Greece on business. When Hart reported the contact to the State Department, he learned that the Libyans had already made several approaches to different intermediaries but the White House refused to pursue relations until Qadhafi turned over the Lockerbie bombers.19

Senators have tremendous egos, so they make useful idiots for dictators. Hart was no exception, and he decided to continue his dialogue with the Libyans. In March 1992, he met with Yusuf Dibri, head of the Libyan Intelligence Service, and two other Libyan officials in Geneva. Dibri told Hart that Qadhafi would turn over the Lockerbie suspects in exchange for an agreement to begin talks on normalization and lifting sanctions. Hart later complained that the Bush administration was dismissive of this offer, almost unreasonably so. “We might have brought the Pan Am bombers to justice, and quite possibly have moved Libya out of its renegade status, much sooner than we have,” he wrote.20 In giving the benefit of the doubt to Qadhafi, Hart followed a common pattern in U.S. engagement with rogue leaders: ambitious intermediaries place greater faith in their adversary’s goodwill than in their own president.

At its core, the Libya debate was nonpartisan. Clinton also kept U.S. relations with Libya on ice, largely due to concern about Libya’s WMD ambitions. In 1995, the IAEA found that Libya had made a “strategic decision to reinvigorate its nuclear activities, including gas centrifuge uranium enrichment.”21 The following year, Congress passed the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, which authorized the president to impose sanctions on any company investing more than $40 million annually in Libya’s oil industry.

Diplomats often describe the United States and the United Kingdom as sharing a “special relationship,” yet the two states seldom approach rogue regimes in a coordinated manner. While Washington was isolating Libya, London was reaching out to Qadhafi to get him to end his assistance for the Irish Republican Army.

For Qadhafi, however, it was the United States and not Britain that was the big prize. When the Hart channel did not produce, he turned to Milton Viorst, a former Washington Post and New Yorker writer sympathetic to Arab autocrats. Dibri invited Viorst to visit. Viorst dutifully fulfilled his role, meeting Qadhafi in the desert south of Sirte. The Libyan leader complained to him, “we want a reconciliation with America, but America doesn’t want a reconciliation with us.”22 A Libyan diplomat, Abdulati Alobeidi, reported that he had tried reaching out to Washington, not only directly but also through Egypt, Morocco, Italy, and South Africa. No matter where he turned, Clinton rebuffed him.

Qadhafi wanted sanctions lifted as soon as the Lockerbie trial began. This would, however, have removed any leverage for collecting reparations. The stalemate continued until April 5, 1999, when Libya handed the two Lockerbie suspects over to Dutch authorities for trial under Scottish law in The Hague.

The State Department, meanwhile, concluded that Libya had “not been implicated in any international terrorist act for several years.”23 In 1999, and in response to demands passed to him through private channels, Qadhafi expelled the Abu Nidal Organization from its Libyan safe haven, from which it had targeted Jews and Westerners in Europe and the Middle East for almost twenty years.

Qadhafi’s about-face was the result of accumulated sanctions and low oil prices, which weakened his ability to resist isolation. His acquiescence to the Lockerbie trial began the process of reconciliation. Even though the British had intercepted an illegal shipment of missile parts bound for Libya in May 1999, two months later London and Tripoli resumed diplomatic relations, which had been suspended fifteen years earlier.24

On January 31, 2001, the Scottish court convicted Abdelbaset Ali Mohamed al-Megrahi of downing Pan Am 103, but declared motive and Qadhafi’s culpability beyond the scope of the case.25 It was a convenient dodge, for it enabled the State Department to pretend the Libyan regime did not directly have American blood on its hands. Soon afterward, Assistant Secretary William Burns began secret talks with Qadhafi’s regime.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Qadhafi condemned al-Qaeda and positioned himself as an ally in the Bush administration’s war against terrorism. “Despite political differences with America, it is a humanitarian obligation to offer condolences to the American people on this serious and horrible incident, which has aroused the conscience of humanity,” he said.26 Given his past support for a host of terrorist groups—ranging from the Irish Republican Army to myriad Palestinian factions to Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines—his about-face was rich, but American and British diplomats were willing to embrace the fiction.

