Part 2. Libyan Winter.

I. The Bang That Ends Qaddafi’s Rule

“Like me, you now await your cross with dread.

Whenever night falls, the echoes of a

phonograph record bring you back.

You traitor. Yes. The worst of all is to have betrayed.”

—Muhammad Farhat al-Shaltami,

“Indictment,” July 26, 1969 (tr. Elliot Cola).

The WikiLeaks cache of US State Department documents from Embassy Tunisia revealed some rather sordid details about the life of Ben Ali and his family. One such cable, from 2008, noted, “President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption. Often referred to as a quasi-mafia, an oblique mention of ‘the Family’ is enough to indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage. Ben Ali’s wife, Leila Ben Ali, and her extended family—the Trabelsis—provoke the greatest ire from Tunisians. Along with the numerous allegations of Trabelsi corruption are often barbs about their lack of education, low social status, and conspicuous consumption.” Revelations such as these provoked the final disgust with Ben Ali. He lost legitimacy. There was nothing left.

Across the border, in Tripoli, Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi once more opted for the erratic. He went on Libyan State Television on January 16, and then offered his statement of support for Ben Ali (oddly calling WikiLeaks Kleenex), “Even you, my Tunisian brothers. You may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet. This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in; do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner. It can suck anything. Any useless person: any liar, any drunkard, anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs: can talk on the Internet. And you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of Facebook and Kleenex and YouTube? Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods?” Ben Ali had already left his post. Qaddafi perhaps feared that the contagion would spread into Libya, and to an extent it did. But the fate that would befall Qaddafi was not spread by WikiLeaks or Facebook or even the dreaded YouTube (where I watched his January 16 speech). It would come from older movements, with deeper roots and grievances.

Around January 16, Qaddafi remained a loyal soldier in the US-led War on Terror and in the promotion of neoliberal consumerism (apart from his general “uncle-like” antipathy to information technology). In this way, Qaddafi resembled Ben Ali and Mubarak, which is perhaps what provoked his television address. In early February 2011, the IMF said of Libya that it has followed its “ambitious reform agenda” and the Fund encouraged Libya’s “strong macroeconomic performance and the progress on enhancing the role of the private sector.” These are all things that were said of Tunisia (praised by the IMF for its “wide-ranging structural reforms” and “prudent macroeconomic management” in September 2010) and Egypt (praised by the IMF for its five years of “reforms and prudent macroeconomic policies,” in April 2010): neoliberal consumerism set aside the social costs to the population, the human sector that was not sound and did not benefit from prudent state policies. The pain of the IMF-led policies pushed the needle of distress beyond the bearable. Combined with the lack of democracy and the harshness of the security state, it is no wonder that the contagion spread as rapidly as it did.

Libya, however, did not suffer the sharp rise in grain prices, nor the overarching distress afforded by the global credit crunch that began in 2007. The centrally planned economy cushioned the macroeconomic indicators from the kind of free-fall that took place in Tunisia and Egypt. There were no bread riots in late 2010, nor was the protest in February linked directly to economic matters. Other issues took center stage in Libya, mainly anger at the suppression of genuine democratic opportunities for the population.

Rumors of a demonstration on February 17, 2011 hastened the hand of the Qaddafi regime. Two days before, the police arrested human rights lawyer Fathi Terbil Salwa and the novelist Idris al-Mesmari. They, along with other lawyers such as Salwa al-Dighaili, made up the leadership of the February 17 Movement, formed to commemorate the date of the 2006 police firing in Benghazi at a demonstration which killed ten, and to build the movement for civil liberties that grew out of it. In 2006, the police opened fire at a crowd that assembled before the Italian consulate in Benghazi to protest against the Italian minister Roberto Calderoli, who had worn a t-shirt that depicted an offensive and Islamophobic cartoon published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Not only was this demonstration against the tide of Islamophobia sweeping through Europe, but it was also against the old colonial power, Italy, whose minister seemed to relish being hateful. That the police opened fire to defend the consulate of the old colonial power sent a chill through Benghazi, where there were deep roots of anger against the Qaddafi regime.

What was so remarkable about the 2006 protest and the movement that built on it was its catholic reach: the original protestors were largely political Islamists as well as pious Muslims and those who defended them were middle-class professionals and intellectuals (Terbil, al-Dighaili and al-Mesmari, for instance). The police firing revived deep-seated anger at the way Qaddafi’s regime has treated the eastern part of the country (the old Ottoman vilayat of Cyrenaica), and it underscored the basic military state character of the Qaddafi regime, easy to turn to guns when other means lay at its disposal.

A few hundred people gathered outside the police headquarters to protest the arrest of Terbil and al-Mismari. The police broke up the crowd, and the Qaddafi regime sent the interior minister Abdullah Senussi and Sa’adi Qaddafi to take charge of the city. Sa’adi, who gives off the impression of being lost, fancies himself as a peace-maker and tried to walk the streets of Benghazi to that end. His charms were lost on the city. It was a failed mission. Enthused protestors gathered at the Maydan al-Shajara, where they fought off the police attempt to break up their resolve. News of the Benghazi revolt spread to other towns, and in Al Bayda’ and Az Zintan the protestors burned down the traffic police headquarters and the police station respectively. The revolt, in earnest, tried to match the state repression with its own violence. There was no other way to go. Qaddafi’s Libya would not tolerate a Gandhi. It had to be fought with force of arms.

On February 17, the Days of Rage protest was larger than it would have been had Qaddafi’s regime not made the arrests two days before hand. Those arrests provided the best advertisement for the protests. Rumors spread that Qaddafi’s regime, like Mubarak’s before him, released thirty prisoners, armed them, and sent them to shoot at the protestors. Fourteen people died that day, with some additional killed in sporadic fighting in Al Bayda’, Az Zintan and Darnah. The numbers were not huge, but they are of course considerable (ten here, thirteen there). Undaunted, the next day, the protestors in Al Bayda’ captured a military base. In a sign of what was to come, the rebels executed “fifty African mercenaries and two Libyan conspirators” (according to al-Jazeera). In Derna, the rebels burnt down a police station, where prisoners died in their cells. Focus remained on the institutions of repression, the police and the military.

On February 20, a forty-eight year old executive at the state oil company, Mahdi Ziu, filled his truck with propane tanks and drove into the gates of Benghazi’s katiba, the barracks that housed the main force of the regime. Protestors rushed in, and took the barracks.

By February 21, the city was in the hands of the rebels. Qaddafi’s envoys (Sa’adi Qaddafi and Abdullah Senussi) fled back to Tripoli. The hasty speed of the fall of Benghazi showed the brittleness of the regime. Its base of support in the city was negligible, and its command over the repressive apparatus minimal. Those that remained with Qaddafi, such as the troops in the Elfedeel Bu Omar compound, were besieged and, as news reports put it, “butchered by angry mobs.”

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay denounced the behavior of the Libyan government. More condemnation would come soon. On February 22, the former British Foreign Minister David Owen called for “military intervention” and on February 23, Luxemburg’s Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn called the situation “genocide.” The words genocide and military intervention were chilling. They represented a push from the Atlantic powers to transform the rebellion into a massacre, and to insert themselves into North Africa and its Spring. Events on the ground did not suggest that things were so bleak for the rebels. The rebel’s advance continued, and by the end of February the rebels had seized Libyan Air Force planes and Libyan navy ships. For which reason, on February 27, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, a senior lawyer and human rights campaigner, announced in Benghazi, “We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people and Qaddafi’s security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya.”

Ghoga’s assertion was to be of no consequence by March 1, when the leadership of the newly created National Transitional Council of Libya (NTC) joined with the Atlantic powers, and the Gulf Arab emirs, to call for foreign intervention. The French, British and Americans hastened to put through a confusing resolution in the United Nations on March 17 (UN Resolution 1973). Aerial bombardment by NATO began on March 19. In no time, Qaddafi’s military prowess was degraded. It took a few months for the NATO aerial and naval power to fully wipe out Qaddafi’s regime, and for the rebels on the ground to make the most of the air cover to assert themselves over the Libyan landscape. On August 22, the rebel forces took Tripoli. Qaddafi disappeared. On October 20, Qaddafi was killed in Sirte, his hometown.

The future of Libya remained an open question. Would the Libyan rebels set aside the many sectarian (religious and tribal) affiliations that bedeviled them, and combine to properly fight off the Qaddafi regime? If it succeeded, what kind of Libya would these rebels create? During the military campaign, the rebels refused to succumb to a unified military command, which is what NATO preferred and so did NATO’s generals, such as the CIA asset General Khalifa Belqasim Hifter. The rebels wanted to fight in a military coalition. This meant that with the fall of Tripoli, the rebel command remained diffuse. There was no civil war as such, but there was no unity either. There was a government, but no state with the authority to enforce its laws on the population. Each city (Misrata, Zintan, Dernah) has its own military authority, with little coordination amongst them and very little respect for the central government. There is still every indication that the neoliberal clique that authored the NTC remain in control over the main arteries of accumulation in Libya, notably the oil ministry and the central bank. It is these people, as journalist Patrick Cockburn comments, that “speak the best English” and are “prepared to go before [the United States] Congress to give fulsome gratitude for America’s actions.” Or as the Middle East Report editorial of March 23 warned, these are the people who “are apt to be the most willing to give favorable terms to Western oil firms for invigorated exploration and exploitation of the country’s hydrocarbon deposits.” Libya remains in political paralysis. It is not clear what kind of political dispensation will form. What is clear is that the new Libya has opened itself to the neoliberal reformers in a way that they found difficult even under a pliant Qaddafi. The rebels from below, who spent the most blood in the conflict, are not the immediate beneficiaries of the revolution, but they are not quiet. They retain their guns. They have their imaginations for a new Libya. What comes is to be seen. But how did we get here?

The “humanitarian intervention” from the Atlantic states and the Gulf Arabs attempted to wrest the dynamic from the rebellion from below, and from the Arab Spring in general. That it has not been able to succeed fully is a testament to the deep springs of suspicion about imperialism that linger across West Asia and North Africa, and to the faith of the people in their wanting control of their own lives. In November 1942, when Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was defeated by the Allies in Benghazi, Tobruk and then El Alamein, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill cautioned, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

Before we get to the end of beginning, it makes sense to unravel the Libyan labyrinth, to understand how we got to February 15, 2011, then to the Atlantic involvement in this war and to what this says for the future of imperialism and the doctrine of humanitarian intervention.

II. Qaddafi’s Revolution

In 1969, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi (age 27) surprised the aged King Idris, then in Turkey for medical treatment, with his attack on the Benghazi radio station on September 1, and with the subsequent coup d’etat against the monarchy. Inspired by the Free Officers of Egypt, Qaddafi and his fellow Colonels forced-marched the fragile Libyan State and even more fragile Libyan society into a new dispensation. Devastated by Italian colonialism and World War 2, the new Libya under Idris could aspire to little. In 1959, Time enumerated the particulars, with emphasis on the one resource that Qaddafi capitalized upon, “Free Libya’s legacy from its past includes rich Roman ruins, live German land mines, and a fierce resentment among Libya’s predominantly Arab 1,130,000 population against all things foreign.” Qaddafi drank deeply in the well of that patriotism and anti-colonialism, covering his coup in the mantle of ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, whose face would then adorn the Libyan ten dinar bill and whose struggle against the Italians was made immortal for the worldwide audience by Anthony Quinn in the 1981 film (financed by Qaddafi’s government), The Lion of the Desert.

As World War 2 slipped into the horizon, discussions in the Atlantic world threatened to divide Libya along its three Ottoman provinces: Tripolitania to the Italians, Cyrenaica to the British and Fezzan to the French (the Bevin-Sfora Plan of May 10, 1949). Fortunately for the Libyans, the Haitians voted against this plan in the United Nations and tipped the balance toward independence. But with King Idris on the throne, Libya enjoyed a constrained freedom. When the Italians established themselves in Libya in 1927, Idris and his sanusi circle escaped to British-controlled Egypt, where they became the clients of London (a fact begrudgingly noted in Evans Pritchard’s informative The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, 1947). In 1951, when Libya was formed, Idris took up the mantel, but essentially retired to his honey-colored palace in wondrous Tobruk. Tripoli was a backwater for him. He preferred Cyrenaica. Idris’ flag for the new Libya borrowed from Cyrenaica’s emblems (with the star and the crescent), not Tripolitania’s totems (a palm tree, a star and three half moons). Popular anger against the Idris realm grew in the west, and eventually in the east. Idris had to seek protection from the HMS Bermuda (in July 1958) and then the British 10th Armored Division (on October 29, 1959, when they protected him from a general uprising and played, as a British government official wrote at the time, “a vital role in keeping King Idris alive and on the throne”).

A pliant Idris signed off on an essential twenty-year Anglo-Libyan treaty in 1953, which by many appearances seemed to have been drafted in Prince Charles Street by the over-educated bureaucrats of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. It allowed the British to maintain bases in eastern Libya (at Tobruk and El Adem), and the next year, it allowed the United States to lease the Wheelus Air Base just outside Tripoli (the cost was modest, $7 million and 24,000 tons of wheat as a down-payment and an annual rent of $4 million). It was from the Wheelus base that the US flew sorties across the Mediterranean, with the F-101 and F-102 aircraft screaming near the Gulf of Sidra. The troops stationed at these bases kept to themselves. “Most American servicemen are apathetic to service in Libya,” wrote the anthropologist Louis Dupree in 1958, “and almost never leave the air base. Others, when they do leave, make asses of themselves.”

The United States was interested in the southern coastline of the Mediterranean, what the Romans had called mare nostrum, our lake. In 1885, the Italian writer Emilio Lupi put the case for the lake plainly, “Even if the coast of Tripoli were a desert, even if it would not support one peasant or one Italian business firm, we still need to take to avoid it being suffocated in mare nostrum.” The French had Morocco, the Italians must have Tripolitania. Seven decades later, US President Dwight Eisenhower welcomed Libyan Prime Minister Mustafa Ben Halim to Washington, and told him that Libya “would, as far as the United States was concerned, be in the Middle East what the Philippines were to the United States in the Far East.” Libya would be “firmly in our camp,” he said, a tone set by the US Ambassador to Libya, John Tappin, who was eager to form a “southern tier” of North African states. Ben Halim had come to the Americans with a dowry in hand: he had signed a treaty with President Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and they were eager to forge an alliance that might include Algeria in a pro-Western bloc (if only the French could be persuaded to leave their neighbor alone). To be fair to Ben Halim, he was a vigorous supporter of the Algerian freedom fighter Ahmed Ben Bella. The fantasy of the Maghrebian bourgeoisie is evident here, that somehow their bent knee might convince the benevolent Americans to provide them with flag independence in order for them to turn over their sovereignty toward NATO’s Mediterranean.

Such fealty to the old and new colonial powers unsettled the Libyan people. No wonder they protested so frequently. It was this patriotic sentiment that made Rajab Buhwaish’s anti-colonial anthem Ma Bi Marad (I Have No Illness) so central to the imagination of the Idris-era intellectuals. Buhwaish, who was from the same tribe as the rebel hero ‘Umar al-Mukhtar, had provided the best dirge of Italian atrocities, with the cautious lament, “I have no illness but endless grief.” It provided the young Qaddafi with the poetry to offer his own jeremiad, “The sky over Arab Libya is being polluted by foreign planes.” An early act of the new regime after 1969 was to jettison the foreign bases and to reclaim sovereignty for the new country. It won Qaddafi a great deal of popular respect. Wheelus became a Libyan military air base (Okba Ben Nafi Air Base), and when Tripoli expanded to embrace it, the regime turned it into the civilian Mitiga International Airport.

Libya had the misfortune of being a distant outpost of the Ottoman Empire and the Italian colonial adventures. It wanted for basic social development. When Qaddafi came to power, the main export was scrap metal. Libya’s deserts were a dumping ground for the detritus from Operation Compass, the allied attack on the Italian and German positions between December 1940 and February 1941. That part of the war is celebrated in the Rock Hudson film, Tobruk (1967), where Hudson, playing a Canadian soldier points out, “A dead martyr is just another corpse.” It gives you a flavor of the violence during the war, and the destruction. I remember being driven along the Mediterranean road as a child, looking in wonder at the half tracks and tanks littering the roadside. It was these ruins that provided the main export for Libya. Libya’s second main export was esparto grass or halfa (needle grass) used to make high quality paper. Idris’ regime ignored the economic question. They were satisfied with the rents collected from the imperial powers (and occasionally caviled to have these increased) and with the surplus that came from the hard working peasants (there was nothing like the inventiveness of King Mohammed V of Morocco, whose Operation Plow in 1957 at least attempted to modernize the agricultural sector). “Libya was just a tray of sand in 1951,” recalled Abdul Hamid Bakoush, a close friend of King Idris. “It had an income of £3 million a year, and that came from Britain and the United States in rent for the bases on Libyan territory.” Rents made up for economic development.

Esso (Standard Oil) discovered oil in the Zelten oil fields in Cyrenaica in June 1959. Hints of the possibility of oil underfoot had been around since the 1940s, and in 1955 Idris’ regime passed a Petroleum Law that allowed the Seven Sisters to drill in parts of the country. Oil was mainly found in the northeastern and north-central sections, from As Sarie to Mabruk. By 1961, Standard Oil began to export Libya’s oil. This was to soon become the major export of the country. Libya’s oil was in demand because of its proximity to Europe and because it was sweet oil (which makes it easier and cheaper to process). By the time Idris was deposed, the country exported three million barrels of oil per day. Scandalously, the government received the lowest rent per barrel in the world. Idris was not known to be personally ostentatious, but his circle could not help themselves. Sayyid Abdallah Abed Al Senussi, called the Black Prince, was famous for his bribe-taking, and also famous for building projects that would allow him to recycle the oil profits into his pocket (one such was a road that began nowhere and led into the Sebha Oasis, later slated to be the home of an alleged chemical weapons plant). The Black Prince modestly named his company SASCO, the Sayyid Abdallah Senussi Company. The routine corruption of Idris’ circle and their obsequiousness to their imperial friends are two of the reasons why there was barely any opposition to Qaddafi’s coup. “The Idris regime was certainly one of the most corrupt in the area and probably one of the most corrupt in the world,” confessed the US State Department’s James Akins, “It was overthrown with surprising ease and there was almost no resistance.”

Qaddafi’s revolution was his regime’s to tarnish. The Libyan people were with him in 1969. They would have been with his revolution in 2011 if it had delivered on its promise. But much had changed since then, even though in the first decades of the new regime so much was delivered to the population. That was perhaps part of the problem: the social goods were delivered. The social basis of Libya was not decentralized and its politics was not democratized. Nevertheless, only a mind unable to appreciate the slow movement of history would see nothing to celebrate in the 1969 revolution and what it was able to deliver to the Libyans at least in its first decade, if not in the first two decades. Take a look at the latest Human Development Index developed by the United Nations Development Programme (November 2010, updated June 2011). The Human Development Index (HDI) is a measure that looks at education, life expectancy, literacy and the general standard of living. In terms of HDI, Libya comes in 55th out of 170 countries, the highest from the African continent and behind only three other Arab countries (all very small oil and natural gas-rich states: Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait). The HDI in Libya is higher than in Saudi Arabia. That the HDI does not count political opportunities is significant. It was the measure that most disturbed sections of Libyan society.