While British and Libyan diplomats and parliamentarians traded trips, it was intelligence agents like Stephen Kappes, the CIA’s deputy chief of covert operations, who carried out the substantive dialogue. The British press noted the irony that MI6 was not only negotiating with Musa Kusa, head of Libya’s external security service, expelled from Britain two decades earlier for endorsing the murder of Libyan dissidents overseas, but also providing him with sensitive intelligence to use against members of an anti-Qadhafi Libyan terrorist group.27 The State Department also dismissed outrage about Musa Kusa, whom Lockerbie victims believed was complicit in the attack. Publicly, spokesman Richard Boucher explained that neither the Libyans nor the Americans had vetted each other’s delegations.28 Privately, diplomats argued that most of Musa Kusa’s intelligence benefited the United States. Dialogue means talking with enemies; rogues are not antiseptic partners.

Simultaneously, lawyers representing Lockerbie victim families began negotiating with the Libyan government for compensation. Only in August 2002 did Qadhafi agree “in principle” to pay compensation.29 For U.S. and British officials, the families’ suit was both helpful and problematic. The State Department traditionally opposes lawsuits against foreign governments for fear that, in an age of moral equivalence, foreigners will bring lawsuits against the United States too. Burns resented the actions of the victims’ families, but they forced the State Department to take a firm line and hold Tripoli to account. This became apparent with the announcement of a deal that tied family compensation to the lifting of sanctions. The State Department had never expected linkage between the private settlement and government action. Only when it became evident that most families accepted the settlement did the State Department agree not to oppose the deal.30

Dialogue continued through the winter and into spring. Just because his aides were talking, however, did not mean that Qadhafi’s intentions were clear. After all, both Iranian and Palestinian officials had engaged in dialogue that their political leadership later disavowed. There was a breakthrough in March 2003 when Qadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam met three MI6 officers in a London hotel to discuss WMD. The next day, he flew to Burkina Faso to get his father’s blessing to continue. Diplomatic footsie was over; Libya had decided to put its cards on the table. There followed a meeting between Musa Kusa and top MI6 and CIA officers to hash out issues that had festered since the Reagan administration.

Lockerbie remained the major obstacle in Libya’s quest to end its isolation. By August 2003, Qadhafi decided he had had enough. He formally accepted responsibility for the bombing and agreed to compensate victims’ families to the tune of $10 million for each passenger on Pan Am 103, a total of $2.7 billion to be placed in escrow. The agreement stipulated that money would be paid to each victim’s family in installments: $4 million when the United Nations lifted sanctions, $4 million when the United States lifted economic sanctions not related to its terrorism list, and the final $2 million upon the State Department’s removal of Libya from the list. When the Security Council voted to lift sanctions less than a month later, Libya made the first payments.

The restitution agreement was not officially approved by the United States, but it reflected Libya’s agenda and laid out benchmarks for negotiations. The non-terrorism-related sanctions mostly concerned Libya’s WMD program. The talks over WMD were already at their five-month mark, but American and British policymakers were still not certain that Qadhafi was sincere.

With Bush’s blessing, Prime Minister Tony Blair sent a letter to Qadhafi on September 6, 2003, agreeing to end sanctions and begin military cooperation should he come clean on WMD.31 Qadhafi, it turned out, was not acting on good faith. Unbeknownst to diplomats, intelligence analysts were tracking a shipment of nuclear equipment heading to Libya from a Malaysian factory affiliated with A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist. On October 3, 2003, German and Italian authorities acting on behalf of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a U.S.-backed multinational antiproliferation effort, intercepted the suspect ship and forced it to dock in Italy. On board, inspectors found parts bound for Libya’s covert nuclear program. The discovery was a game changer. “The capture of the BBC China helped make clear to Libya that we had a lot of information about what it was doing,” said John S. Wolf, the assistant secretary for nonproliferation at the time.32

While the incident showed that Qadhafi had engaged in bad faith, hindsight suggests that the interdiction convinced him that his deception was not worth it. Successful diplomacy requires not merely agreeing to sit with an adversary, but possessing superior intelligence. Engagement with a rogue should be a high-stakes poker game in which the United States can see its opponent’s cards. The invasion of Iraq also shifted Qadhafi’s cost-benefit analysis. Whereas Qadhafi may initially have tried to achieve a détente at a limited cost, perhaps by sacrificing only his chemical weapons programs, he came to realize the extent of U.S. intelligence, to understand that he could not hide weapons without consequence, and to acknowledge that on some subjects Bush did not bluff.33

On December 19, 2003, Qadhafi announced that Libya would come clean. At first he had resisted a full public declaration, but the American negotiating team insisted. As Robert Joseph explained, “The U.S. and U.K. participants believed that, without such a public acknowledgment and commitment, the strategic decision was absent or would be easily reversible.”34

On January 18, 2004, Donald Mahley, deputy assistant secretary for arms control, led a team of experts to Libya to inventory its nuclear program components. Nine days later, the U.S. airlifted twenty-seven tons of documents and components relating to Libya’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. The team worked quickly, knowing that the mercurial Qadhafi might reverse course at any time. On March 6, 2004, a U.S. tanker sailed from Tripoli, removing additional equipment and Scud missiles that North Korea had sold to Libya. Two days later, U.S., British, and IAEA officials arranged to fly thirteen kilograms of highly enriched uranium to Russia.35

It did not take long for Washington to begin Qadhafi’s rehabilitation. Even before Mahley had departed, Tom Lantos, the ranking minority member on the House International Relations Committee and a fierce advocate of engagement, became the first U.S. congressman in decades to visit Libya. On February 26, 2004, the Bush administration lifted the ban on American citizen travel to Libya, invited the Libyan government to open an interests section in Washington, and publicly urged more people-to-people exchanges. Finally, on March 23, 2004, Burns met Qadhafi, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Libya in thirty-five years. The Washington Post described the atmosphere at the State Department as “almost giddy.”36 Not all was well, however. Qadhafi was still dragging his feet on compensating terror victims. He knew that once the Western floodgates were opened, it would be difficult for the White House to close them again.

In the face of the diplomatic progress to that point, it was easy for American diplomats to believe Qadhafi was a changed man. But while the Libyan strongman had agreed to pay compensation for those he murdered over Lockerbie, among other attacks, he refused to accept that the penalty was due to terrorism. A day after Libyan negotiators agreed to compensate the disco bombing victims, Saleh Abd Ussalam, the head of Libya’s quasi-governmental Qadhafi Foundation, demanded that Washington pay it compensation for the 1986 airstrikes on Libya.37 “The families of the victims stress the need to prosecute those who caused their losses, and also the need for them to obtain their civil rights in terms of compensation,” according to Libyan television.38

Qadhafi was correct in concluding that he could backslide with impunity. On April 23, 2004, Bush terminated the Libya component of the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act, lifted a ban on U.S. commercial investment in the Libyan oil industry, and dropped Washington’s longstanding objection to Libyan membership in the World Trade Organization. Qadhafi responded by demanding that Bush stand trial for the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal in Iraq.39 Nevertheless, on June 28, 2004, the United States resumed diplomatic relations with Libya. Qadhafi responded by starting a legal defense fund for Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator.40 Still, on September 20, after the Qadhafi Foundation agreed to pay compensation to the Lockerbie victims, Bush canceled executive orders imposed by Reagan and Clinton that had frozen Libyan assets in the United States, barred overflights and air links, and placed sanctions on Libya and prohibited importation into the United States of petroleum products refined in Libya. A year later, Bush issued waivers to allow export of military equipment to Libya. And, on May 15, 2006, Rice announced Washington’s intention to send an ambassador to Tripoli at the end of the month. Libya remained as autocratic as ever, denying freedom of movement to American diplomats.41 No matter—few Bush administration officials sought to talk to anyone beyond Qadhafi’s immediate family.42