Qaddafi’s regime pushed forward a series of radical developments to transform Libyan society. Over the first decade of the Qaddafi regime, the state took charge of the oil fields (1972) and raised the rents charged to multinational firms (Standard Oil, but also later Nelson Bunker Hunt’s Titan Resources). That money was then diverted toward social welfare, mainly an increase in housing and health care. “I recall the new leadership was greeted with something like euphoria in 1969, especially by the young, some of whom I was teaching,” remembers Graham Brown. “The new authority, calling itself The Revolutionary Command Council initiated a socialist programme—first nationalizing the oil companies, fixing a minimum wage, extending the welfare and health systems and slashing the obscene rents being charged by property owners. A limit was imposed on the rents that landlords could charge, fixing maximum rents at about one third of the pre-revolutionary level. Tripoli until then had been the most expensive city in the Middle East. Many large properties were taken over and let to the people at low rents. The vast sprawling shanty town just outside Tripoli was torn down and replaced by new workers’ housing projects.” When Qaddafi took power, the literacy rate in Libya was a miserable twenty percent. The consequence of the transfer payments lifted the rate to ninety percent by 1980.

Libya has often been described as a large desert with two towns on either end, as bookends for the sand: Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east. They are divided by about six hundred and fifty kilometers of roadway. But in the middle and into the south lay vast desert stretches where the Bedouin and the peasantry worked the land in miraculous ways to grow crops and to raise livestock. Qaddafi and his officers came from the small villages and small towns, modest men who had none of the pretentions of the monarchy. Aware of the hardships in the countryside, Qaddafi’s regime allowed farmers to settle on confiscated Italian and Sanusi land, and the government provided them with low interest loans to buy farm equipment and inputs. “Land could be purchased interest free,” writes historian Dirk Vandewalle in his A History of Modern Libya. “Until the farm became self-sufficient the farmer was eligible for a government salary.”

During the second decade of the new regime, from 1978 to 1988, the state continued with the gist of these policies. The regime constrained private enterprise and encouraged workers to take control of about two hundred firms. Redistribution of land on the Jefara plain west of Tripoli was the rural cognate. The state stepped in to manage all macro-economic functions, at the same time as the Central Bank redistributed wealth by putting a ceiling on bank account holdings. It was a straightforward redistribution of wealth conducted as a currency exchange.

Qaddafi’s populism was hemmed in by his regime’s lack of appreciation for the administrative costs of this mammoth centralization of redistribution. After his coup, sections of the educated professionals fled the country, offering their services to the Gulf Arab emirs (so that Ben Halim became an advisor to Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdul Aziz) or to the financial and business world that centered around Beirut. As the state’s administrative apparatus fumbled, Qaddafi attacked the overwrought bureaucrats. “They became even more inefficient,” Vandewalle notes, “making Qadhafi’s harangues against them a self-fulfilling prophecy that would lead to their evisceration after the mid-1970s.” Qaddafi would continue to centralize social and economic functions around a state apparatus that was no longer capable of carrying these many functions. It was a mirror to what was happening on the political scene, where Qaddafi was even less disposed to democratic decentralization.

Qaddafi was never keen on the full agenda of socialism. He liked the abstract idea of redistribution, but like most authoritarian populists he had not considered the mechanisms to transfer authority and decision-making to localities who might then harness their newly provided wealth for the betterment of their towns and villages. Instead, Qaddafi turned over the fruits of social wealth to the people at the same time as his regime centralized the mechanism for the redistribution of those fruits. The gargantuan state was not capable of being efficient, and this led to serious problems of incentive in the population and to alienation from its mechanisms. Rather than address these administrative problems, Qaddafi relied upon the oil revenue to pacify the population. That he and his circle did not steal from the oil profits is commendable, and it is the reason why social projects made an impact on the lives of the people. By the 1980s, Libya could boast of very high human development indicators: in literacy and health, in the main. It was the oil that prolonged his revolution and allowed his central state to appear benevolent even as it monopolized decision-making in the country.

Qaddafi’s own idea of democracy was centered around him, his clan (the Qadhadhfa) and his “men of the tent” (rijal al-cheima), his military associates and childhood friends. To be fair, Qaddafi’s was not a personality cult of the kind produced by Saddam Hussein after 1978. The democratic set-up, which he called the Jamahiriya (State of the Masses), exceeded what King Idris allowed. The failure to engage with a real democratic experience rankled on Qaddafi himself, and he would return over the course of the following forty-two years several times with new ideas for it. In 1978, he created the Revolution Committee Movement (harakat al-lajnati ath-thawra) and then in 1988 he went to the General People’s Conference to promise more civil and political liberties. The Revolution Committee Movement was not a real development. Like Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Red Guards, it sought to undermine the official institutions by creating a parallel structure dominated by Qaddafi, who claimed to have no official position in the government. This abeyance of authority (“I am not the leader”) was dangerous because it weakened the established systems, which turned to Qaddafi for his almost regal assent or views. The Revolution Committee Movement was filled with Qaddafi’s cronies, such as Khalifa Khanaish, Khawaildi Hamidi, Mustafa Kharroubi, Abu Bakr Yunis, the leadership of the security services (chillingly named the Leader’s Information Office, Maktab Ma’lumat al’Qai’d) and Abdessalam Jalloud (who was hastily removed for being too radical). There was no sense of the failure of the process of democracy, of the “state of the masses,” of a rhetorical façade that stood in for the whims of the men of the tent. Qaddafi conducted the remarkable feat of centralization of power in the name of de-centralization.

Over time the limited democratic spaces strained against both the rhetoric of the regime and the aspirations of the people. In 2009, Qaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi delivered a speech at his alma mater, the London School of Economics. “In theory, Libya is the most democratic state in the world,” he said, chuckling. When the audience laughed with him, he smiled and laughed along, saying, “In theory, in theory.” Even the Qaddafi inner circle recognized that although the theory of the Jamahiriya or state of the masses is of interest, the practice has been anything but. By 2000, only ten percent of the eligible citizenry came to the Congress meetings, and over seventy percent did not believe that they could influence political decisions (as shown by surveys collected in Amal Obeidi’s Political Culture in Libya). This is a serious indictment. That Qaddafi’s regime had a strong stomach for authoritarianism is illuminated by his active support for Charles Taylor in his war against the people of Liberia.

In his Green Book, Qaddafi offered an alternative to the Jamahiriya idea of democracy. “The natural law for any society is tradition (custom) or religion.” The State of the Masses claimed to organize community power absent the social baggage of tribe and faith. But such a move would be idealistic, and it would threaten the new regime with the loss of sections of the population to a brewing counter-revolution (whose main agents were the deposed royals and their imperial allies). There was little time to build up a new social fabric, so the Qaddafi regime for reasons of instinct or opportunity seized upon those provided for them. Qaddafi relied upon well-trod capillaries of power, the hierarchies of tribe, faith and army. Unwilling to opt for a radical democratization of the society, Qaddafi pursued a tense dance from the 1970s to 2011, offering carrots to his allies and sticks to his potential enemies, reining in the leadership of these traditional hierarchies, and then offering them patronage when it suited him. The mercurial style that Qaddafi adopted was not about his personality alone, but also a leader’s natural response to a system that relied upon power brokers whose own loyalty was purchased through elements who did not have any ideological commitment to the system.

By the 1980s, the web woven by the Qaddafi regime began to unravel. The war in Chad wore down the military, and it ate into the exchequer. The return to eastern Libya of the Afghan Arabs jihadis by the late 1980s and the Algerian Civil War in 1991 brewed the stew of extremist political Islam in the towns of Dernah and Benghazi. The tribal leadership caviled at the regime, as it floundered. Old social classes pushed against the regime at the same time as the new social classes (the educated middle class professionals), made by the transfer payments of the national development regime set-up by Qaddafi, began to turn on it: they wanted more political power. The new dilemma seemed to be beyond Qaddafi, whose own health (two strokes) and poor capacity to delegate authority led to an unfinished battle between those who would be called the “reformers” (led by Saif al-Islam Qaddafi) and the national development “hard-liners” (putatively led by Mutassim Qaddafi). It is fitting that the leaders of the two wings are sons of Qaddafi—it tells us a great deal about the involution of his regime.

Geography of Identity.

Qaddafi’s new regime purportedly attempted to overthrow the supremacy of the tribes. In fact, it strengthened his own tribe, the Qadhadhfa, and gained the trust of other significant tribes of the western and southwestern parts of the country, such as the Maghraha (of Misrata) and the Warfallah (from Sirte to Fezzan). These tribes are vast kinship groups, spread over considerable territory. A million or so of the Warfallah do not march in evolutionary lockstep. What Qaddafi’s regime was able to enjoin was the support of the tribal elders, who by one way or another would procure the sympathy of their tribal structures for the regime for as long as that loyalty remained. The “tribal chiefs represent a sort of moral and social support,” noted Hasni Abidi (director of CERMAM, Centre d’études et de recherché sur le monde arabe et méditerranéen). They are a “refuge, given the total absence of Libyan political institutions.” What Qaddafi’s regime was able to do was to create the illusion of the loyal tribes, and when fractures opened up with their leadership, the regime enforced allegiance. The ultimate tribe of the regime, the army, would be at hand to make it so.

The Revolution, in one sense, was also a revolution against the Sa’adi tribes of the East, those who had dominated the regime of King Idris. The King was an eminence of the Sansussi order, which was born in 1843 at the hand of the Algerian scholar Sayyid Muhammed bin Ali al-Sansusi in Al Bayda’, in eastern Libya. The Sansussis built their strength around the zawiyas, the residential settlements of their order that happened to be built on the crossroads of trade routes. About a third of the country’s population gave their allegiance to the order. It was powerful. Qaddafi saw it as the fifth column, and was not disposed to being generous. The Sa’adi confederation of the East was left out of the spoils of the new dispensation. By the 1980s, Benghazi looked a little worn compared to Tripoli. The returns of the oil rent and the social wage pledged by the new revolutionary regime offered only parsimonious help to the impoverished East. It meant that the Eastern part of Libya became a hive of conspiracy against the regime.

UN Commissioner Adrian Pelt recounts that when the Libyans deliberated over their 1951 Constitution, the longest debate was over whether the country should have a unitary or federal system. The Tripolitanians wanted a unitary system, and the Cyrenaicans wanted a federal system. The East was jealous of the privileges it had enjoyed under the Idris regime. It wanted to preserve these through political autonomy from Tripoli, now ruled by the men of the small towns (such as Qaddafi’s own Sirte). It was a sore issue. Idris, who was ambivalent in the debate, did not throw his weight into it and the Libyan constitution settled eventually for a unitary system. It provided the legal basis for the policies that created the idea of Libya. Even as Qaddafi’s prejudices offered parsimonious help to the impoverished East, his state-building policies ensured the creation of a Libyan national sensibility. In the 1960s there was no real Libyan cultural identity, with accents and food differing from one town to the next, so much so that identification between them was minimal. The regime’s new education system drew talent from across the deserts, and enabled young people to move from one locality to another. The oil industry and the Great Man Made River (depicted on the twenty dinar note) pulled the new mobile middle class professionals, the oil workers, and the construction workers from one end of the country to another. It was the state bureaucracy and the military that finished the process, cementing the basis for Libyan personhood, now formulated around a culture polished by the authoritarian populist state.

Even as a Libyan identity flourished, neglect of the tribes of the East and of the communities of the Jebel Nafusa, the mountains of the Northwest, continued. Across North Africa, the Amazigh peoples (derogatorily known as the Berber) strive for autonomy and dignity. From the Kabyles of northern Algeria to the Riffians of northern Morocco and to the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Amazigh peoples or the Imazighen have struggled against the national liberation states, with little success. In Morocco, King Mohammed VI, in fear of the Imazighen revolts, hastened to allow Tamazight as an official state language. Qaddafi has been routinely hostile to any attempt by the Imazighen to comport themselves in their language, much like the Turkish policy of banning the Kurdish language and their identity (or the French, who, in the name of Enlightenment, banned the Tahitians from speaking their own language). Over the past decade, the Libyan state vacillated over the idea of recognizing the existence of the Amazigh peoples. In August 2007, the government allowed the World Amazigh Congress to be held in Tripoli. A year later, Qaddafi went to Jadu, in the Nafusa mountains, to meet with Amazigh leaders. “You can call yourselves whatever you want inside your homes,” Qaddafi is reported to have told them, “Berbers, children of Satan, whatever—but you are only Libyans when you leave your homes.” The idea of Libya as an Arab country was firmly in the imagination of the Qaddafi regime. It was a normal tendency of modern nationalism to deny the fractures within a nation-state, and to pretend that minority rights and cultural expression are the first gesture toward secession. The denial of those rights, history shows us, are more likely to spur secession than the recognition of them in the first place.

In 1993, Qaddafi survived an assassination attempt in the town of Bani Walid, in the Misrata district. Qaddafi went to the elders of the Warfallah tribe, those who dominate the region, and told them that they must both deliver the culprits and then collectively condemn the plot. They refused to do so. Qaddafi’s alliance with the Warfallah frayed. It is in such instances that it becomes clear how Qaddafi lost the loyalty of the natural leaders. During the rebellion in 2011, substantial numbers of the Imazighen and the Warfallah turned their backs on Qaddafi and provided the basis for the final push against Tripoli. Sociologist Mohammed Bamyeh investigated twenty-eight of the tribal declarations issued by the tribal leaders between February 23 and March 9, 2011; he found that “the vast majority highlighted national unity or national salvation rather than tribal interests. These declarations also demonstrate that Libya’s tribes are not homogenous entities, but rather are composed of diverse members with varying social and economic backgrounds. This reality reflects the nature of Libyan society as a whole, which has a 90% urban population and in which inter-marriages across tribal lines are common.” Qaddafi’s natural leaders could not control the desires and ambitions of their populations.

The Green Flag.

A nationalist in the Nasser vein, Qaddafi nonetheless was never keen on secularism. His Green Book dismissed Capitalism and Communism in favor of a “Third Universal Theory,” to return the Arab world to the fundamentals of Islam in both politics and economics. His new constitution was founded on Islamic principles (article 2), and his new state attempted to do with Islam what it had done with the economy and with politics: nationalize Islam. The waqf, the religious trusts, were grasped by the state, which then brought the clergy to heel as well as promoted ijtihad, personal interpretation of the Koran, and a religious experience without the dominance of the ulema. Once more Qaddafi would dance between his absorption of Islam into his own Third Universal Theory and a more conventional, even salafi understanding of Islam (in 1973, for instance, he told the people of Zuwara that the Sharia should be the legal code of Libya). Expulsion of the Italian residents in Libya followed as much from Qaddafi’s Islamic injunctions as from Nasserite nationalism, and so too Qaddafi’s fellowship with Islamic revolution from Chad to the Philippines (the instrument for his ambitions was the 1972 created al-Failaka al-Islamiya, the Islamic League).

Political Islam’s representatives began to dig deep roots, mainly in eastern Libya. It built up networks outside the mosques whose ulema had been largely nationalized. The first pass at political activity took place not inside Libya, but in exile in Sudan. There Dr. Muhammed Yusuf al-Muqarayif, formerly Libya’s ambassador to India, created the National Salvation Front for Libya (Inqat) in 1981. Its most spectacular action was an assault on Qaddafi’s residential compound, Bab al-Aziziyah, in Tripoli. The attack failed, and two thousand or so people were captured as a result of its failure. It would be a few years later before another dramatic episode reminded Qaddafi of the viability of this strand of political Islam as a dangerous foe. Further attacks came from Inqat and the Islamic Liberation Front. More repression followed, including the hanging of two students at the al-Fateh University in 1984 and the execution of nine members of Jihad on Libyan State Television on February 17, 1987. The emergence of the group Jihad was a premonition of what was to come: the small bands of dedicated fighters prepared to die for their cause.

Clashes at Tripoli University (January 8, 1989) and in Tripoli’s mosques (January 20, 1989) threatened Qaddafi’s monopoly over Islam. In 1989, fears of unrest led the regime to cancel a soccer match between Libya and Algeria. “Qaddafi is the Enemy of God,” chanted the restive crowd, angry at being denied their pleasures, confident in the security of numbers. Qaddafi’s response would become scripted, blaming the Islamists for being “hashish smokers and charlatan groups” (on February 24, 2011, Qaddafi would say that the rebels of Az Zawiya had taken “hallucinogenic drugs in their coffee with milk, like Nescafé”). Many hardened Islamists had fled Libya in the 1980s, joining up through the Maktab al-Khidamat, the Afghan Services Bureau run by Osama Bin Laden’s mentor, Abdullah Azzam, as part of the Afghan Arab force to fight in Afghanistan. It was safer to conduct their jihad in far off Afghanistan than in Libya, where the regime remained powerful and dangerous.

With the Afghan war winding down by the end of the 1980s, the Afghan Arabs returned home. In Algeria, they came in large numbers as hardened warriors and formed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Angered by the direction of Algerian society, frustrated by the US-led attack on Iraq in 1991 and stymied by the regime’s cancellation of elections that they might have won, the forces of political Islam turned to the armed struggle. The Algerian Civil War cost almost two million lives and the destruction of the social wealth of the country. Nonetheless, it provided an opening for the Libyan Afghan Arabs, many of whom joined the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG, the al-Jama’a al-Islamiyyah al-Muqatilah fi-Libya, founded in Pakistan in 1990). The LIFG drew from the experience of the Islamists in Egypt and Algeria to form small cells, anqud, and its ideologues (such as Sami al-Sa’idi, also known as Abu al-Mundhir) promoted this idea through making a distinction between jihad as a collective obligation for all Muslims (fard kifaya) and as an individual obligation (fard ‘ain). By favoring the latter, they allowed these small cells to live amongst their less radical fellows and plot spectacular acts of violence to shift the social conditions to suit them. LIFG moved from Pakistan to Sudan and then to Algeria, conducting their leap (al-wathba) into North Africa.

The first major action by the LIFG was in Benghazi in 1995, and then in Derna and in the Jebel el-Akhdar (the Green Mountains). They tried to assassinate Qaddafi at least a few times, once in February 1996 in Sirt and once again in May 1998 near Sidi Khalifa, east of Benghazi. A major confrontation with the regime’s guns in Wadi al-Injil (Bible Valley) in March 1996 cut down most of their fighters. Their military commander, Fathy bin Sulayman (also known as Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Hattah) was killed in September 1997. The guerrilla phase of the LIFG’s combat ended at an Istanbul meeting in 1998. Mustafa Qunayfid, their leader, shifted the Libyan Afghan Arabs to fight in Chechnya. After 2003, they would go to join the insurgency in Iraq.