As the State Department removed Libya from its State Sponsors of Terrorism list, it lauded Libya’s about-face. “Libya has responded in good faith not only in the area of international terrorism but also in the related field of weapons of mass destruction,” the department announced, adding, “Libya is an important model to point to as we press for changes in policy by other countries (such as Iran, North Korea, and others), changes that are vital to U.S. national security interests and to international peace and security.”43

If Washington moved fast to rehabilitate Qadhafi, London moved even faster. On March 25, 2004, Tony Blair became the first British leader to visit Libya since Winston Churchill went there during World War II. Blair, perhaps too eager, allowed Qadhafi to stage-manage the encounter. Libyan television broadcast the meeting as Qadhafi pointed the sole of his shoe, a traditional sign of disdain, toward his partner in peace.44 Nevertheless, Blair was followed to Libya by a half dozen other ministers.

After every major meeting, Qadhafi instigated a crisis. On May 6, 2004, a Libyan court sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death on charges of infecting several hundred Libyan children with HIV, even though the French doctor who first identified the HIV outbreak concluded that it started a year before the Bulgarians’ arrival. The Libyan government nevertheless used the scandal to demand $5.5 billion in compensation for the families. Despite the State Department’s wishful thinking, Qadhafi had not reformed.

The Libyans claimed that delays in removing Libya from the terrorism list meant they need not make the final payment to Lockerbie victims. The reason for the delay, however, was Qadhafi’s complicity in a plot to kill Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. In August 2003, as Qadhafi was pledging his intent to change, British authorities questioned an American Muslim activist who had been stopped with $340,000 in a suitcase, and who admitted his involvement in the assassination plot. The Libyan foreign minister, Abdel Rahman Shalqam, called the allegation “completely unfounded,” but Saudi authorities said a Libyan intelligence official in Saudi custody had corroborated the account and fingered Abdullah al-Sanusi, Qadhafi’s brother-in-law and director of military intelligence, along with Musa Kusa, the chief interlocutor for American and British authorities.45

Even so, the State Department soon removed Libya from the terrorism list, albeit without an announcement.46 Wishing to take the spotlight off its terror support, Libya made its final $1.5 billion payment on October 31, 2008. The White House was willing to turn a blind eye to terrorism for the sake of preserving the deal.

The deal, moreover, netted a profit for Qadhafi. Not only did Libya receive a flood of investment upon the lifting of sanctions, but the State Department actually provided Libya with aid for nonproliferation and antiterrorism programs, a curious use of taxpayer dollars given Libya’s oil wealth.47 Further, on August 14, 2008, Tripoli and Washington signed a comprehensive Claims Settlement Agreement, which allowed Libyan claimants to seek compensation for U.S. military strikes, in effect rewarding Qadhafi’s past terror. Soon afterward, Rice visited Libya, the first secretary of state to do so since 1953.

Relations improved further under Obama, at least initially. While Qadhafi complained that normalization was not quick enough nor relations warm enough, Obama bestowed honors on the mercurial dictator that no predecessor ever had. On July 9, 2009, for example, Obama became the first U.S. president to meet Qadhafi as both attended the G8 summit dinner in L’Aquila, Italy. Less than a year later, the United States and Libya signed a trade and investment pact. Almost $60 billion in Libyan infrastructure projects was at stake.48 Within two years, however, Obama would build a coalition against the rehabilitated rogue, supporting rebel forces who would capture and summarily kill the Libyan strongman.

Did Engagement Work?

Was it engagement alone that brought Libya in from the cold? Willingness to talk does not necessarily mean sincere engagement. Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, won a Nobel Peace Prize for sitting with Israelis, yet he refused to abandon terrorism, and even after eight years of talks he simply walked away from the agreement his aides had accepted. Had U.S. diplomats rushed into negotiations with Qadhafi during the Clinton administration, Libya might have avoided accountability for the Lockerbie bombing.