The East had sent a disproportionate number of its young to fight in Iraq. They did not go strictly for the purposes of jihad, or because they had fealty to al-Qaeda. A US embassy official snuck away from his Tripoli minder in 2008 and reported that the young men who went to Iraq did so because they could not effectively protest against Qaddafi. Iraq stood in for Libya. The official went to Dernah. Upon his return to Tripoli, he filed this memorandum for his superiors, “Frustration at the inability of eastern Libyans to effectively challenge Qadhafi’s regime, together with a concerted ideological campaign by returned Libyan fighters from earlier conflicts, have played important roles in Derna’s development as a wellspring of Libyan foreign fighters in Iraq. Other factors include a dearth of social outlets for young people, local pride in Derna’s history as a locus of fierce opposition to occupation, economic disenfranchisement among the town’s young men. Depictions on satellite television of events in Iraq and Palestine fuel the widespread view that resistance to coalition forces is justified and necessary. One Libyan interlocutor likened young men in Derna to Bruce Willis’ character in the action picture Die Hard, who stubbornly refused to die quietly. For them, resistance against coalition forces in Iraq is an important act of ‘jihad’ and a last act of defiance against the Qadhafi regime.”

It was out of the LIFG struggles that on June 29, 1996 a protest by LIFG members at the Abu Selim Prison in Tripoli took place. The regime killed 1,233 prisoners. Qaddafi’s henchman (and brother-in-law), Abdullah Senussi, who would be sent to Benghazi in February 2011, was the interior minister then as well. The lawyer who would take up the case of the Abu Selim prison, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga became the spokesperson of the 2011 National Transitional Council of Libya, and one of his council members (and another lawyer) Fateh Terbil would hold a weekly vigil for justice for the dead.

A frazzled Qaddafi began to assert views about Islam that were not new to him, but which had been provoked by the emergence of the LIFG and the Algerian Civil War next door. During George H. W. Bush’s telephone call with Mubarak on January 21, 1991, the US president said, “I’ve been disappointed in Qadhafi. He’s been making some crazy statements.” Mubarak’s response is censored. Bush responded, “I think he is just grandstanding.” In fact, he was doing more. He was trying to turn the ideological tide to his favor, complaining that in the context of the US bombing in Iraq that “Islam became the target of the West.” In 1994, he reaffirmed his ban on alcohol, introduced the Islamic calendar and against UN sanctions dispatched pious Libyans to the hajj on state aircraft. He was the “shield of Islam,” as one Libyan put it at that time.

Frayed Uniforms.

In 1978, the Libyan armed forces entered Chad after two decades of low intensity political and military conflict over a strip of land that divides the two countries (the Aouzou Strip). Debates over old colonial treaties and historical claims rested on a region believed to be home to large uranium deposits. Proxies for powers far from Tripoli and N’Djamena, the two countries went into a bloody conflict that lasted for ten years. Supplied by the Soviets and the East Germans, Qaddafi’s Islamic Legionnaires at first simply provided resources to the Chadean rebels, but over the course of the decade were drawn into the war. The French intervened twice, and with superior air power beat back Qaddafi and his allies. By 1987, the Libyans had lost their own Chadean allies and remained vulnerable in Chad’s northern deserts. The newly emboldened army of Chad, the FANT, assembled their fighting forces onto Toyota trucks armed with MILAN anti-tank guided missiles. This was the Toyota War of 1987, and it resembled in many particulars the use of such trucks in Libya itself in 2011. The Libyan army was routed, and it lost the Aouzou Strip, and if the Organization of African States had not intervened, it might have been threatened within Libya itself. The French intervened against Qaddafi, and the United States provided intelligence support to the FANT. It was a preview of 2011.

The Libyan army lost about eight thousand of its troops, about eight times what was lost by Chad’s army. By some accounts, the Libyan armed forces lost a third of its infantry and considerable amounts of armor. Morale was at a very low level. The better sections of the Revolutionary Command Council, particularly the smart and capable members of the Free Officers, were either cashiered or brought to heel. If they had been allowed to flourish, Libya’s military might not have run out of ideas or produced a disjuncture between the ordinary soldier and the officer class (increasingly the sullen children of an emergent favored section). It was never to recover its verve.

In 1986, the United States bombed Tripoli and Benghazi in retaliation for the Libyan bombing of a Berlin nightclub. Operation El Dorado Canyon comprised an aerial attack on Qaddafi’s compound (where Qaddafi claimed his adopted daughter Hanna had been killed. In 2011, it was demonstrated that Hanna had actually survived the attack, and is now a doctor). It was a brief boost for Libyan nationalism, as the armed forces at the very least pledged their bay’a, their loyalty to Qaddafi. The defeat in the Toyota War reduced their confidence. The 1992 UN sanctions further sharpened the edge for the armed forces. The UN sanctions, Dirk Vandewalle argues, led to “mounting discontent and increasing privation in Libya, reflected in unpaid salaries, decreased subsidies, cuts in army perks and a shortage of basic goods.” It was these cuts in army perks that counted strongly against Qaddafi.

Canny enough to recognize the problems in the military, Qaddafi recalled his best units to the western part of the country. The elite corps, including the 32nd Reinforced (later Khamis) Brigade, was brought to defend Tripoli. Its members were thought to be carefully recruited for their loyalty and trained to defeat anything weaker than the kind of sustained warfare that the US aerial power is capable of unleashing (as it did for a brief burst in those twelve minutes of the April 15, 1986 raid and then later in the demonstration effect of the 1991 war over Iraq). It was already a sign of weakness. The Libyan army was the regime’s own Trojan Horse.

III. Revolution within the Revolution

“Libyans want to eat McDonald’s

hamburgers, not uranium.”

—Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, 2005.

United Nations sanctions came into effect in 1992. They had a huge impact on the Libyan exchequer. Between 1992 and 1998, the treasury lost about $24 billion, with infrastructure plans curtailed, no foreign investment for the ailing oil extraction devices, a $15 billion loss in oil income and a two hundred percent increase in the price of foodstuffs. The country was simply not prepared to withstand the pressure. Qaddafi’s regime had failed to build up its economic reserves and to strengthen infrastructure during the previous decade. Unimaginative use of the oil surplus hastened the economic stagnation.

The Libyan people rallied around Qaddafi after the April 1986 attack. Anti-Americanism, easy enough with Reagan at the helm in Washington, provided cover for what Qaddafi called the “revolution within the revolution.” This was the Libyan phrase to describe the entry of neoliberalism, or what Qaddafi called “popular capitalism.” In 1987, anemic import substitution polices came to a close and “reforms” in agriculture and industry flooded out of the IMF manuals. By September 1988, the government abolished the import and export quotas, allowing retail trade in the new souqs to flourish in the cities. UN sanctions in 1992 threw the reforms into turmoil, and it allowed the old Qaddafi to emerge out of the sarcophagus that he had become. Cracks in the ruling elite at times slowed and at times speeded up the reforms. Qaddafi would enter the debate on one side, then another, speaking out of both sides of his mouth. It was clear that two main problems needed to be treated before the medicine of neoliberalism could be allowed to work: the Qaddafi regime had to make its peace with the United States to lift the UN sanctions, and to help it deal with what it saw as the virus of political Islam. Once the United States’ allergic reaction to Libya could be sorted out, Qaddafi bet, the problems of Libya’s economic and political vitality could be solved.

Moussa Koussa Travels Light.

“We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.”

—Senator Joseph Lieberman,

August 2009.

Moussa Koussa was one of Qaddafi’s close allies, a man of the tent. His loyalty knew no bounds. In 1980, he was sent to be ambassador to London. There he told The Times that “stray dogs” had to be killed. This was a reference to the Libyan dissidents. He was expelled from London. In 1996, it was the unit commanded by Moussa Koussa that fired into the LIFG in Abu Salim prison. But he was not Qaddafi’s butcher. Polished by his time at Michigan State University, and well-regarded by Tripoli’s diplomatic corps as an urbane man, Moussa Koussa was picked to travel from Atlantic capital to Atlantic capital to settle all the scores and bring Libya out of the diplomatic deep freeze.

The key were the cases of the Lockerbie bombing (Pan Am Flight 103), and that of the French aircraft (UTA Flight 772) bombed over Niger. Moussa Koussa could promise millions of dollars from Libya’s oil money. The negotiations went back and forth. The promise of money and a return to the oil fields of Libya was too much for the Atlantic world to refuse. By April 1999, the UN sanctions were suspended, and in 2003 they were lifted. To add to the pot of blood money, Qaddafi decided to announce that Libya would “disclose and dismantle all weapons of mass destruction.” This was on December 19, 2003, after the United States armed forces had chased Saddam Hussein from power on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. The US was equally angry at Iran and North Korea, but it could not act militarily. Their nuclear card prevented a repeat of the Iraq adventure. That Qaddafi threw the card on the table revealed his obsequious intentions. Commercial links were restored the next year, when a US Congressional team (led by Congressman Tom Lantos) came to Libya. Lantos’ team returned to the US with good news about Libya. In 2006, the US State Department decided to remove Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In October 2008, the Libyans promised to turn over $1.5 billion in a trust fund as compensation for the various bombings. President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13477 which voided all outstanding claims against Libya. A US Ambassador arrived in Tripoli, in the wake of US oil companies (who have faster jets).

Moussa Koussa had done a remarkable job.

In 1999, Moussa Koussa opened conversations with various jihadi groups based in Europe. He wanted to defang their anger. At the same time, Qaddafi’s regime put the screws on the hardened jihadis inside Libya, and tried to gain the favor of the US since both the American and Libyan regimes shared a fear of jihadis. After 9/11, Qaddafi was one of the first world leaders to offer his condolences for the “horrifying and destructive” attacks, as he urged Libyans to donate blood for the survivors in the United States. In October 2002, Foreign Minister Mohammed Abderrahman Chalgam admitted that his government closely consulted with the US on counterterrorism, and a few months later, Qaddafi’s heir apparent Saif al-Islam warmly spoke of Libya’s support for the Bush War on Terror. If you went to Qaddafi’s website at this time, you would have read this remarkable statement from the old Colonel, “The phenomenon of terrorism is not a matter of concern to the US alone. It is the concern of the whole world. The US cannot combat it alone. It is not logical, reasonable or productive to entrust the task to the US alone.” It needed Qaddafi, who was in sheer terror of groups such as the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.

Qaddafi played a double game with the jihadis. On the one side, by about 2005, the regime had opened a dialogue with the LIFG. In January 2007, Saif al-Islam met with Noman Benotman, a former leader of the LIFG, and with the Qatar-based Sheikh Ali al-Sallabi. The head of LIFG, Abu Layth al-Libi, refused to meet with the Qaddafi regime. He had other fish to fry. In November, al-Qaeda’s leadership in the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan announced that the LIFG had joined al-Qaeda (Abu Layth al-Libi was with Ayman al-Zawahiri when the announcement was made). That was chilling to the regime, whose paranoia over the LIFG had intensified as the Atlantic powers made their own dramatic declarations about al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (the AQIM, despite the swagger of its leadership, has become a kind of trans-Saharan gang, involved in the kidnapping and smuggling businesses, drawing from the Taureg insurgency against the government of Mali and from the remnants of the Algerian civil war). It must have chilled Qaddafi much more to find that Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s funeral service in May 2009 was attended by thousands in his town of Ajdabia (al-Libi was arrested in Pakistan in 2001, and he died in Libyan custody, apparently with a wink and a nod from Egypt’s Omar Suleiman). “The enemy of yesterday is the friend of today,” Saif al-Islam said in March 2010 at a ceremony of national reconciliation with the jihadis. It was more theatre than real-life, but it was sufficient for Libyan State Television.

The jihadis had not been completely pacified, but their lingering presence allowed Qaddafi to pirouette his regime’s antipathy to the United States into an alliance. It was enough to keep their water on a slow boil—so as to show the United States of their presence, and to therefore become a more credible ally in the War on Terror. General William Ward, head of the US military’s African Command (AFRICOM), did not need to be persuaded. In a memorandum from 2009, General Ward wrote, “Libya is a top partner in combating transnational terrorism.”

The settlement of the claims against Libya was not a neutral process, geared only to break the sanctions regime. Alongside the payment of the money came a remarkable shift in the ideological framework of the Qaddafi regime. By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, little of Qaddafi’s worldview would have been recognizable to the young officer of 1969. Qaddafi’s interpreter of world events, Dr. Ahmed Fituri (the Secretary for the Americas in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) had begun to write summaries of new books for the leader. It tells you something about a person if you know what they are reading. Qaddafi enjoyed the work of Newsweek’s international editor, Fareed Zakaria (his The Future of Freedom and The Post-American World), of Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat), of George Soros (The Age of Fallibility) and importantly, the Foreign Affairs essays of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (he kept a scrapbook of pictures and writings of Rice in his compound, in which one finds the bizarre statement, “I admire and am very proud of the way she leans back and gives orders to the Arab leaders…. Leezza, Leezza, Leezza. I love her very much. I admire her and I’m proud of her because she’s a black woman of African origin”). When Obama won the 2008 election, Qaddafi wrote a personal letter to him (November 9, 2008) in which he drew his own conclusion about the election, “The main point is that Blacks shall not have an inferiority complex and imitate the Yankees.” The presence of Rice and Obama in the leadership of the Atlantic states seemed to allow Qaddafi to make that journey from revolutionary nationalism to obedience to the imperial capitals. As African Americans, Rice and Obama provided cover for American repression, allowing the ersatz nationalist to take his place happily beside them.

Personalities did not spur the transformation. It was rooted in the need to remove the sanctions, and to maintain the older animosities in the new era. The Qaddafi regime’s distrust of the Iranians and the Saudis manifested itself in an attempt to join with the US anti-Iranianism, and to tar the Saudis with the thick brush of Wahhabism. When Congressman Tom Lantos visited Tripoli in 2006 (his second visit), he sat down with Moussa Koussa, who warned him, “Iran and Iraq used to balance each other out. Now, there is no balance.” Moussa Koussa was “sure that the Iranians are enriching uranium and making a bomb,” which was honey to Lantos’ belligerent ears. Meeting with Military Intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi, Lantos heard how the Libyans expected the US to provide Saudi Arabia with its “judgment day” after 9/11, since most of the hijackers were Saudis, not to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. In November 2006, Ibrahim Dridi, Director of the Americas Office at the General People’s Committee met with the US embassy personnel to alert them about the Libyan anxiety about “Chinese hegemony over the continent.” Charge d’Affaires Ethan Goldrich, bewildered by this turn of events, wrote to Washington, “We find it fascinating that the Libyans have identified a fear of Chinese hegemony as a potential source of common interest with us.”

Other elements in the foreign affairs bureaucracy in Tripoli did not see the convergence with the United States and its Atlantic partners as such a boon. By 2009, Ahmed Ibrahim, the director of the Green Book Center and a former high official in the People’s Congress, told a conference in Tripoli that this convergence with the United States was “a great sin,” and that the Qaddafi regime should snub the US Ambassador, who he called a “rotten dog.” But Ibrahim did not have the ear of the government. Behind his back, the pro-Western “reformers” in Libya called Ibrahim al-Bahim. Bahimah, the feminine of bahim, refers to a beast, with the street meaning being dullard. Ibrahim was known as The Donkey, largely because he tried unsuccessfully to ban the teaching of foreign languages (mainly English) in the 1980s. Such old-school revolutionaries had been sidelined by the late 1990s, even as they retained a small public following among those who had faith in the 1969 revolution’s promise. At no point did Qaddafi bulldoze the statue in Bab al-Azziziya of a US warplane being crushed by a fist (a sculpture to commemorate the 1986 bombing of Libya). Such images remained part of the diet of state propaganda, even as the official current moved in a direction that pleased the Atlantic capitals.

It was this lingering faith in the revolution that allowed Qaddafi to awaken the demons of nationalism when it suited him, largely as a bargaining chip for greater economic or political benefits on the world stage. He would do this routinely as we shall see below when he tried to get better terms from the oil companies, eager to get their drills into the Libyan sands. There was an element of naivety in the Qaddafi foreign ministry. As Roland Bruce St. John put it in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Libyan foreign affairs bureaucrats addressed “diplomatic problems of overwhelming complexity with naïve, simplistic solutions.” They are “increasingly frustrated as polices are greeted outside Libya with widespread disbelief or lack of interest and largely rejected.” Nevertheless, on occasion, the old-school bureaucrats were able to push Qaddafi in a worthwhile direction. The most important such maneuver was Qaddafi’s attempt to block the idea of a Mediterranean Union mooted by France’s Sarkozy. France wanted to use its financial aid to the southern tier of the Mediterranean to yoke the countries into a new Union whose agenda would be matters such as immigration from Africa into Europe and providing a platform for Israel to be a full member. This Mediterranean Union would circumvent the African Union and the Arab League. Qaddafi called a mini summit of the Arab League in Tripoli to denounce the Union. In his speech on June 10, 2008, Qaddafi said that the countries of North Africa are “not hungry to this extent; we’re not dogs that they can wave a bone in front of and we’ll run after it.” There was also the threat toward the creation of an African currency, to circumvent the use of the French franc on the continent for inter-country transactions. Much the same kind of virulence was reserved for the Italians, for when Qaddafi visited Berlusconi and the Italian parliament, he wore a picture of the great Libyan hero Omar al-Mukhtar, on his lapel. It is a picture of the hero as dignified captive, surrounded by preening Italian army and civilian leaders as they prepared to execute the Libyan hero.

Qaddafi’s residual anti-colonialism came out in his tussles with the Europeans. The Europeans were also eager for Libyan oil. Britain’s Tony Blair and France’s Sarkozy went to kiss Qaddafi’s ring and pledge finance for oil concessions. It is the reason why the British government freed Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the convicted Lockerbie bomber, in August 2009. It is also the reason why Berlusconi bowed down before Omar al-Mukhtar’s son in 2008 and handed over $5 billion as an apology for Italian colonialism. In his characteristic bluntness, Berlusconi said that he apologized so that Italy would get “less illegal immigrants and more oil.” Qaddafi remained wary of the Europeans, who needed his oil but seemed to despise his person. He saw the United States as somehow changed after 9/11, and hoped to build up relations with the United States as a counter to the pressures his regime seemed to get from the European capitals. No wonder that in August 2009, Qaddafi’s testosterone-laden son, Mutassim, told US Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins that the Libyans could easily buy arms from Russia or China, “but we want to get it from you as a symbol of faith from the United States.” Qaddafi’s anti-colonial ideology was like a gopher, breaking the surface erratically and just as fitfully hastening to bury itself deep into the ground. Qaddafi was willing to give up the main insurance policy of rogue states, his nuclear arsenal. This is an illumination of Qaddafi’s bizarre belief in the benevolence of the United States. He was eager to forge some kind of entente despite the press of imperialism on the Global South.