Theories swirl as to why Qadhafi acted when he did. Years of sanctions played a role. One European diplomat told the New York Times, “He realized that Libya was on a path of international isolation and internal stagnation after 30 years of concentrated economic wrecking.”49 Qadhafi was also scared. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he reportedly began to “call every Arab leader on his Rolodex,” worried that Bush would target him for retaliation much as Reagan had fifteen years earlier.50

The looming Iraq War also added to Qadhafi’s anxiety. On February 11, 2003, the CIA director, George Tenet, reported that “Libya clearly intends to re-establish its offensive chemical weapons capability.”51 The Libyan press, reflecting the regime’s mindset, warned that Bush might consider using nuclear weapons against Libya.52 As U.S. troops advanced on Baghdad, John Bolton, under secretary for arms control and international security, suggested that the invasion of Iraq “sends a message that when the President of the United States says that all options are open in his determination to rid countries of weapons of mass destruction, that he is serious about it.” Bolton singled out Libya, Iran, and Syria as countries that should learn a lesson from Iraq.53

The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer argued that it would be counterfactual to ignore Iraq’s importance. “After 18 years of American sanctions, Gaddafi randomly picks Dec. 19, 2003, as the day for his surrender. By amazing coincidence, Gaddafi’s first message to Britain—principal U.S. war ally and conduit to White House war councils—occurs just days before the invasion of Iraq. And his final capitulation to U.S.-British terms occurs just five days after Saddam is fished out of a rat hole.”54 The conclusion was clear to Robert Joseph, senior director for nonproliferation in the National Security Council at the time: “Without the use of force in Iraq and the successful interdiction of the BBC China, the outcome almost certainly would have been different.”55

Bush voiced similar logic in his 2004 State of the Union address when he said, “Nine months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not. And one reason is clear: For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible and no one can now doubt the word of America.” For his part, Qadhafi himself had already hinted at the importance of Iraq in his own calculations, saying, “When Bush has finished with Iraq, we’ll quickly have a clear idea of where he’s going. It won’t take long to find out if Iran, Saudi Arabia or Libya will be targets as well.”56 Libyan officials have subsequently confirmed the importance of Bush’s mobilization against Iraq in Qadhafi’s nuclear turnaround.57

The Iraq War was a polarizing moment, however. Many analysts, infected with “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” refused to find any merit in Bush’s policy. Ronald Bruce St. John, a historian of Libya, argued that Bush deserved no credit for the change in Qadhafi’s behavior. “The bellicose policies of the Bush administration, as opposed to accelerating the long-anticipated change in Libyan policy, actually delayed it,” he wrote, offering no evidence for his charge.58 Still, some Bush critics grudgingly acknowledged that force played a part.59

Martin Indyk, a Clinton National Security Council official, spoke of how Qadhafi had actually offered to forfeit his WMD programs in May 1999 during secret negotiations. It is true that Qadhafi approached the administration, but had the White House agreed to engage at that time, it would have undercut the resolution of Lockerbie. It is a common malady among American diplomats to regard all engagement as beneficial. Too often, they believe that if they can entrap rogues in process—even insincere rogues—they can compel them to reach a resolution.

Libyan authorities approached Bush and Blair again in the spring of 2003, nine months before the eventual agreement.60 Even then, Qadhafi was insincere, as the BBC China incident shows. Rather than abandon WMD, he wanted to keep all options on the table. Through years of negotiation, he sought tactical diplomatic advantage, not sincere resolution.61

The Cost of Dialogue

While diplomats debate where credit should go for the dialogue that led Qadhafi to forfeit his WMD and reach a resolution of Lockerbie, there has been far less conversation about the cost of engagement. Certainly, it was a diplomatic coup to force Qadhafi to give up his nuclear program without a shot being fired. The CIA received a rare opportunity to calibrate its analysis to reality and found that it had underestimated the speed and sophistication of Qadhafi’s missile program, the reach of A. Q. Khan’s nuclear network, and the extent to which al-Qaeda welcomed Libyan members.62

If Qadhafi believed that Bush had an itchy trigger finger, and if sanctions had left him economically vulnerable, might the State Department have driven a harder bargain and demanded more concessions from Libya on terrorism and human rights? Seeking to avoid complications, U.S. officials refrained from criticizing Libya’s human rights record too harshly. When Colin Powell said the United States had “no illusions about Colonel Qadhafi or the nature of his regime,”63 Libya’s foreign minister, Abdel Rahman Shalqam, threatened him with a lawsuit “because his statement implies insult and libel against all Libyans.”64 The following day, the Libyan daily Az-Zahf al-Akhdar printed a racist tirade against Powell.