External Security Organization Director Moussa Koussa, once ejected from London for his intemperate views, now “shared his views frequently and openly with his US contacts in the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of State,” as he put it to General William Ward in May 2009. CIA papers found in a cache of Libyan government documents in an abandoned Tripoli building show that Sir Mark Allen, the former head of counterterrorism in Britain’s MI6 carefully nurtured a relationship with Moussa Koussa. A fax from 2003 shows that the British had arrested LIFG head Emir Abu Munthir in Hong Kong for passport violations. “We are also aware that your service had been co-operating with the British to effect Abu Munthir’s removal to Tripoli,” the fax notes, “and that you had an aircraft available for this purpose in the Maldives.” The British were willing to help the US and Libya with the “extraordinary rendition” of Abu Munthir. Moussa Koussa was a crucial point man. It would not be a huge surprise that when the UN placed sanctions on senior members of the Qaddafi regime in March 2011 (UN Resolution 1973, appendix), Moussa Koussa’s name did not appear there. It was also not an enormous surprise that Moussa Koussa fled to Tunisia in late March, and by March 30 arrived on a private Swiss jet at Farnborough Airport, in Britain. The flight was organized by MI6. Moussa Koussa was the highest profile defector during the 2011 battle to eject Qaddafi. Qaddafi had become for both Britain and Moussa Koussa a “stray dog.”

Kuwait on the Mediterranean.

Once Moussa Koussa had successfully spread the oil largess to erase the UN sanctions and to placate the United States, the question of “reform” returned to the political elites of Libya. It was there that the main debate would flourish from the late 1990s to 2011. The basis of the disagreement was over how to deal with the newly emboldened oil companies, how to encourage foreign investment into the country, what to do with the massive “cradle to grave” social subsidy and how to negotiate the economically stagnant but socially necessary state sector. The debate broke along lines familiar in many post-colonial states that had been through the epoch of national construction of an economy (through import substitution or other means) and that had by the 1990s been pressured by structural forces (and by more overt forces, such as the IMF) to globalize. The “reformers” followed the script of the IMF, and the “hardliners” settled into an obduracy regarding the old ways (and so appeared unimaginative in this new climate). Their debates sharpened after the credit crunch of 2007, when oil prices oscillated and plans for privatization floundered as the ability to continue to pay out the social wages declined. It was in this maw that Qaddafi would lose very large sections of the population that had hitherto supported him for one reason or another. The regime’s hegemony collapsed long before 2011. When the rebels took up arms, they had only to break the fear of the security state. For them, Qaddafi’s “dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air” (Marx on the Qing dynasty). The rebels did not have to gain the support of the masses who held fast to Qaddafi, for such masses, by 2011, did not exist in large numbers. That was the task of the 2011 uprising.

On August 20, 2008, Saif al-Islam Qaddafi gave the keynote address at the third annual Libya Youth Forum. The two previous forums, in Sirte in 2006 and Benghazi in 2007, had provided Saif al-Islam with a platform to urge on reforms of the regime built by his father and his clique. The first two speeches were forthright, but timid. At the third meeting, held in a remote desert town on the Awbari Lakes, Saif al-Islam set aside his prepared remarks and spoke, nervously, from the heart. He praised his father, but said that Qaddafi had built a regime in a historically unique set of circumstances. It was not reproducible. Things had to change. Saif al-Islam called for total privatization of all aspects of life. “The state will not own anything,” he reported, and “everything should be done by the private sector.” As if this heresy were not enough, Saif al-Islam announced that genuine political reform was needed, including “what is perhaps called a constitution—let’s say a people’s pact similar to the social pact or a pact of the mass of the people.” Aware of Qaddafi’s predilection to promise political reform each year, Saif al-Islam pointed out, “we want to have an administrative, legal and constitutional system once and for all, rather than change every year.” It was a biting criticism of his father’s vacillation.

To conduct the neoliberal reforms that he envisioned Saif al-Islam brought in Libyans from the Diaspora and Libyan technocrats who hastened to break with the residual policies of the 1969 revolution. The people who would become essential to Saif al-Islam’s program were Mahmoud Jibril, Tarek Ben Halim and Shukri Ghanem. All of them had been educated in the Atlantic world, and most of them spent much of their career overseas. Ben Halim, son of the last prime minister of Idris’ reign, was a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, and Jibril had his own consulting business in Beirut, Cairo and Doha. They are figures of renown in their own circles, and had come to Libya on the say-so of Saif al-Islam because they were committed to the transformation of the rump of the revolutionary social wage set-up into a neoliberal system. What they wanted was to build a Kuwait in the Mediterranean.

By 2006, a leading figure in the Economics Ministry in Libya, Taher Sarkez, had begun to talk openly about the need to attract foreign investment capital, create free trade zones and enhance the fledgling stock market. In other words, to import into Libya the full spectrum of neoliberal economic policies: open doors to finance capital, a place for finance to run its casino activities and an industrial sector premised upon an absence of regulations. People like Rajab Shiglabu (Libyan Foreign Investment Board) and Ali Abd al-Aziz al-Isawi (Export Promotion Board) sought to break Libya out of its predicament, the Dutch Disease (a country that exports pricey raw materials, such as oil, develops a strong currency, a deterrent to exports of other goods since it makes those exports more expensive outside the country). The classic approach to deal with this Dutch Disease is to raise tariffs and subsidize manufacturing. Such an approach did not sit well with the neoliberal clique, who preferred to inoculate Libya from the petro-dollars by keeping more of it overseas, and by using what money was available to build up export-oriented infrastructure.

Ghanem, who had been trained at Tufts University, was an old hand in the Libyan oil bureaucracy. He had been at OPEC as Libya’s representative, he worked in the Ministry of Economics and in the National Oil Corporation (NOC), being elevated to lead the NOC in 2006. Ghanem was the Prime Minister of Libya from 2003 to 2006, when Qaddafi had to bring him back to run NOC. Once back at the NOC, Ghanem calmed down the pressures brought on the multinational oil firms by the Libyan government to pay higher hidden costs and to pay money into a terrorism compensation fund.

Over the course of the next three years, as the reform agenda went back and forth, Qaddafi frequently turned to Ghanem. He wanted him back as Prime Minister, to replace the technocrat al-Baghdadi Ali al-Mahmudi (who had chanced to embroil himself in a series of scandals that showed poor management rather than corruption, and that showed him to be a poor standard bearer for the reform agenda). Ghanem, on the other hand, was capable and ideologically given over to the world of reform. He had the fortune of being well-regarded in the international oil world (not long after he was tasked to head the NOC the 27th Oil and Money Conference in London voted him “Petroleum Executive of the Year” for 2006; over the years the winners include executives from Chevron, Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell and Arab oilmen such as Abdullah S. Jum’ah of ARAMCO and Abdelrahman bin Hamad al-Attiya of Qatar). An open embrace of the multinational oil companies followed, with Ghanem thought of among oil executive and even oil engineers as the hope for turning Libya into a Gulf-like oil regime. Ghanem launched private Libyan oil companies (al-Sharara, Libyan Company for Distribution of Petroleum Products and al-Rahila) to take up the room previously dominated by the public sector firm, Braiga Company. The oil ministry was well on its way to resembling the oil sector in Qatar or Saudi Arabia.

Ghanem did crucial work in the most lucrative of Libya’s sectors. But far more important reform work was taking place at the National Economic Development Board, headed by Mahmoud Jibril. Before he was coaxed by Saif al-Islam to return to Libya in 2007, Jibril ran a successful consultancy firm that trained Arab management leaders from Morocco to Jordan, and he operated an asset management business (whose clients included the second wife of the emir of Qatar, Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned). He remained at this job till early 2011, when he joined the rebellion and quickly became its most important leader (after Qaddafi’s regime fell, Jibril became the first Prime Minister). In May 2009, Jibril met with the US Ambassador Gene Cretz, whose staff produced a fascinating summary of the conversation, “The NEDB’s role…is to ‘pave the way’ for private sector development, and to create a strategic partnership between private companies and the government. There is a still a ‘gap of distrust’ dividing the two. As to whether Libya has a Master Plan that includes all the 11,000 [privatization] projects, Jibril admitted that in the past two years, Libya had started executing projects without such a plan. However, the NEDB has been working with experts from Ernst and Young, the Oxford Group, and lately with five consultants from UNDP to advise the prime minister on the best sequencing and pacing of the projects in order to decrease poverty and unemployment. With a PhD in strategic planning from the University of Pittsburgh, Jibril is a serious interlocutor who ‘gets’ the US perspective. He is also not shy about sharing his views of US foreign policy, for example, opining that the US spoiled a golden opportunity to capitalize on its ‘soft power’ (McDonald’s, etc.) after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 by putting ‘boots on the ground’ in the Middle East. At the same time, his organization has a daunting task to tackle, in terms of rationalizing 11,000 development projects in the chaotic Libyan government bureaucracy and also, to train Libyans to work in new sectors outside of the hydrocarbons industry. Jibril has stated American companies and universities are welcome to join him in this endeavor and we should take him up on his offer.”

Apart from Ernst & Young and the Oxford Group, another consultancy firm that made its trip to Qaddafi’s Libya was McKinsey & Company. They came to work with the Libyan Central Bank’s project director Tarek Ben Halim to create a friendly financial environment inside Libya for foreign banks. The property rights law no. 9 of 1992 allowed for private property, but its foundation had to be strengthened. Ben Halim (son of Idris’ Prime Minister) came back to Libya from Goldman Sachs, and was deeply aware of the mechanisms for such reforms. A market for finance needed to be constituted, but it could only flourish if the Central Bank ceased to be a political instrument and allowed itself to ride the tide of the market (in other words, to give up any political oversight to the powerful waves generated by monopoly banks).

The changes desired by the reform section mentored by Saif al-Islam would certainly slice away at the social subsidies provided by the regime using the oil money. This worried another strand of the regime, and they weighed in on Qaddafi. They wanted the old fox to take a firm stand against the reformers. This was wishful thinking. At best, Qaddafi gave a couple of speeches that recycled the old rhetoric. In 2006, Qaddafi warned, “Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them—now Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.” Oil nationalization (1972) had made a positive impact on the people’s lives, but those days were long gone. Oil money now slipped through the net into the Atlantic banks, where the accounts of the oil companies, Libya’s Sovereign Wealth fund and the private accounts of the Libyan regime’s elites grew substantially. Qaddafi’s fulminations would only result in some modest nationalist window-dressing: oil companies had to adopt Arabic names (Total became Mabruk, Repsol became Akakoss, ENI became Mellita and Veba became al-Hurruj). Behind the names, the old game continued. If the social wages would not be properly funded, other results awaited the Libyan people. The Governor of the Libyan Central Bank, Farhat Bengadara longed for the kind of “shock therapy” that had been conducted under the auspices of Jeffery Sachs in Eastern Europe. This was classic neoliberal thought at work.

By early 2008, the tremors in the ruling elites of Libya came to a head. The neoliberal reformers wanted much more, but they were being stymied. Ben Halim resigned when he found himself unable to move the banking system fully into neoliberalism. Jibril threatened to resign at least three times, but he was brought back into the fold with promises from Saif al-Islam. In his 2008 speech to the Youth Forum, Saif al-Islam himself proposed that he would retire from politics. These men responded to a formidable section of the Old Guard who had not fully bought into the reform agenda. People like Housing Minister Abu Zayd Umar Dorda held fast to the ideals of the 1969 revolution, or else they worried that their own leeching of the social wealth for private gain would be supplanted by the new methods that would benefit the reform section.

Qaddafi proposed a unique solution in 2008. He wanted to abolish all the ministries and turn over governance to a new structure (to be developed in working groups by Mahmoud Jibril). This was a boon to the reformers. To tie the hands of the Old Guard Qaddafi offered a massive transfer payment scheme, to turn over oil revenues to individuals. This was a populist feint, since it would allow Qaddafi to suggest that he remained a man of the people at the same time as he would liquidate not only the institutional apparatus of his state, but would also make it impossible to congregate the oil wealth for social spending (such as for health and education, which would now have to be purchased on an individual basis). It was privatization that looked like populism. It is here that Qaddafi remarkably began to say that it was time to return Libya to the “natural state of things,” that is to say to the dynamic from 1951 onward, interrupted by the 1969 revolution. The past forty years had to be set aside, and Libya needed to pick up on its arrested historical development.

The Old Guard returned to the fray, threatening a rise in inflation if Qaddafi simply turned over the oil money to every individual Libyan. They were, however, not willing to take up the cudgel on behalf of a better system. Forty years of accommodation to the Qaddafi regime had made them ideologically unprepared to fight for any alternative. They had become defensive and worn-down. As early as 2000, the Basic People’s Congress had complained about the first generation of reforms. The Congress did not appreciate the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the creation of free trade enclaves. Their periodical, al-Zahf al-Akhdar, fulminated against foreign firms and the tourism sector. A section within them was also angry at Qaddafi’s political concessions to scale back the UN sanctions and to earn favors in European capitals. The Congress tried to hold the tempo of reforms down. Their actions irritated the IMF, whose 2006 report on Libya concluded, “Progress in developing a market economy has been slow and discontinuous.”

By 2007, the neoliberals were able to push through a slate of what they considered the painless reforms: easy import of consumer goods, privatization of banks, easing of currency regulations, and the creation of a new legal framework for commerce. In addition, the neoliberal reformers and business community proposed a few other easy reforms: customs exemptions, tax holidays, vouchers for education and health care. These sailed through. The Old Guard’s worries were vindicated by 2009, when the Libyan National Information Board estimated that in the third quarter of 2008 prices were almost ten percent higher than they were in the third quarter of 2007. Social unrest in the cities over the rise in food prices had dampened the enthusiasm of the neoliberal reformers. Facts on the ground did not support them. Qaddafi nonetheless went to the General People’s Congress in March 2009 and once more proposed a “shock therapy” version of privatization and state evisceration. It was not popular on the ground.

Nothing came of this. Instead, Qaddafi took to fulminating against prominent businessmen (such as Husni Bey, head of HB Group, and Hassan Tattanaki, head of Challenger Ltd.). It was dangerous to accuse these men of corruption, particularly when it had become clear already that wealth had been siphoned off to high officials in the regime and into Qaddafi’s own family. Neoliberalism metastasized into Libya, carrying forward its normal forms of privatization and an end to social welfare, but manifesting itself in its local forms—it developed along the grain of the equations of power, here the disgorging of the “state of the masses” into the hierarchies of family. The Qaddafi clan dug in. It looked like corruption, but it was really neoliberalism’s manifestation in the conditions it found in Libya in the early 2000s. The new state had gone into overdrive to demolish what it considered bad construction, painting izaala (removal) onto its walls. No homes of the elite were slated for destruction and seizure by some foundation or firm. It had become plain even in the Libyan media of the 2000s that the Riqaba committee, or the Committee for Oversight and Audit, had become a spoon for the skimming of the cream of business activity, with that cream ending up in private hands.

Qaddafi’s son Sa’adi had created a Free Trade Area in Zuwara, using the regime’s funds and pressure. Qaddafi’s daughter Aisha had created a charity, Wa’atassemo Foundation, which seemed to be a front for her business activity rather than for aid purposes. The other sons, Mutassim and Mohammed (who dominated telecommunications), had come to armed blows over a Coca Cola bottling plant in 2006. All of this was miserable. But it was not corruption on a grand, legal scale such as would be familiar to the CEOs of the financial world or of the Gulf Arab emirs. A US State Department cable from 2006 quite gingerly pointed out, “Compared to the egregious pillaging of state coffers elsewhere in Africa, or the lavish spending of the Gulf Arabs, the Libyans don’t see much to complain about in their leader’s lifestyle, as long as he does a good job of making sure other people get a piece of the pie.” When the New York Times’ Anthony Shadid and Kareem Fahim went into the abandoned Qaddafi properties in August 2011, they reported that they seemed ordinary. “Given Colonel Qaddafi’s noted flamboyance, the residence of Qaddafi himself was not quite as grand as people might have supposed. They lacked the faux grandeur of Saddam Hussein’s marbled palaces. There are no columns that bear the colonel’s initials, or fists cast to resemble his hands or river-fed moats with voracious carp.”

Qaddafi’s children had no such scruples. Aisha Qaddafi’s lavish compound in the Noflein district in Tripoli was built during those neoliberal reform years of 2005–08. Her brother, Hannibal financed his lavish lifestyle from the funds in the national shipping company. He liked his Dom Perignon and his Gulfstream jet, and had a reputation (with his wife the Lebanese model Aline Skaf) of brutality toward their domestic help (in 2008 they were arrested in Geneva for “bodily harm, threatening behaviour and coercion” against domestic staff, and they were known to have burnt the Ethiopian nanny of their two children, Shweyga Mullah, after she apparently failed to keep them quiet). The vulgar expenditures of the children were kept relatively hidden from the population. When the House of Qaddafi decided to be excessively lavish, its members took a flight to London or Geneva and threw themselves a party. No wonder that the citizens of Libya, like those of France two hundred and twenty five years ago and those in Egypt in 1952, walked bewildered through the palaces of their rulers, converting them into museums of excess that needed to be seen to be mocked, not seen to be envied.

In 2008, as the reformers found their way blocked, a prominent Tripoli attorney Ibrahim el-Meyet, a friend of Shukri Ghanem, went to meet the Charges d’Affaires in the United States Embassy. He complained for Ghanem, and then laid out why the neoliberal reformers felt that no shock therapy-type change would come as long as Qaddafi remained in power, “Despite the rhetoric, el-Meyet said he and Ghanem believe that al-Qadhafi is not genuinely ready ‘in his heart and in his bones’ to implement change, for two reasons. First, real change would entail undoing economic fiefdoms of regime loyalists whose profitability derives from political connections and who would be unable to successfully compete in an economy characterized by transparency and rule of law. Second, genuine reform would be a tacit admission that the Jamahiriya system, of which al-Qadhafi himself was the author, had failed. Al-Qadhafi perceives himself as ‘a superman of history’ and is not able to admit fault or weakness. Cosmetic attempts at economic reform are acceptable and help advance al-Qadhafi’s goal of reingratiating Libya with the West, but the shared assessment of Ghanem and el-Meyet is that meaningful economic and political reform will not occur while al-Qadhafi is alive.” This is not Qaddafi’s own view of why he would not fully support the reforms. It also lays too much on the shoulders of Qaddafi alone, and not on the Old Guard’s bloc and that of the public sector workers who fought against the reformers from the early part of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, it says a great deal about the reformers themselves, who believed that Qaddafi had to go for their agenda to go even further.