The State Department traditionally avoids soapbox diplomacy and remains silent in the face of crude rhetoric; diplomats are conflict-averse. Following Libya’s tirade, the State Department refrained from any serious criticism of human rights in Libya so as not to sour dialogue. The Bush administration did not speak out forcefully when Libya assumed the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Commission in January 2003 beyond calling it “a rather odd choice.”65 Qadhafi concluded he had a free pass and proceeded to publish missives rebutting criticism of the human rights situation in Libya.66 He grew so bold that he even called publicly for his supporters to “kill enemies” who sought political reform.67

In a 2003 study group report, the Atlantic Council argued that political reform need not be the focus of engagement, because it would naturally follow when Libya’s isolation ended. Qadhafi’s “arbitrary, authoritarian style is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world,” argued Chester Crocker, a retired diplomat, and C. Richard Nelson, international security director at the Atlantic Council. “This suggests that more active engagement could influence changes in Libya more effectively than continued isolation.”68

Major news outlets accepted Qadhafi’s son Saif, the regime’s chief interlocutor with the West, at face value. The Washington Post described Saif Qadhafi as defying hardliners to display a “commitment to political freedoms and free-market reforms,” while the New York Times said he was aiming “to dismantle a legacy of Socialism and authoritarianism.”69

Events proved them wrong. The decision to remain silent on human rights enabled rapprochement to continue apace, but dissidents like Fathi El-Jahmi paid the price. Libya’s most prominent democracy advocate, El-Jahmi was imprisoned in 2002 for advocating free speech and democracy at a public meeting hosted by Qadhafi. When the Libyan government released El-Jahmi on March 12, 2004, it won White House praise. President Bush called his release “an encouraging step toward reform in Libya.”70 Two weeks later, however, Libyan security forces rearrested El-Jahmi after he spoke with Alhurra, a U.S.-funded satellite station, about his desire for democracy. Fearing that human rights advocacy could derail rapprochement, the White House declined to demand El-Jahmi’s release. The Libyan government “have cautioned that they view discussion of individual cases as improper interference in their internal affairs,” the American embassy in Libya warned Rice.71 El-Jahmi languished in prison while the regime harassed his family. When he fell ill from chronic conditions, Qadhafi’s regime refused him basic medical care. Through it all, the Bush administration remained largely silent. On May 21, 2009, El-Jahmi died. State Department officials viewed his case as unfortunate, but saw in his death the possibility for better relations.

Libyan repression of El-Jahmi represented the rule rather than the exception. Bush’s silence had a price. The Libyan government sponsored a pogrom against a large Berber town, and American diplomats avoided the issue so as not to antagonize the regime.72 Regional dictators saw that they need not fear White House wrath, that Bush’s rhetoric about democracy and dissent had become empty. Many realists argue that the human rights practices of other countries should not be an overriding U.S. policy concern, or that, at the very least, they should be subordinate to counterterrorism and counterproliferation. The human rights issue, however, has a direct impact on international credibility. Dispensing with it while possessing a strong hand means an opportunity lost.

Within the State Department, other motives may also have been at play. David Welch, assistant secretary for Near Eastern affairs and point man on Libya, retired from the Foreign Service in December 2008 and almost immediately began to work for Bechtel, helping the firm win lucrative contracts in Libya.73 As Qadhafi gunned down dissidents three years later, Welch met with the Libyan strongman to help him avoid culpability. The revolving door with wealthy dictatorships creates a conflict of interest. Diplomats know that only those who cultivate good relations with autocratic rulers can expect a golden parachute. Had Welch antagonized Qadhafi too much with entreaties to free El-Jahmi, for example, he might have put his retirement at risk.