If Saif al-Islam was not the son of Qaddafi he might well have thrown in his lot with the neoliberal reformers in the rebellion of 2011, many of whom formed the nucleus of the leadership of the Transitional National Council (Jibril first among them). Instead family ties and the intoxication of power must have led Saif al-Islam to remain by his father’s side. But there is also an ideological reason why Saif al-Islam would have been loyal to his father, and denigrated the rebels. In September 2007, Saif al-Islam wrote a dissertation at the London School of Economics on “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Decision Making: From “soft” power to collective decision-making” (the work was advised by a leading neoliberal globalization theorist David Held). Saif al-Islam argued for the need to give NGOs voting rights at the level of international decision making, where otherwise the United States and its Atlantic allies hold sway. The “essential nature” of NGOs, he argued, is to be “independent critics and advocates of the marginal and vulnerable.” To allow NGOs to temper the ambitions of the North is far more “realistic,” Saif al-Islam argued, than to hope to transform international relations. That kind of realism led to his faith in the reforms and in February 20 speech for the harshest armed violence against the protests in Tripoli and Benghazi. “Civil society,” in the language of neoliberalism, is restricted to the work of establishment NGOs that are loath to revise settled power equations. The ragged on the streets are not part of the “civil society”; they are Unreason afoot.

Saif al-Islam’s mother Safia Farkash reportedly told an acquaintance at a dinner party in late 2007 that she was worried that her son’s reforms had “exacerbated resentment of the Qaddafi family and other elites who had profited disproportionately from recent initiatives to open Libya’s economy.” The average Libyan, she worried, found their livelihood damaged by inflation, and found themselves now living beside a small section whose own confidence seemed to be on the rise. It was not the social conditions of life that breed resentment, but the perception of a relative distinction between the frustrations of the many and the casual temper of the few. She was perceptive. This is what Alexis de Tocqueville had written in his 1856 L’ancien régime, “It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution. It happens most often that a people, which has supported without complaint, as if they were not felt, the most oppressive laws, violently throws them off as soon as their weight is lightened. The social order destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than that which immediately preceded it, and experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.” Saif al-Islam and the neoliberal reformers set in motion the collapse of the regime. They awakened a new sentiment that bubbled into protests. It would explode in February 2011.

IV. Libya’s Million Mutinies

The rebellion in Benghazi began on February 15, 2011. For the first few days the protests were peaceful and the police fired on them. The number of dead by February 19 was about one hundred and four (according to Human Rights Watch). These numbers are approximations, because the proper forensic work was not possible absent entry into morgues. Human rights activist Fateh Terbil said on that day, “Our numbers show that more than two hundred people have been killed.” “It feels like a warzone,” he pointed out. Human Rights Watch’s Tom Porteous told AFP on February 19, “We are very concerned that under the communications blackout that has fallen on Libya since yesterday a human rights catastrophe is unfolding.”

The violence did escalate, but it was not as one-sided as it appeared at first hand. On February 21, the Libyan air force attacked Benghazi. The former Libyan Ambassador to India, Ali Abd al-Aziz al-Isawi said that the fighter jets were used to attack civilians. Others on the ground said that they targeted the military barracks and ammunition dumps. There was no attempt to verify the claims. Part of this was the lack of media access in the country (a problem magnified in Syria) and part of it is the fog of war. The Cairo-based Arab Organization for Human Rights asked for an international investigation of the war crimes. The UN’s commissioner for human rights Navi Pillay denounced the Libyan regime on February 18, but she said nothing about the police station burned down by the rebels in Dernah or the execution of fifty “African mercenaries and Libyan conspirators” in Al Bayda’. That last quote was from an article in The Guardian (authored by Ian Black and Owen Bowcott, February 19). The full quote is from al-Jazeera:

Amer Saad, a political activist from Derna, told al-Jazeera: “The protesters in al-Bayda’ have been able to seize control of the military airbase in the city and have executed 50 African mercenaries and two Libyan conspirators. Even in Derna today, a number of conspirators were executed. They were locked up in the holding cells of a police station because they resisted, and some died burning inside the building. This will be the end of every oppressor who stands with Gaddafi. Gaddafi is over, that’s it, he has no presence here any more. The eastern regions of Libya are now free regions. If he wants to reclaim it, he will need to bomb us with nuclear or chemical bombs. This is his only option. The people have stood and said they will not go back.”

This press report made no impact on the UN headquarters, because two days later, on February 21, the UN News Center reported that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was “outraged at press reports that the Libyan authorities have been firing at demonstrators from war planes and helicopters.” The conventional narrative in the Atlantic world was that Qaddafi’s regime had begun a full-bore attack on the unarmed civilian protestors. In no time at all, which is to say by February 23, word would leak out of London and Paris that the Atlantic states were worried about a potential massacre. Qaddafi, meanwhile, said on February 22 that he had “not yet ordered the use of force,” and that “when I do, everything will burn.” It is without question that when Qaddafi did give his orders to his Generals they probably mimicked those of the Serbian General Ratko Mladic, whose orders to his troops regarding a Bosnian city are chilling, “Shell them till they are on the edge of madness” (Qaddafi and Mladic are heirs to the words of William Henry Drayton, who advised his settler troops in their war against the Cherokees, “Cut up every Indian cornfield, and burn every Indian town”). But such orders had not yet been given in February, according to Qaddafi. A week later the US State Department’s spokesperson Mark Toner warned that Qaddafi was given to “overblown rhetoric.” But this rhetoric would have it uses if Qaddafi needed to go. It would be sufficient when necessary to turn that rhetoric against Qaddafi. Such speeches were tinder for the fires of imperialism.

The details of the ground-war are essential at this point. They tell us how swiftly the rebels were able to take over Benghazi, Tobruk, Misrata, Az Zawiya and even the Tripoli working-class neighborhood of Tajoura and the Mitiga International Airport (“a serious blow to the regime,” wrote The Guardian’s Ian Black on February 26). The Warfallah tribal elders declared on February 23 that they no longer supported the regime. Defections from the Libyan government came first in drips and then in a flood. On February 17, Youssef Sawani, Saif al-Islam’s close aide and head of the Qaddafi Foundation, resigned and joined the rebellion. This was an embarrassment, but it was not decisive. That was to follow. Mustafa Abdel-Jalil, Qaddafi’s interior minister, resigned on February 21. He would become the head of the rebellion’s political arm, the National Transitional Council when it was formed on February 27 by himself and ‘Abd al-Fattah Younis. Major General al-Fattah Younis had been the Minister of the Interior in Qaddafi’s cabinet, and was sent to Benghazi on February 18 to relieve the loyalists besieged in the Katiba military compound. Major General al-Fattah Younis defected with his troops. He would become the military leader of the rebellion.

As Abdel-Jalil and al-Fattah Younis formed the core of the NTC, the defections of entire military battalions and of individual air-force pilots would begin apace. In Benghazi and Tobruk considerable sections of the armed detachments gave themselves over to the rebellion. The naval base and airport in Benghazi went to the rebellion. Soldiers from Az Zawiya joined them. In Misrata, the Qaddafi troops shot at a crowd with rocket-propelled grenades, and the protestors fired back with an anti-aircraft gun. The cadets at an air force school joined the protests, took over the airbase in Misrata and disabled the jets. On February 24, the BBC reported, “In the eastern city of Benghazi, residents have been queuing to be issued with guns looted from the army and police in order to join what they are calling the battle for Tripoli. A number of military units in the east say they have unified their command in support of the protesters.” BBC’s Jon Leyne, reporting from eastern Libya, said that Qaddafi was likely ready less than ten days after the outbreak of the rebellion to make his final stand in Tripoli. The tide was with the rebels.

It was at this stage of the conflict that the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1970 (February 26). The resolution came to the Council from the Atlantic powers (France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States). The resolution called for an end to the hostilities, an asset freeze and travel ban on members of the Qaddafi regime, and an embargo on arms sales to Libya (which was interpreted to mean, no arms to either side in the conflict). There was a general understanding that the situation on the ground in Libya had devolved into an asymmetrical civil war, with the Libyan army (with air support) far stronger than the rebel army. There was no discussion about the defections to the rebels, and its gains. The language of a potential civilian massacre in any of the cities had not been raised. The statement by Nigeria’s U. Joy Ogwu was typical. She expressed her concern about the “inflammatory rhetoric and loss of life occurring in Libya,” and hoped that the sanctions would “provide for the protection of civilians and respect for international humanitarian and human rights law.” The Council focused on the killing of the protestors in the cities and the refugee crisis that had inflicted the Tunisian-Libyan border.

The Libyan Ambassador to the United Nations, Abdel Rahman Shalgham, a leading figure in the Qaddafi regime for his entire career, defected to the rebels. He pushed the Council hard to create a no-fly zone and to ask the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Qaddafi and his regime for war crimes. It took a great deal to persuade China, India and Russia to go along with the ICC involvement. But no-one was willing to go for a “no-fly zone,” and the Russians in particular pushed in a clause against any foreign intervention. The Council did not hear from anyone loyal to the Qaddafi regime, even though on paper that regime continued to be the recognized government.

On the ground, meanwhile, the rebels, despite the bloodshed and without foreign assistance, seemed to be making headway. This was not Egypt and Tunisia, where the armies stood down and refused to fire on the protestors. Here the army had broken into two, one part remaining loyal to the Qaddafi regime, and the other giving itself over to the rebellion. Qaddafi still controlled the air, but even that seemed to be a momentary advantage. On February 21, two Libyan Air Force Dassault Mirage F-1 jets flew to Malta, and the pilots requested political asylum. This was a turn for the Air Force. A week later, on February 28, the rebels of Misrata shot down a Libyan Air Force jet. On March 2, when Libyan Air Force jets targeted the weapons dump at Ajdabiya, the rebels shot down one aircraft. Three days later, the rebels in Ras Lanuf shot down a fighter jet. On March 13, Colonel Ali Atiyya announced his defection at the Mitiga International Airport in Tripoli.

These high-level military defections continued. On March 1, Brigadier Musa’ed Ghaidan al-Mansouri (head of the al-Wahat Security Directorate), Brigadier Hassan Ibrahim al-Qarawi and Brigadier Dawood Issa al-Qafi defected to the rebellion. Troops joined them. On February 26, ten thousand troops in the east went to the rebellion. Meanwhile, in Az Zawiya the rebels held off the Qaddafi forces on March 1, they took Ghadames and Nalut on March 2, and battled Qaddafi’s forces in Bin Jawad on March 5. As they advanced forward, Qaddafi’s air force began to be an impediment. When the rebels moved toward Sirte on March 6, the Libyan Air Force fired on them, and they retreated to Ras Lanuf. By March 11, Ras Lanuf and Az Zawiya went back and forth between Qaddafi’s troops and the rebels. Brega and Ras Lanuf are not heavily populated towns. They were not of supreme consequence to the fight. More important was Ajdabiya, the gateway to Benghazi.

On March 15, the rebels used their own air force to destroy two of Qaddafi’s warships and they hit a third off the coast of Ajdabiya and Benghazi (as reported by al-Jazeera). It meant that the rebels had developed air power, strengthened the next day with the defection of two more fighter jets into Benghazi and two more battalions from Sirte, who took over its airport. In Misrata, the rebels defeated Qaddafi’s forces on March 16, and took command of several of his tanks.

Nevertheless, by mid-March the Qaddafi forces had pushed the rebels out of the central towns and appeared to be advancing to Benghazi, and to Misrata. It is at this point that the calls began to intensify for either a “no-fly” zone or some kind of intervention to prevent a massacre. Britain’s David Cameron had called for a “no-fly” zone on February 28, and the Arab League sharpened the call on March 12. The NTC asked the United Nations for a “no-fly” zone on March 2, the day after the military leader Major General al-Fattah Younis called for foreign intervention. As morale began to turn in the rebel’s camp, the leadership sought salvation elsewhere.

Was a massacre impending? Qaddafi’s troops had previously tried to take Az Zawiya (March 1) and Misrata (March 6), and in both cases the rebels held off the attacks. There is no question that blood was going to be shed, but that is not itself the definition of a massacre or of genocide. When Qaddafi took back Az Zawiya on March 7, credible reports suggested that the “minimum” loss of life was about eight people. Thirty-three people died on March 5 at Az Zawiya, with twenty-five being rebels and eight being Qaddafi soldiers. When Qaddafi’s army shelled Misrata on March 6, twenty-one rebels were killed. These are the costs of war, not the outcome of genocide. Revolutions are fought. They cannot be given. The rebels seemed prepared. Protests in Tripoli amongst the working-class neighborhoods of Feshloom, Gurgi and Tajoura gave extra strength to the rebellion. These neighborhoods were in permanent siege. Martyrs lay on autopsy tables at Tripoli Central Hospital. The workers were not pusillanimous. They seized the moment. There would be blood. No revolution comes in a straight line. The workers knew nasty from their everyday lives. No-one would expect that real revolutionary change would come absent violence.

The conflict began on February 15. Six days later, the Libyan Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN, Ibrahim Dabbashi, having defected from the regime, said, “The regime of Qaddafi has already started the genocide against the Libyan people.” What was the evidence for the genocide, which technically is the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” (Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, UN, 1948)? Where was the “intent to destroy” and where was the evidence that this had “already started”? Not to fix onto definitions, let us assume that Dabbashi did not mean “genocide,” but simply what he had also said in the same press conference, that what was occurring were “crimes against humanity and crimes of war.” The standard for these is no doubt lower. The Rome Statute (1998) that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) notes that “crimes against humanity” refers to “odious offenses” that are not “sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy…or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government.” For these crimes, still, one would have to ascertain them in terms of quantity (how many dead?) and quality (how did they die?). Dabbashi, like many of the high level diplomatic defectors of the Libyan service, touted very high figures. Most of them seem to have based their numbers on a report from al-Arabiyya, based in Dubai and owned by a Saudi company, Middle East Broadcasting Center, and Lebanon’s Hariri Group (these are largely pro-Western and pro-Saudi business interests). On its Twitter feed, al-Arabiyya reported that 50,000 had already been wounded and 10,000 massacred by the Libyan government. The source for this story was Sayed al-Shanuka, the Libyan member of the ICC who had defected from the regime. This was on February 23, a week after the conflict began.

That number swept the media sphere. Al-Jazeera, based in Qatar, ran the story, as did the BBC and the US media. No-one seemed to ask where these deaths had taken place. France’s Sarkozy and Britain’s Cameron warned Qaddafi that they would act if this kind of killing continued. The word “genocide” defined the discussion. Even in the liberal-Left, commentators absorbed the idea that “genocide” had either happened (based on al-Arabiyya numbers) or was about to happen (the people here are Juan Cole and Gilbert Achcar). But already some credible organizations began to provide figures. On February 20, Human Rights Watch announced a figure of 233, with most of the dead in Benghazi proper. Benghazi was, by February 20, in rebel hands. One of the alarms rung by those who spoke of an impending massacre by late February was that the population of Misrata was going to be killed in large numbers. On April 10, Human Rights Watch released a report on the dead of Misrata, a major battlefield in the war. What they found for this city of four hundred thousand was that, according to Dr. Muhammad el-Fortia (of Misrata Hospital) who had the highest numbers, there were 949 wounded and 257 dead. Of these, surprisingly, the numbers of women dead were only 22, or three percent of the total. If the violence was indiscriminately or odiously unleashed on the population the percentage of women killed would surely have been higher. The discourse on genocide in Libya was either fanciful or based entirely on speculation. It simply did not happen. By the middle of June, the first credible figure appeared that showed that about ten thousand people had been killed. This was from Cherif Bassiouni of the UN, who led a UN Human Rights Council team to Tripoli. Bassiouni’s panel found evidence of war crimes by Qaddafi’s side, but also noted war crimes on the side of the rebels. This number comes not within days of the rebellion and the attacks by the army, and not in one site, but over the course of four months. It includes the violence from the Libyan army, the violence from the rebels and the violence of the NATO aerial assault. Much later, on December 18, 2011, the New York Times’ C. J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt published a long investigation on the civilian casualties inflicted by the NATO bombardment. They found that the seven month air campaign came with “an unrecognized toll: scores of civilian casualties the alliance has long refused to acknowledge or investigate.” That was long after the conflict had substantially ended. Bassiouni is a credible Egyptian diplomat, who has headed many panels to investigate human rights (such as in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2006), and has consulted with the US State Department. His figures seemed accurate to human rights specialists. Nevertheless, at no point did Bassiouni’s panel call for an investigation of NATO’s war crimes or of the attacks by the rebels on civilians (such as the so-called “African mercenaries”). The emphasis was on Qaddafi’s human rights violations.

Even more startling evidence of the very poor investigation of the war crimes allegations comes at a Pentagon press conference on March 1. When asked about Qaddafi’s aerial attacks on civilians, Defense Secretary Gates said, “We’ve seen the press reports, but we have no confirmation of that,” and Admiral Mike Mullen added, “That’s correct. We’ve seen no confirmation whatsoever.” That the US military complex relies upon press reports to confirm the use of live fire seems remarkable—with the massive surveillance infrastructure in place it seems that the Pentagon would be able to make a reasonably more accurate assessment than al-Jazeera or BBC, or al-Arabiyya, upon whom they relied to base their assessment of armed conflict. Asked about the situation on the ground in Libya, Gates offered an “honest answer,” which was that “we don’t know in that respect, in terms of the number of casualties. In terms of the potential capabilities of the opposition, we’re in the same realm of speculation, pretty much, as everybody else. I haven’t seen anything that would give us a better read on the number of rebels that have been killed than you have. And I think it remains to be seen how effectively military leaders who have defected from Gadhafi’s forces can organize the opposition in the country.” Asked at this point if the rebels had asked for NATO air strikes, Gates answered, “no.”

Around March 14, despite the talk of genocide, al-Jazeera reported that the rebels fought on. East of Brega they ambushed a Qaddafi column and took fourteen soldiers prisoner and killed twenty-five. The two major cities of the rebellion, Benghazi in the East and Misrata in the West, remained in rebel hands. On March 13, the rebels held off the Qaddafi attack on Misrata. The Qaddafi troops, according to al-Jazeera, had a breakdown in discipline, and this cost them their superiority in firepower. The next day, Qaddafi’s advance to Benghazi was blocked at Ajdabiya, held by the main rebel force under the command of Major General al-Fattah Younis. The Major General told al-Jazeera that he would defend Ajdabiya, and that the cities of the east were heavily armed, ready to take on Qaddafi’s armies block by block. It had already become clear by March 14 that even if Qaddafi’s armies took back towns, they were not capable of holding onto them. The rebellion seemed to have the initiative.

V. Intervention

By early March, the Libyan rebellion began to be hijacked by forces close to the Atlantic powers, whose interest in Libya is governed by oil and by power: it is my view that the Libyan rebellion gave the Atlantic powers, Qatar and Saudi Arabia an opportunity to attempt to seize control over an escalating dynamic that had spread across the Middle East and North Africa, which had already been called the Arab Spring. It threatened the US pillars of stability and the foundation of Saudi rule. This dynamic needed to be controlled, or at least, harnessed. Libya, which sits in the center of North Africa, with Egypt on one border and Tunisia on the other, provided the perfect space to hurry along the clock, to skip Summer and hasten to Winter. Apart from the obvious addiction to oil, the political issue came to the surface: to maintain the traditional order of things in the Arab world, with the main pillars of stability intact: Israel, Saudi Arabia, with the Gulf emirs, and the tentacles of the Atlantic world in the major capitals in the oil lands. No revision of that order was permitted. Libya opened the door to the counter-revolution.

Why did the Atlantic states want to remove Qaddafi? We shall have to wait for the leaks, the self-serving memoirs and the next major cache of WikiLeaks documents, this time perhaps from the Quai d’Orsay. By March, the French were in the lead at the United Nations. Initially it seemed that this was either a smokescreen or a wag the dog scenario. After all, during the Tunisian uprising, the French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie flew on a plane owned by Aziz Miled, a close associate of Belhassen Trabelsi, the brother-in-law of Ben Ali. When she returned to France, Alliot-Marie, or MAM as she is known, offered French assistance to help put down the rebellion. All this focused attention on the fact that Sarkozy was very close to Ben Ali, and in 2008 was made an honorary citizen of Tunis. Frédéric Mitterrand, Sarkozy’s culture minister, went along the grain of MAM’s offer of military assistance, in mid-January, “To say that Tunisia is a one-man dictatorship seems to me quite exaggerated.” France had fumbled in Tunisia. MAM was fired, but her departure only heightened the stench of collusion between Sarkozy’s circle and people like Aziz Miled, Belhassen Trabelsi and eventually, Ben Ali.

Libya would provide the smokescreen to cover over what the US embassy in Tunis described in 2005 as France’s “tradition of cultivating close relations with ageing Arab world dictators.” This was a classic case of transference. With cantonal election on the horizon in March it might have bolstered the fortunes of Sarkozy’s anemic party (but it did not, as the far right and the socialists made considerable gains). As well, the French intelligentsia went out of its way to promote the war. Former Sarkozy Foreign Minister and legendary promoter of humanitarian intervention Bernard Kouchner threw himself at the English and French media to promote the war. He was helped along by gauche caviar, Bernard Henri-Levy (BHL), whom Tariq Ali called a “veritable Tintin.” BHL phoned Sarkozy from his revolutionary safari in Benghazi, where he was also trying to steady the nerves of the neoliberal faction among the rebel leadership. The Élysée Palace needed fortitude of the BHL variety if it was to stay the course toward UN Resolution 1973 and the intervention. Sarkozy did not need much persuasion. Qaddafi had stymied his Mediterranean Union. He was an impediment to French interests in the region. The French led because the Libyan goose was ready to deliver a golden egg.

The Gaullist traditions of hesitancy over intervention were broken by the Kosovo war. No such tradition needed to be broken across the Channel in the United Kingdom or across the Atlantic in the United States. Oil is always a central preoccupation of the war planners among the cousins. The basic script for the US and the UK was set after the Iraqi coup of 1958 in a telegram sent by British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to his prime minister, the Conservative leader Harold Macmillan. If the British pre-emptively occupied Kuwait, Selwyn Lloyd wrote, it would get the oil into their hands quickly. There was a problem: “The effect on international opinion and the rest of the Arab world would not be good.” Instead of this preferred, direct route, the best option was to set up a “Kuwait Switzerland where the British do not exercise physical control,” but “we must also accept the need, if things to wrong, ruthlessly to intervene, whoever it is has caused the trouble.” This ruthless intervention was necessary to protect the Gulf oil reserves and indeed the Arab oil lands, what the US State Department right after World War 2 called “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the great material prizes in world history.” It would be silly to ignore the elephant in the room, namely oil.

If oil was one part of the equation, the other was the political necessity to exercise hegemony in the region, to maintain that stupendous source of strategic power. The US had come off very poorly with Obama’s hesitancy in Egypt. Sending Wisner was the wrong move. So too was the dialogue with Tantawi over stability and Israel. The US needed to get back in the game as the Arab Spring seemed to spiral out of control. Libya was the impetus for a re-engagement on US terms.

On March 15, in the White House, President Obama’s inner circle sat and made their plans. At the center of it were people who believed that George W. Bush’s adventure in Iraq in 2003 destroyed the will among Northern states for humanitarian intervention. That will was to be reconstructed. Libya provided the opportunity. A senior administration official told Time’s Massimo Calabresi, “The effort to shoe-horn [the Libyan events] into an imminent genocide model is strained.” Nevertheless, as early as February, the supporters of humanitarian intervention were “laying the predicate” for military force. Among those supporters were Samantha Power and Jeremy Weinstein (National Security Council), Susan Rice (UN Ambassador) and Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State). Obama had a harder time with his military commanders, who were loathe to enter another conflict on pragmatic grounds: they simply did not have the available troops if the conflict escalated. But Obama got their support, and on March 16 announced that if Qaddafi was not stopped “the words of the international community would be rendered hollow.” This was the same argument used by George W. Bush against Saddam Hussein.

What really seems to have set the clock to intervention was the pressure from the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs. They wanted to put down the Bahrain uprising and take control, in their own way, of events in Yemen. As well, the Saudi King hated Qaddafi. In 2003, at an Arab Summit, Qaddafi accused King Abdullah of “bringing the Americans to occupy Iraq.” The following year, King Abdullah’s people accused Qaddafi of trying to kill the King. In 2006 at another Arab Summit in Doha, Qatar, Qaddafi faced the King and said, “It has been six years, and you have been avoiding a confrontation with me. You are propelled by fibs toward the grave and you were made by Britain and protected by the US.” The point about the British and the Americans is perhaps true, and it made for good television to watch Qaddafi erupt. The emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, was embarrassed to see his senior potentate be scolded in this manner, and furious at Qaddafi. The memory of a monarch is longer than that of an elephant. It is also filled with petty slights that must be avenged. The monarch dreams that his enemies are flies to be swatted; when he wakes he razes cities. Any excuse to put that upstart from a minor tribe in his place was welcomed in the royal circles of Riyadh.

These are all speculations. It is of course the case that Libya’s neoliberal reform agenda had been dented. Ghanem had sent his emissary, el-Meyet, to tell the Americans in 2008 that the agenda would not be able to move unless Qaddafi was out. The old man was willing to go along with the neoliberal reforms, but his regime was incapable of delivering it. It had to be knocked out. There were always conspiracies afoot, but these were not decisive. Three of the leaders of the February 17 Movement went to Paris on December 23, 2010 where they met other figures from the old anti-Qaddafi clique. Fathi Boukhris, Farj Charrani and Ali Ounes Mansouri sat down with Qaddafi’s old aide-de-camp, Nuri Mesmari, who had defected to the Concorde-Lafayette hotel. What is essential to know about Mesmari, Qaddafi’s shadow, is that he was a crucial figure among the neoliberal reformers, the point man who arranged state trips of foreign leaders and who pampered Qaddafi’s children. It is said that Qaddafi insulted Mesmari at an Afro-Arab summit in Sirte on October 10, 2010, after which he decamped for Paris. It is also said that Qaddafi was angry with the entire clique by December 2010, and had asked Moussa Koussa for his passport. This cannot be confirmed. What is clear is that by December Mesmari was singing to the DGSE and Sarkozy about the weaknesses of the Libyan state. Their man in Benghazi was Colonel Abdallah Gehani of the air defense corps. He was arrested by Qaddafi’s regime in January 2011. The Atlantic states set aside Gehani by mid-March. He could not ascend to the leadership of the military side of the rebellion. The CIA already had its man in mind. He would soon be in place. We shall get to him below.

Cynics in Washington and Paris used Libya as a way to wash off the stain of Bush’s Iraqi adventure from the carapace of the idea of humanitarian interventionism. This is cynical and inhumane. Out of such misplaced idealism comes enormous bloodshed for ordinary people.

Resolution 1973.

On March 19, the United Nations Security Council voted for Resolution 1973 to establish a “no-fly” zone over Libya. The violence against civilians and media personnel was cited as the reason for the new resolution (an earlier one, 1970, languished). The Council authorized a ban on all flights over Libya (except for humanitarian purposes), froze assets of a selection of the Libyan high command (including all of Qaddafi’s family), and proposed to set up a Panel of Experts to look into the issue within the next year. Even as the members of the Council raised their paddles to indicate their “yes” votes, French mirage fighters powered up to begin their bombing runs and US ships loaded their cruise missiles to fire into Libyan targets. Their bombardments were intended to dismantle Libyan air defenses. This was the prelude to the establishment of a “no-fly” zone.

The ground for NATO’s intervention was crafted after the genocide in Rwanda (1994), when an estimated million people were massacred over the course of a few months. This action happened in plain sight, with a United Nations team unable or unwilling to act to stem the violence. The sheer sin of the event pushed the UN toward a new doctrine, if not a new understanding of whether such genocides can easily be prevented (if the US and/or NATO had acted in Rwanda, what would they have bombed to prevent the genocide? How would they have bombed the hundreds of thousands of people who wielded pangas [machetes] to kill almost a million Tutsis. The tiny minority of génocidaires convinced the many to kill, Mahmood Mamdani shows us in When the Victims Become Killers. Aerial bombardment does not provide a simple solution to such a grave and difficult political problem). By 1999, President Bill Clinton declared, “If the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing.” The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001) and then a UN Panel on these issue (2004) reported, “We endorse the emerging norm that there is a collective international responsibility to protect…in the event of genocide and other large-scale killing, ethnic cleansing or serious violations of international humanitarian law.” The UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit suggested that the UN could authorize force “on a case-by-case basis, should peaceful means be inadequate.” The final clause here is central, and it was not discussed at the Security Council in March. No-one considered a peaceful path, even though the African Union had set up an Ad Hoc High Level Committee on Libya on March 10. It was sidelined, and in fact its team was prevented from going to Libya on March 19 as the French mirages took off to bomb the country. Humanitarian intervention (the alias for aerial bombardment) would come prior to and against any peaceful initiatives to stop the violence.

To create the “no-fly” zone, the Council allowed member states to act “nationally or through regional organizations” and to use “all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas.” The problem with this confused mandate was at least two-fold. One: who would be able to execute the mandate? As Mahmood Mamdani astutely put the problem, the United Nations’ resolution was “central to the process of justification, it is peripheral to the process of execution.” The UN had no real ability to take “all necessary measures,” and nor would the African Union or the Arab League. Indeed, in the chamber, the Russian and Chinese delegates caviled about “how and by whom the measures would be enforced and what the limits of engagement would be.” The only power capable of such an action was the United States either alone or in collaboration with NATO, of which the US is a major part. In other words, the UN resolution was falsely universal, calling on “all member states” when it might as well have been decidedly particular, calling on NATO and the United States to act here as it had acted in Yugoslavia.

Once the war entered its critical stage in September and October, the US military, the Obama White House and its assorted intellectuals began to promote the view that the US “led from behind.” It was NATO that was in the lead, they suggested. This was a view put forward first by Ryan Lizza in The New Yorker for an essay entitled “The Consequentialist: How the Arab Spring Remade Obama’s Foreign Policy.” “Pursuing our interests and spreading our ideals,” Lizza wrote, “requires stealth and modesty as well as military strength.” As an Obama advisor told Lizza, “It’s so at odds with the John Wayne expectation for what America is in the world.” The US had learned its lessons about the perils of unilateral intervention. Obama had the soft touch against Bush’s harder manner. But this is another illusion. When Roger Cohen of the New York Times tweeted about this, he received an immediate rebuke from the US Ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder, “That’s not leading from behind. When you set the course, provide critical enablers and succeed, it’s plain leading.” The United States provided most of the surveillance, intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, it conducted most of the refueling missions and it provided most of the aerial bombardment. Resolution 1973 was essentially an invitation for US power to be exercised from the skies of North Africa onto its ground.

The second problem with the Resolution was graver. It did not specify who would define the limits of “all necessary measures” and how long should these “measures” remain in force? The UN Resolution 1973 called upon the parties to facilitate dialogue and to seek the means for an “immediate establishment of a ceasefire.” If NATO and/or the United States went into full-scale action that would embolden the rebellion to believe that under cover of the drones and cruise missiles they would soon ride their Toyotas into Tripoli. There would be no stomach for a ceasefire given the type of strategy NATO historically utilizes. At the same time, Qaddafi would immediately recognize that NATO’s typical modus operandi was to seek to isolate the regime’s leader (as NATO did with Slobodan Milosevic) by pushing for an ICC investigation on war crimes charges, to use aerial bombardment to degrade his armed force and to push the rebels to make a full-scale charge to overthrow him. Around the time of the Resolution, Sarkozy, Cameron and Obama began to say that Qaddafi “has to go.” They wrote a joint opinion essay that appeared on April 15 in various media outlets (including The New York Times, where I read it). They laid out the full nature of their campaign against Qaddafi,

So long as Gaddafi is in power, NATO and its coalition partners must maintain their operations so that civilians remain protected and the pressure on the regime builds. Then a genuine transition from dictatorship to an inclusive constitutional process can really begin, led by a new generation of leaders. For that transition to succeed, Colonel Gaddafi must go, and go for good.

If Qaddafi had to go “and go for good,” there was no room for any negotiation. There was no option for a peaceful settlement. Assassination or war was the only option. “To insist that Qaddafi both leave the country and face trial in the International Criminal Court is virtually to ensure that he will stay in Libya to the bitter end and go down fighting,” pointed out the International Crisis Group’s North Africa director Hugh Roberts. “That would render a ceasefire all but impossible and so maximize the prospect of continued armed conflict.” The entire idea that NATO was open to a peaceful path was a cynical smokescreen to camouflage NATO’s singular agenda: to use its military might to give air-cover for the rebels to seize Tripoli, and, as far as the evidence suggest, to remain beholden to the NATO states for their fundamental assistance.

Given this, the NATO strategy would have no room for a “ceasefire.” One of the principle planks of the confused resolution would never be met. That is why even Gilbert Achcar, who otherwise supported a “no-fly” zone wrote, “There are not enough safeguards in the wording of the resolution to bar its use for imperialist purposes.” One senior diplomat told Pepe Escobar of Asia Times why his country could not support Resolution 1973, “We were arguing that Libya, Bahrain and Yemen were similar cases, and calling for a fact-finding mission. We maintain our official position that the resolution is not clear, and may be misinterpreted in a belligerent manner.” Not long after the passage of Resolution 1973, US cruise missiles struck Libyan armed forces units and Qaddafi’s home.

By March 20, it was clear that the United States and NATO had gone to war against Qaddafi himself.

The murkiness of the mission perplexed General Carter Ham of the US African Command (AFRICOM). Ham acknowledged that many of the rebels are themselves civilians who have taken up arms. Resolution 1973 did not call upon the member states to assist the rebels, only to protect civilians. It followed the Responsibility to Protect mandate of the UN. It was technically not permitted to enter the civil war on one side or another. There is no obligation to protect an armed rebellion, only unarmed civilians. By the first days of the NATO bombing, however, it was already clear that the “no-fly” zone would advantage the rebels and so violate the mandate. “We do not provide close air support for the opposition forces,” General Ham notes, “We protect civilians.” However, “It’s a very problematic situation. Sometimes these are situations that brief better at the headquarters than in the cockpit of an aircraft.” But this was disingenuous. The rebel spokesperson, and former Good Morning Benghazi presenter Ahmed Khalifa explained, “There is communication between the Transitional National Council and UN assembled forces,” in other words NATO, “and we work on letting them know what areas need to be bombarded.” This does not sound like the accidents of distance. It sounds more like collusion, with NATO taking a strong position on behalf of the rebels.

When Qaddafi’s forces engaged the rebels, technically the NATO aircraft and cruise missiles were not permitted to interfere. The resolution had forbidden NATO from sending in ground forces. Technology had rendered the idea of “ground forces” redundant. The US brought its AC130 gunships and A10 Thunderbolt II aircraft into operation over the skies of Libya. These are not designed to help patrol the sky, but are capable of hovering in the sky and firing at ground troops and at heavy weaponry with its cannons (including a 40mm Bofors cannon) and machine guns. The AC130 is essentially “boots in the air,” and its presence showed that the US arsenal (even under NATO command) was no longer patrolling the skies, but was actively engaged against Qaddafi’s forces on the ground. A senior US military official told the Washington Post on March 22, “I would not dispute the fact that in some of our actions we are helping the rebels’ cause, but that is not the intent.” Things got murkier by May, when US Navy Admiral Samuel Locklear told Congressman Mike Turner that the NATO forces were trying to assassinate Qaddafi. There was no UN mandate for this, nor did the US political leaders authorize this publicly (although Obama did say that “Qaddafi has to go,” a more modern version of “who will rid me of this meddlesome priest”). Locklear had much more measured language, but the gist was the same. As Turner reports it, Locklear told him, “The scope of civil protection was being interpreted to permit the removal of the chain of command of Qaddafi’s military, which includes Qaddafi.” In any form of English, this means assassination. This was after the April 30 NATO aerial attack on Qaddafi’s compound that reportedly killed three of his grandchildren. Resolution 1973 was violated by the NATO actions then, even if NATO’s intent was pure.

A hundred years ago, Italian planes inaugurated aerial bombardment over these very cities: Benghazi, Tripoli. The Futurist F.T. Marinetti flew on one sortie, finding the bombing runs to be “hygienic” and a good “moral education.” The air force communiqué from November 6, 1911 considered the runs to “have a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs.” The Daily Chronicle hesitated on the same day, “This was not war. It was butchery. Noncombatants, young and old, were slaughtered ruthlessly, without compunction and without shame.” The Italians took cover behind international law. The Institute for International Law in Madrid found that “air warfare is allowed, but only on the condition that it does not expose the peaceful population to greater dangers than attacks on land or from the sea.” Much the same kind of logic floated around in NATO’s Brussels’ headquarters prior to the UN vote and then afterwards.

In the camp of the Left, certainty was no longer an option. Qaddafi’s threats against the weaker forces in the East were hard to ignore. Arrests, assassinations and artillery fire in the West were equally appalling. There was no easy lever to use against Qaddafi’s power. Many who would otherwise stand surely against humanitarian intervention were now not so sure. Much the same kind of predicament stopped liberals and leftists when George H. W. Bush promised to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime (those of us who stood on vigils for the dead of Hallabja in 1987 will remember the debates). These are not manufactured discussions. They are real. No countervailing armed force of the Left was available to defend the rebels. No Vietnamese army, such as entered Cambodia in 1978–79 to crush the degenerate Khmer Rouge and save Cambodia from the maniacal policies of Pol Pot. No Cuban troops, such as came to the aid of the MPLA (who can forget the 1987–88 Cuito-Cuanavale siege and the eventual victory of the MPLA and the Cubans against the South Africans, a mortal blow for the apartheid regime). These are episodes of military intervention when the balance of forces favored the Left. Was the Resolution 1973 “no fly” zone intervention such a feat?