It is also unclear whether the State Department’s engagement with Libya substantively altered Qadhafi’s embrace of terrorism. The Libyan regime had already modified its behavior before it began direct engagement with U.S. diplomats.74 And while it is true that Qadhafi cooperated with the United States with regard to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, both of which targeted Qadhafi’s regime, it was an exaggeration to call Libya “a top partner in combating transnational terrorism,” as the American ambassador to Libya did.75 Qadhafi continued to support other terror groups either materially or morally, from Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines to Palestinian groups fighting Israel. Qadhafi continued to welcome Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC) at a time when the group still sponsored suicide bombings in Israel.76 The British government reported that Libya sought to purchase 130,000 Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifles for questionable end users.77 That the State Department did not require Qadhafi to accept a precise definition of terrorism allowed the regime a way to sidestep its commitments.

Qadhafi’s subsequent actions underline the danger of believing that engagement alone changes behavior. As Qadhafi traveled through Europe on his first trip to the continent in fifteen years, he threatened to return to violence should he not get his way diplomatically. “We do hope that we shall not be obliged or forced one day to go back to those days where we bomb our cars or put explosive belts around our beds and around our women,” he told a Brussels news conference.78 The plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia underscored his threats, and in January 2008, Iraqi officials accused Saif Qadhafi of sponsoring a group of foreign fighters who crossed into Iraq from Syria in order to conduct terrorism.79

Nor did it appear that Qadhafi had changed his stripes when it came to proliferation. While announcing, to diplomatic applause, that it would end its military trade with countries “of concern for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” Libya cheated, selling weaponry to Syria as that country was constructing a covert nuclear facility.80 The list of equipment the Syrians wished to purchase from Libya left little doubt about their intentions.

The Syria episode was not Qadhafi’s only bout of insincerity. On June 14, 2007, Libya canceled its contract with the United States to destroy its chemical weapons. Libyan officials blamed their reversal on the cost of clearing the chemical stockpiles, and laid blame on a grassroots environmental campaign.81 The State Department, never letting discernment interfere with its public posture, continued to describe Libya as “a model of nonproliferation.”82

If diplomats expected engagement to change Libyan behavior or usher in a period of Libyan responsibility, they were wrong. Questions over continued Libyan support for terrorism delayed the return of a U.S. ambassador to Tripoli until December 2008.83 When the Libyan leader rose to the podium to address the United Nations General Assembly for the first time in September 2009, it was not the reformed Qadhafi but the old one, demanding $7.77 trillion in compensation from the West for its imperial crimes, and suggesting that swine flu was manufactured in a military laboratory.84 American diplomats privately reported how tenuous Qadhafi’s adherence to his agreements was, describing how the Libyan government sought to sell uranium yellowcake and also to keep highly enriched uranium, which it had agreed to dispose of in order to extract new concessions, including the provision of U.S. weaponry.85 Indeed, as soon as Western leaders and the United Nations unfroze Libyan assets, Qadhafi began hoarding money to help him weather future rounds of sanctions.86 His wholesale slaughter of Libyan civilians and wanton launching of Scud missiles at civilian population centers were the exclamation point to his insincerity.

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The 2003 deal to bring Libya in from the cold became the marquee case to justify diplomacy with rogue regimes. The engagement clearly achieved its immediate goals: Qadhafi forfeited his nuclear program and agreed to compensate victims of Libyan terrorism. To credit engagement alone, however, would be naïve. Qadhafi treated U.S. diplomacy as credible only when he believed it his best option to avoid military force. Once America waivered in Iraq and he recognized second-term Bush administration rhetoric to be empty, his compliance with agreements fell short. While Bush was willing to deal with Qadhafi, he did so by sacrificing Libyan human rights. That might be a worthwhile price for U.S. national security, but it is irresponsible to pretend that the sacrifice of human rights is a price that does not need to be paid. Nor did diplomacy change Qadhafi’s behavior. Even if talks did convince Qadhafi to strike a deal and stick by it, to believe that rogue leaders will ever change their personalities or behavior is fantasy. It was the Libyan people who demonstrated what Western diplomats never understood: the only way to end a rogue regime is to oust the rogue.