The events of late February are positioned as a false dilemma. Only two options are presented (massacre or intervention), when others presented themselves: the rebels had begun to take control of the dynamic, and would prevail, and the African Union had begun to assert itself as a peace-maker, and would perhaps have convinced Qaddafi to accept a ceasefire. In one case, the rebels might have won the military campaign on their own, albeit on a much longer timeframe (perhaps the Egyptians would have entered the campaign at some point to open a humanitarian corridor for the civilians of the East to flee to Egypt). In another, a peace agreement might have allowed Qaddafi to decamp with dignity and for a regime change to take place with many of the same faces from the NTC in the new government (alongside a few regime stalwarts, including Saif al-Islam). Those who posed this false dilemma had no faith in either the rebels or in the African Union. Their horizon of human action remains frozen in a colonial mindset: the natives are barbarians and the Europeans are the saviors.

Few had any illusions about the actions of the “coalition.” Even the guru of liberal interventionism, Michael Walzer, believed that Libya was the “wrong intervention.” Why the West sought to bomb Libya and not the Gulf States, or Darfur or indeed the Congo was plain to see. The answer to every question is the same: oil. In Bahrain, as we shall see, the Saudis and their Gulf Arab allies were given carte blanche to crush the dissent in the peninsula and preserve the monarchies that encircle the first amongst equals, the realm of King Abdullah and the oil barons. Yemen was on the brink. Deals were being struck. Senior figures in the military and in the political wing who had abandoned Ali Abdullah Saleh had been given assurances from their powerful backers. As long as the revolution did not go too far, and as long as the military could contain any move to radical democracy, all would be forgiven. The bogey of al-Qaeda took care of Washington, and that of radical republicanism took care of Saudi Arabia. The realm of care could not include Bahrain or Syria, the Congo or Sri Lanka. There would be no intervention in oil-rich Gabon, where Obama mourned the loss of the old-hand dictator Omar Bongo in 2009 with platitudes that should be reserved for genuine leaders of their people. It is mockery that greets the pious declarations of human rights when these rights are so stingily doled out to areas of the world that seem to matter more than others. The question that burned up the media in the Global South was why this was the “right intervention,” and why not Syria, why not Bahrain, why not all the other important sites where the “international community” (namely the NATO powers) did not bother?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice did not have an easy time at the UN. South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil and India balked. The Chinese and Russians were not keen. It took the Arab League’s assent to give Obama the lever to move South Africa’s Jacob Zuma in a rushed phone call. India’s Manjeev Singh Puri pointed out that his country could not support the resolution because it was “based on very little clear information, including a lack of certainty regarding who was going to enforce the measure…. Political efforts must be the priority in resolving the situation.” Brazil’s Maria Luiza Riberio Viotti also demurred, largely because Brazil “believed that the resolution contemplated measures that went beyond [the] call” for the protection of civilians. She worried that the actions taken might cause “more harm than good to the very same civilians we are committed to protecting,” and that no military action alone “would succeed in ending the conflict.” A senior diplomat from a country among the non-permanent members of the Security States told me that he feared that Resolution 1973 would create a political moral hazard: would a secessionist or rebel movement that was weak risk an armed uprising knowing it would be crushed so as to force a NATO intervention on its behalf? Such a suicidal rebellion, which might be emboldened by the example of 1973, might result in huge casualties, the opposite of the responsibility to protect.

No doubt my diplomatic source was correct. By early September, the Syrian Revolution General Commission, the umbrella bloc of activists opposed to the Asad regime, called on the “international community” to act. “Calling for outside intervention is a sensitive issue,” said its spokesperson Ahmad al-Khatib. “That could be used by the regime to label its opponents as traitors. We are calling for international observers as a first step. If the regime refuses it will open the door on itself for other action, such as no-tank or no-fly zones.” By early 2012, no such Libya-style military intervention was in the cards. On the surface, the once-bitten governments of China and Russia refused to give their assent to a tough resolution in the style of 1973. Beneath the bluster, other motivations made their impact felt. The Israelis worry greatly about their security in this new Arab Spring environment: the emergence of political Islam into Egyptian political life threatens security on that border, while the Lebanese continue to refuse to police a border while in a state of dormant war. Despite his own bluster, Bashar al-Asad has turned out to be a resolute border guard for Israel. The worry in the US State Department and in the Israeli government is that there is no alternative to Bashar’s regime in Syria as far as this kind of border service is concerned. The US cannot be seen to make any moves in defense of Bashar, and they need not do so: the Chinese and Russian wall allows the US and Israel to benefit as free riders. No-one wants to see the precipitous fall of the Asad regime. This cynical analysis might give pause to the Syrian rebels, who have been willing to lose blood on the streets hoping for an intervention that will not come. Geo-politics does not dictate it.

Brazil, China, Germany, India and the Russian Federation abstained from the vote on Resolution 1973. Ten voted with the United Sates, France and the UK. There were no negative votes. It was hard enough to abstain.

China did not use its veto. Later, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said that her government had been led by the Arab League’s plea. They had not anticipated such widespread air strikes. Turkey, which did not play an active role at the UN, was also furious at the “all necessary measures” part of the resolution. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan expressed the kind of indignation he had shown at Davos when sharing a panel with Israel’s Peres in 2009, “We have seen in the past that such operations are of no use and that on the contrary, they increase loss of life, transform into occupation and seriously harm the country’s unity.” Both China and Turkey suffer from regional divides (Tibet and the Kurds). Libya’s East-West cardinal split is far more dramatic than anything that these countries face, but the principle is nonetheless unsettling. If a rebellion breaks out in Qamdo prefecture, would something like Resolution 1973 return to the Security Council?

The idea of the “no-fly” zone came to the Security Council from the defected Libyan representatives (February 21), from the National Transitional Council in Benghazi (March 2), from the United Kingdom and France (March 7) and from the Arab League (March 12). That the idea first came from the Libyans at the UN and then from the NTC before it came from the NATO states is important to note, but not significant in itself. Liberal intervention takes cover behind invitations. The US invaded the Philippines in 1898 only after being invited to join in the struggle against the Spanish by Emilio Aguinaldo. When the Spanish fled, the US decided to take over. This kind of imperial grammar moves from 1898 to the twenty-first century with ease. It is important to note, however, that there was no unanimity in the NTC. On February 27, Abdul Hafiz Ghoga, the NTC’s spokesperson announced in Benghazi, “We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people and Qaddafi’s security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya.” The strident calls from Benghazi for intervention come only after March 10, when France recognized the NTC. The calls were heard in the NATO capitals when it was clear that the neoliberal reformer Mahmoud Jibril was the key political person in the NTC (he met with Sarkozy and Hillary Clinton in Paris on March 14) and that the military wing of the NTC was in firm hands (of whose, we shall see below). This new clique had banked on NATO air support. It wanted the NATO intervention to strengthen its own hand among the rebels, and to sideline the more patriotic and anti-imperialist among them. The NATO intervention was an essential part of the attempt to hijack the Libyan rebellion.

In the UN’s Security Council “emergency room” there is a mural done by the Norwegian artist Per Krogh. Its panels showcase everyday life in Northern Europe. At its bottom center there is a phoenix, rising from the flames, around which stand people who might just be “Eastern” (the women here have their faces covered, and the men wear turbans). A field artillery gun points at these people. It is their fate. Under such illusions, the Security Council deliberates.

The Europeans and the US knew that they would not have been able to turn those guns as they wished in the case of Libya without cover from the Arab League, and from the African Union. The former was much more eager for intervention, and the latter hoped to effect some kind of political solution. Neither was willing to put all its efforts to stop NATO’s entry into a rebellion that seemed to have its own dynamic. If the Arab League had said no to the intervention, or if the African Union had been more forceful in its disapproval (such as disregarding the UN and sending its team to Tripoli on March 17, 18, 19 or 20), then it would have been embarrassing for the Atlantic powers to have insisted on a resolution. Bernard Kouchner, the leading advocate for humanitarian intervention writing in The Guardian on March 24, provides us with an open statement of the importance of the Arab and African fig-leaf, “Fortunately, the UN, the African Union and the Arab League are here to provide us with a legal framework so that this momentary violence—under resolution 1973—may serve to achieve real peace, surely preferable to a pacifism that would allow civilians to be slaughtered.” They did not provide a “legal framework.” They provided political cover.

Saudi Arabia Delivers the Arab League.

On March 12, the Arab League voted to back the idea of a “no-fly” zone. At this Cairo meeting, only eleven of the twenty-two members of the League attended the vote. They were hornswoggled by the veteran Saudi diplomat, Ahmed bin Abdulaziz Qattan. Six of the eleven representatives present were members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the GCC or Arab NATO. It is worth pointing out that four of the GCC members are also participants in NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, formed in 2004 to create “inter-operatibility” or military cooperation between NATO and these four states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates). The Arab NATO is also an adjunct of NATO itself.

To gain a simple majority of those present in the Arab League meeting in March, the Saudis only needed three more votes. They got them. The only countries at the table who voted against the “no fly” zone were Algeria and Syria. Eleven countries were not present. It was hardly a quorum.

Youssef bin Alawi bin Abdullah, the Omani foreign minister, announced this news at a press conference. The GCC’s leader Abdelrahman bin Hamad al-Attiya preened for the cameras, “Libya has lost its legitimacy.” Amr Moussa, Secretary General of the Arab League, told Der Spiegel, “The United Nations, the Arab League, the African Union, the Europeans—everyone should participate.” The Arab League had indeed provided the smokescreen for other motivations. This was the spur to get the vacillating members of the UN Security Council to push for a “no fly” zone. Mahmoud Jibril hastened to Paris to huddle with the NATO political leaders at a G-8 meeting on March 14. Obama worked the phones, using the Arab League’s vote as the carrot. On March 17, the UN Security Council voted for the resolution.

The day before the Arab League vote, the Saudi regime, according to Toby Jones writing in Foreign Policy, “ordered security forces to blanket the kingdom’s streets, choking off popular demonstrations and sending a clear signal that public displays would be met with a crackdown. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the kingdom’s usually reserved foreign minister, warned that the regime would ‘cut off any finger’ raised against it in protest.” Demonstrations in al-Hofuf and al-Qatif were fumigated.

Two days before the UN vote, the GCC sent a detachment of 1000 Saudi troops and 500 United Arab Emirates troops (along with a detachment of Jordanians) across the causeway that separates Saudi Arabia from Bahrain. They were part of the GCC’s Peninsula Shield. Their commander, Major-General Mutlaq bin Salem al-Azima said, “We have instructions from our top leadership that we are tools of peace and that we will never attack, but in the meantime, we will never allow anyone to attack us.” These “tools of peace” set about doing what they had been trained to do, namely to beat the protestors and fire into crowds. Human Rights Watch documented the death of at least eighteen people, but cautioned that this number was perilously deflated (the Bahraini authorities refused admission to hospitals, and indeed arrested doctors and nurses who made unpleasant noises). Joe Stork, deputy director of HRW’s Middle East section said in late March, “Bahraini security forces have frequently shown a reckless disregard for human life during crackdowns on protesters. Firing birdshot pellets at close range is not crowd control—it can be murder.” A few weeks later, Stork noted, “Bahrain’s ruling family intends to punish any and everyone who criticizes the government. The aim of this vicious full-scale crackdown seems to be to intimidate everyone into silence.”

The White House released an anodyne statement, urging the GCC partners to “show restraint” but privately quite pleased with the outcome. Defense Secretary Gates had been in Manama on March 11, a few days before the Peninsula Shield entered the country. He offered the al-Khalifa family “reassurances of support” from the United States. That is what they wanted to hear. It was sufficient.

The Bahrain Centre for Human Rights remains in business a year after these events, documenting the harsh treatment of political prisoners and harassment of journalists and politicians. The opposition’s paper, al-Wasat, was silenced (the regime arrested its founder, Karim Fakhrawi, on April 5, and he died in custody a week later; it main columnist Haidar al-Naimi was arrested at the same time). The struggle in Bahrain continues. Occasionally protestors appear on the site of the Pearl Monument (now destroyed by the authorities who did not want it or its name to memorialize the protests and the crackdown). Mohamed Ali Alhaiki, Ali Jawad al-Sheikh, Nabeel Rajab and so many more continued their futile vigil. They have faced the full flavor of repression from the Bahraini government. Rajab was arrested and beaten brutally in the early 2012, a sign of the ongoing protests and counter-revolution. In the context of this repression and the ban on international media entering Bahrain, and you might as well say the janazah for the protests.

Nada Alwadi, who covered the protests for alWasat, points out that the Bahraini activists know that the “United States is not in favor of any changes…the US posture has played a major role in marginalizing Bahrain in the eyes of the international media.” In early January 2012, several thousand Bahrainis protested before the UN building, chanting, “Down, Down Khalifa,” and holding signs urging the UN to “intervene to protect civilians.” The protestors came from the al-Wefaq party and the more secular Saad Party. One of the issues before them was to protest an anodyne report released by a commission set up by the King to assess the protests and the crackdown. Strikingly, the commission was chaired by Cherif Bassiouni, the official who had previously led a UN Human Rights Council team to Tripoli. In Libya, Bassiouni was harsh against the regime; in Bahrain, he was forgiving to the Kingdom. Protected by the calumnies of power, the baffling crimes of the Bahraini regime are forgiven.

As the crackdown continued into the end of 2011, the Bahrani government took refuge in US forms of crowd control. They hired former Miami police department head John Timoney to come and train the Bahrain police. Timoney had cut his teeth at the New York Police Department, then made his name in Philadelphia controlling the people at the Republican National Convention (2000) and in Miami during the Free Trade Area of the Americas protest (2003). Journalist Jeremy Scahill wrote of Timoney’s work in Miami, “No one should call what Timoney runs in Miami a police force. It’s a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armour and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, ‘back…back…back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.” A Commission of Inquiry in Miami found that the flagrant use of riot police in their outlandish gear stifled free speech since it scared public citizen action. Bahrain did not need to dig deep into its older traditions to crush dissent and affirm its autocracy; the Miami model from the cradle of liberty is sufficient.

That they had been able to get away with murder pleased the GCC members. At a meeting on March 20 at the UAE, Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal told his peers that the Gulf NATO needed to take care of its own security. “Why not seek to turn the GCC into a grouping like the European Union? Why not have one unified Gulf army? Why not have a nuclear deterrent with which to face Iran—should international efforts fail to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons—or Israeli nuclear capabilities?” The deal on Libya allowed the GCC to act in Bahrain, which has now emboldened the Gulf Arabs to think of a nuclear shield. This is catastrophic for the region.

Once the air war began over Libya, the members of the Arab League knew they had been taken for a ride by both the NATO countries and the GCC. The debate inside the League appeared on the surface in a very bizarre fashion. It seemed as if the League’s members did not know what a “no fly” zone entailed. Nawaf Salam of Lebanon, for instance, said that the resolution did not authorize the occupation of “even an inch” of Libyan territory. The League’s Amr Moussa said that the NATO bombing “differs from the aim of imposing a no-fly zone.” To Der Spiegel, Amr Moussa said he did not know “how nor who would impose the no-fly zone.” If this meant that NATO would be able to define the assault on Libya, Amr Moussa said, “That remains to be seen.” The Arab League’s contortions seemed bizarre if one believed that they actually did not know what a “no fly” zone would look like. But this is not credible given the actual experience of a “no-fly” zone maintained during the 1990s over Iraq, an Arab League member state. The only adequate explanation, reaffirmed by a diplomat from an Arab state who concurred with this theory, is that once the air war began the League’s members balked. Amr Moussa, who had pretensions for the Egyptian presidency, had to back off from full support of resolution 1973. He was dragooned to stand beside UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Cairo and recant (Ban’s car was assaulted as he left the Arab League headquarters by protestors chanting “no-fly, no-fly”).

Amr Moussa’s bid to become Egypt’s next president faltered, as he seemed to be outmaneuvered in the Arab League over Libya. One of the key players who whipped Amr Moussa into line was Qatar. At the Arab League, it was Qatar that pushed ahead of Saudi Arabia, pressing the GCC to line up for the “yes” vote. Qatar did not only provide the political support for the resolution. Once it passed, Qatar worked with NATO on the military end (recall that Qatar is a member of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative). Qatar’s Mirage fighter jets and its C-17 Globemasters went into action in the air, while Qatari Special Forces hit the ground. Libyan rebels came to Qatar to train at the same time as Qatar became the base for the communications apparatus of the TNC (a television station, Libya Ahrar TV, and a radio station broadcast into Libya from an office in Doha’s fabled Souq Waqif). Qatar also became a de facto headquarters of the Libyan Contact Group. The first meeting of the group was held in Doha on April 13. It was chaired jointly by the United Kingdom and Qatar. At this meeting, the Contact Group reiterated the rhetoric of peace, called on Qaddafi to go and then established it as the main channel of communication between those who were prosecuting the air war (and the trainings for the rebels) and the rebels themselves. In other words, the Contact Group and the Transitional National Council opened discussions about financing (a Temporary Financial Mechanism was set up), humanitarian assistance and “recovery” once the war was over. It was the central focal point for deals about the future of Libya, and Qatar’s fingerprints were all over it. Qatar also sent its military chief, Abdelrahman bin Hamad al-Attiya to Cairo to discuss its Libyan strategy with the ruling Military Council on April 6. Egypt, by some accounts, had provided arms to the rebels. But it would not enter the conflict with its military. That might have made NATO irrelevant.

Retribution by the disgruntled Arab states against Qatar and the GCC’s manipulation of the Arab League came in May. The lead candidate to take over the GCC from the retiring Amr Moussa was the GCC’s former head Abdelrahman bin Hamad al-Attiya. Al-Attiya, a Qatari, had been an active player in getting the Arab League’s support for the “no fly” zone. His country, Qatar, was a major booster of resolution. The Arab League would have taken al-Attiya without complaint had this bad feeling over 1973 resolution not prevented unanimity. At the last minute, the Egyptians threw in their venerable diplomat, Nabil Elaraby, who became the Arab League’s Secretary General in May 2011. Al-Attiya had been set aside.

Africa’s Dented Shield.

Gabon, Nigeria and South Africa voted for UN Resolution 1973. South Africa had intended to vote against it or to abstain, but a phone call from Obama to Jacob Zuma was the decisive factor. The vote from these three weakened the process that was ongoing in the African Union (AU), namely to create a framework to bring peace to the overheated Libyan conflict. On March 10, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council met in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and set up a High Level Ad Hoc Committee on Libya. They were to fly in to Tripoli and put pressure on Qaddafi. Qaddafi respected the African Union. After he felt let down by the Arab League in the 1980s, Qaddafi pivoted toward Africa. He had become the biggest backer of the African Union (including using Libyan state funds to build houses for all the African leaders for their 2001 summit in Lusaka). If anyone could influence Qaddafi, it was the African Union. By all indications, Qaddafi did not want to become an utter pariah, at least not in the eyes of those whom he sought out as his peers (the African leadership). That was the only possible lever.

The African Union Panel on Libya included heads of government (such as Amadou Toumani Touré of Mali) and foreign ministers (such as Henry Oryem Okello of Uganda). Touré was an interesting choice. In 1991, as head of the parachute commandos he overthrew the austerity dictatorship of Moussa Traoré (who governed Mali from 1968), but turned over the country to civilian rule. Not for nothing is he known as “The Soldier of Democracy.” Ten years later, Touré returned to politics, and has since won two elections to lead his country. Okello studied and lived in Britain for a number of years before he returned to enter the family business (his father was president of Uganda in the 1980s). He was an active member in the Juba peace talks with the Lord’s Resistance Army. Their credibility is as good as anyone else.

The other two members of the Panel are pale shadows of Touré and Okello. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz also conducted a coup in Mauritania. To his credit, he resigned his position, put on a suit to campaign and won the election to the presidency in 2009. But there was no real transition. Congo Brazzaville’s Denis Sassou Nguesso has presided over his country and run it since 1979. Sassou Nguesso shares much with Qaddafi, including a putative radical past (he is the leader of the Parti congolais du travail, but is better known as a big spender to tender his own family’s needs). He saw the writing on the wall in 1991, was ousted from power, engineered a civil war that lasted through the 1990s and returned to being head of government in 2002.

Their effective leader was Jacob Zuma of South Africa. When formed on March 10, the Panel had hoped to arrive in Tripoli before March 20. But they were prevented from their mission by Resolution 1973 and the immediate assault on the country. The UN declined to allow the African Union Panel to proceed, despite assurances from both Tripoli and Benghazi that they would entertain the mediation. It was a remarkable example of the UN stopping a peace envoy and preferring bombardment.

A month into the conflict, the UN allowed the African Union Panel to try its hand. The conflict appeared to be at a stalemate, so the NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu said that the alliance has “always made it clear that there could be no purely military solution to the crisis.” The African Union proposal was quite simple: an immediate ceasefire, unhindered delivery of humanitarian aid, protection of foreign nationals and a dialogue between Benghazi and Tripoli for a political settlement. Zuma’s South Africa had voted for Resolution 1973, so he had credibility in Benghazi. On April 10, Zuma saw Qaddafi but did not fly to Benghazi. It was a bizarre turn of events. An already demoralized African Union had to chalk up another defeat.

The African Union stumbled along. A preparatory meeting of the African Union panel met on June 26 but did not suggest anything new. They had their roadmap, but it required NATO to stand down. By the AU’s meeting in Equatorial Guinea on June 30 the African Union’s Libya panel’s chair, Mauritania’s President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, had already gone on record that Qaddafi “can no longer lead Libya.” But the African Union, unlike NATO and Benghazi, would not make Qaddafi’s departure a precondition for negotiation. That was a recipe for no dialogue at all, as the International Crisis Group recognized in its June 6 report (Making Sense of Libya). The African Union did not count out Qaddafi’s removal, but would only allow that as a possible outcome of the discussion between the two sides. No such discussion took place.

The International Crisis Group report upheld the African Union view that “a political breakthrough is by far the best way out of the costly situation created by the military impasse.” Their position mirrored the basic peace platform of the African Union. It asked for a third party political intervention. The Atlantic powers could not be a third party. They have no credibility to be unbiased. The Crisis Group went elsewhere for its mediators, “A joint political initiative by the Arab League and the African Union—the former viewed more favorably by the opposition, the latter preferred by the regime—is one possibility to lead to such an agreement.” Such political intervention could not occur, the Crisis Group argued, without “the leadership of the revolt and NATO rethinking their current stance.”

The position of the Crisis Group and the African Union was shared by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (the BRICS states). At their summit in Sanya, China on April 14 the BRICS states essentially endorsed the African Union’s stalled process. The BRICS had a vision that was far more robust than that of the Atlantic powers. It came out of the 1990s, when it appeared as if History had ended and Americanism was the sole approach to human affairs. During the 1990s, the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America tried to develop a new set of institutions to push against the economic and political assertions of the Atlantic powers. As the Group of Seven (G7, 1974), these Atlantic powers corralled the Third World’s initiatives inside the United Nations and gave priority to the G7’s own favored institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs and of course NATO). The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM, 1961) formed the Group of Fifteen (G15, 1989), which narrowed into the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA, 2003) bloc, and finally to the BRICS (2006). The BRICS states had made their claim to planetary governance, with a platform that is far more multipolar and polycentric than that of the Atlantic powers. The African Union would act more as an agent of the BRICS than of Washington and Paris. Libya was a test case for the transfer of power from the G7 to the BRICS—or at least a demonstration effect of whether the BRICS (taken seriously for its surplus capital during the credit crunch) would be acknowledged as a serious partner during a political crisis. As it turned out, the G7 disregarded the BRICS. This was the undoing of negotiations and a peaceful settlement. The opinions of artillery held the day.

Before the March 17 vote in the UN, the BRICS states had agreed in principle not to support another “humanitarian intervention” by NATO. It turned out that all the BRICS states were on the Security Council in 2011, with two of them (China and Russia) as permanent members and the rest rotating through as temporary members. If the bloc had held fast and if the African Union members in the Council (Gabon, Nigeria and South Africa) had abstained or voted against the resolution it would have been embarrassing to the G7—if Germany had still abstained that would have been eight abstentions or no votes in a Council of fifteen. Such a divided Council would not have been able to go through with this resolution, and with so much uncertainty it would have been acceptable for either China or Russia to veto it. But this did not occur. South Africa voted with the G7.

The BRICS states came to Sanya for their second major summit. Between discussions on the credit crunch and their mutual trade relations, the BRICS states released a statement on the events in the Middle East and North Africa. What they saw was a “shift of power towards ordinary citizens,” a fact that must have certainly confounded one or two of the heads of government who had to swallow hard while they accepted that phrase into the final communiqué. When it came to Libya, the consensus was not so clear. The Sanya Declaration was a bit stifled. Nonetheless, the five states agreed that the military option should not be relied upon to bring peace to Libya—reconciliation between the population required a political platform, and guarantees that revenge would not be on the table and that the good of Libya would harness maximalist claims from either side. “All parties should resolve their differences through peaceful means and dialogue in which the UN and regional organizations should as appropriate play their role.” The BRICS states called for an immediate ceasefire to assess the degradation of the civilian infrastructure, and to provide humanitarian aid. This was to be monitored by some combination of UN peacekeepers and the African Union peacekeepers, with every indication that if this plan would go through the BRICS countries might have provided some material and logistical support.

The regional organizations, the African Union in particular, had made its attempt. It had been set aside. The energetic UN envoy, the Jordanian politician Abdul Ilah al-Khatib (who once famously said of the Atlantic powers, “Only when there is a crisis do they realize that they have to do something”), went from capital to capital attempting to draw down the violence and produce some kind of pathway to peace. For the UN, the war had become a humanitarian catastrophe. Between February and July, about 630,000 civilians had fled the country (including 100,000 Libyans), and another 200,000 Libyans had been internally displaced. Al-Khatib’s deputy told the UN Security Council in late July, “Both sides are willing to talk, but they are still emphasizing maximum demands at this point and patience is clearly required before detailed discussion can begin.” It never did begin. The talking appeared to be a smokescreen. It proved that the UN could not operate in a field where it is crowded out by the opinions of artillery, notably the very loud guns of NATO.

Russia, who had neither exercised its veto in the UN nor used its muscle against Qaddafi, now invited Jacob Zuma to bring the BRICS case to the Russia-NATO Council meeting at Sochi, the Black Sea resort, on July 3. The main item on the agenda for the summit was for NATO to smooth Russia’s ruffled feathers. The Council was created in 2002 to make sure that the increased tensions between the two did not detract from Russia’s support of the War on Terror. NATO’s gradual march eastward, attracting former Eastern bloc states into its agenda came just after NATO’s air war in Yugoslavia (1999) and its war in Afghanistan (2001 onward). All this seemed to Moscow like encirclement. Bush’s insistence upon missile defense, and the US push to bring NATO and several Eastern European as well as East Asian states into its missile defense plans rattled Moscow’s justified paranoia. The war over South Ossetia in 2008 allowed Moscow to flex its muscles, but this did not dampen NATO’s confidence; its ships entered the Black Sea to deliver aid to Georgia (Russia went technical here, pointing out that the number of NATO ships in the area violated the 1936 Montreux Convention).

Over the past decade, Russia has moved closer to the new formation that comes out of the Non-Aligned Movement, the G-15 and IBSA. China joined IBSA to block the new trade rules that would have gone through in Cancun (2003) and to formulate a common agenda at the Copenhagen (2009) meeting on climate. These discussions and the creation of a common platform produced the BRICS formation. Russia, long adrift somewhere between its own Cold War past and Boris Yeltsin’s subservience to the US, found a new anchor with the locomotives of the Global South.

At Hainan, in April, the BRICS powers strongly criticized the NATO war on Libya, and formulated the principles that would appear in the African Union High Level Ad Hoc Committee on Libya’s June 15 statement to the UN. BRICS held out for a negotiated settlement, and cautioned against the habits of war. Ruhakana Rugunda, of Uganda, represented the African Union at the UN meeting, where he pointedly noted, “It is unwise for certain players to be intoxicated with technological superiority and begin to think they alone can alter the course of human history towards freedom for the whole of mankind. Certainly, no constellation of states should think that they can recreate hegemony over Africa” (Rugunda was the Ugandan representative to the UN, and has now been moved to a domestic cabinet post). The African Union told the UN that given its experience in Burundi, in particular, it would be able to handle the negotiation and the transition in Libya.

It was in this context that the Russians involved themselves in the Libyan stalemate, sending unofficial diplomats to Libya and pushing back in the halls of NATO. At Sochi, Russian president Medvedev invited Zuma, who has been at the head of the African Union’s attempts in Libya, to join the deliberations. Zuma told the NATO chiefs that they had overstepped the UN Resolutions (1970 and 1973), and that the only way forward was negotiations. If the NATO chiefs could pressure the Benghazi Transitional Council to back down from its maximalist position (Qaddafi must go immediately), Zuma suggested, the way could open for peace with honor. The NATO chiefs listened to Zuma tell them about the African Union’s Framework Agreement on a Political Settlement, and watched Medvedev applaud the African Union for its work and offer his support to the Framework and the African Union’s Roadmap. Russia and the African Union offered to lean on Qaddafi to abide by the terms of the Roadmap, and they wanted NATO to lean on the Transitional Council to do the same. There was even a suggestion that they would provide an exit for Qaddafi, moving him out of Libya to a post at the African Union or somewhere to smooth the transition to peace in Libya.

NATO left Sochi indifferent to Russian concerns over missile defense, with bland promises over progress at their next meeting in Chicago. On Libya, there was no progress, as there could be none. Libya is the first battleground of a new “cold war,” this one not between the US and Russia, but between the G7 (and its military arm, NATO) and the BRICS (who have not much of a military arm). The G7 commands the skies and the rhetoric of freedom, but it does not have a sustainable economic base and no sense of a political process that does not come with aerial bombardment and its threats. NATO’s sword would never grow cold.

The BRICS failed to build on the momentum after the credit crisis of 2007 forced the G7 to invite them to help save the world financial system. The BRICS states showed up, opened their checkbooks, but seemed to do so servilely. They did not insist on greater power in the secret rooms where the G7 makes its decision. When the search for a candidate to lead the IMF opened up in the summer of 2011, the BRICS states failed to coalesce around their candidate (a European once more leads the IMF). They also failed to foist their alternative to the deflationary strategies of the international financial organizations. All this took place despite the fact that the IMF announced that the United States will cease to be the world’s largest economy by 2016 (that reign began in the late 1920s). In its place will come China, the anchor of the BRICS. Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, tried to reassert the BRICS position with “How China Plans to Reinforce the Global Recovery” (Financial Times, June 23). Wen called the bet. China is at ready, but not yet to take on the political challenges alone. It sought to work through the BRICS formation, but without a confrontational attitude. Neither China nor the BRICS in general are willing to stand up to the G7 in the international arena.

On the question of international politics, the BRICS have been a bother to the G7. If the BRICS were defeated in their quest to participate in the Libyan imbroglio, they have so far declined to allow the G7 to repeat their Libyan mission in Syria. The BRICS have refused to allow any strong UN resolution for that country. The grounds are that NATO misused Resolution 1973 on Libya, and it would do the same in Syria (the G7’s case on Syria was made by the French representative to the UN Gérard Araud on June 13 in O Estado de Sao Paulo, to win over the Brazilians away from what the French see as South African obduracy). Since June, the BRICS states blocked a resolution in the Security Council. In early August, the Council condemned the “widespread violations of human rights and the use of force against civilians by the Syrian authorities,” but refused to test the waters of sanctions or threats. On August 31, the New York Times editorial fulminated, “Russia and China, along with India, Brazil and South Africa, are blocking a United Nations Security Council resolution that could impose broad international sanctions on Damascus. Their complicity is shameful.” What the Times did not recognize is that this blockage is a consequence of the shabby treatment of the “international community” by NATO over the Libyan war. What is shameful is the disregard the G7 showed to the world when others had good ideas to help stem the bloodletting in Libya. What is more important here is that the US and the Israelis do not want an intervention in Syria. What appears as the emergence of the BRICS on the world stage might simply be that their reticence to sign-off on a NATO intervention in Syria is along the grain of similar hesitations in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Peace was never the point. The conflict was always about the removal of Qaddafi, and his regime.

America’s Libyans.

In early March, I got a message from an acquaintance who works in the many shadowy enclaves around Washington, DC. He gave me a name, Khalifa Hifter, and the name of a town, Vienna, Virginia. Make the connection, the friend said.

It did not take long to discover the story, one that was initially totally ignored and then later treated as if it were unspectacular (I wrote about him in CounterPunch and then talked about him during my debate with Juan Cole on Democracy Now!, on March 29, 2011. That evening, miraculously, my computer was hacked and the database destroyed). An ex-Colonel of the Libyan army, Khalifa Belqasim Hifter had arrived by at least March 14 (although I think earlier) in Benghazi to share the military command with Major General al-Fattah Younis (and Omar el-Hariri). There was always a whiff of mystery about al-Fattah Younis, Qaddafi’s secretary of the interior till he defected in Benghazi on 22 February. Omar Mukhtar el-Hariri also has a complicated story. He was one of the original members who conducted the coup of 1969, a man not of the tent, but just outside it (he taught Qaddafi how to drive a car). Later el-Hariri reflected that the Free Officers had no clear idea what to do with the new Libya and made many mistakes. It is what turned him against Qaddafi. In 1975, el-Hariri attempted a coup against Qaddafi, but failed and remained in prison and in house arrest in Tobruk till 2011. When the uprising began, el-Hariri rose to become al-Fattah Younis’ no. 2. Neither al-Fattah Younis nor el-Hariri could be counted upon to be proper NATO allies. They had not been made “inter-operatable.” For that, the CIA had to insert Hifter back into the saddle.

Things on the political side were more reliable for the NATO command. The NTC was in the hands of two well known neoliberal reformers. One of them was Mahmoud Jibril, the lead neoliberal “reformer” in the Qaddafi regime who worked, as we saw, closely with Saif al-Islam on the privatization of Libya. The other was Ali Abd al-Aziz al-Isawi who was Qaddafi’s Director General for the Ownership expansion program {privatization fund], and then later Secretary of the Committee for Economy, Trade and Investment. It helps that al-Isawi had a PhD in privatization from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Romania. By early March 2011, people like Jibril and al-Isawi, who had resigned in February from his post as Libya’s ambassador to India, were in firm control of the NTC.

As their figurehead, Jibril and al-Isawi had the venerable former Justice Minister in the Qaddafi regime, Mustafa Abdel-Jalil (who resigned his post on February 21 after he was sent to observe the events in Benghazi by the Qaddafi regime). Trained at the University of Libya, Abdel-Jalil was as comfortable with his country’s legal system as with Sharia law. A religious conservative in many respects, Abdel-Jalil was nonetheless a loyal regime man. When the UN Human Rights Council and others made modest calls for Abdel-Jalil to investigate extra-judicial killings in Libya between 2007 and 2011, he demurred saying that the Internal Security Agency Officers had state immunity. Despite his loyalty to the regime’s codes, Abdel-Jalil showed an independent streak as a judge. This is why he was adopted by Saif al-Islam to reform Libya’s justice system.

Jibril, al-Isawi and Abdel-Jalil are all Saif al-Islam Qaddafi’s men, whose commitment to the reform agenda unites them and whose laxity regarding the power of imperialism makes them able to see NATO as benevolent. Abdel-Jalil is no fool. In January 2010 he told the US Ambassador Gene Cretz that many Libyans are “concerned” with the US government support for Libya and for the perception that the War on Terror was “against Muslims.” Nevertheless, Abdel-Jalil, according to Cretz, “has given the green light to his staff to work with us.” The political control of leadership faction of the NTC was firmly in the hands of the neoliberal reformers by early March of 2011. They were, in a sense, America’s Libyans.

Hifter returned to take charge of the military wing. He made his name in Qaddafi’s war against Chad in the 1980s. At some point in that conflict, Hifter turned against Qaddafi, joined the Libyan National Salvation Front, and operated his resistance out of Chad. The New York Times (May 1991) ran a short piece on Hifter’s 1980s operation. “They were trained by American intelligence officials in sabotage and other guerrilla skills, officials said, at a base near Ndjamena, the Chadian capital. The plan to use exiles fit neatly into the Reagan administration’s eagerness to topple Colonel Gaddafi.” When the US-supported government of Chad, led by Hisséne Habré fell in 1990, Hifter fled Chad for the United States. It is interesting that an ex-Colonel of the Libyan army was able to so easily gain entry into the United States. The US State Department said that Hifter and his men would have “access to normal resettlement assistance, including English-language and vocational training and, if necessary, financial and medical assistance.” Also of interest is the fact that Hifter took up residence in Vienna, Virginia, less than seven miles away from Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the CIA. In Vienna, Hifter formed the Libyan National Army.

In March 1996, Hifter’s Army attempted an armed rebellion against Qaddafi in the eastern part of Libya. The Washington Post (March 26) noted that its reporters had heard of “unrest today in Jabal Akhdar Mountains of eastern Libya and said armed rebels may have joined escaped prisoners in an uprising against the government.” The leader of the “contra-style group” was Hifter. Twenty-three rebels, soldiers and prisoners were reported to have died in this uprising and prison break. It is worth reporting that the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group also conducted an operation in the Wadi al-Injil (Bible Valley) in March 1996, perhaps coordinated with the Libyan National Army. Was it a coincidence that about four months later Abdullah Senussi’s guards opened fire on the (mainly LIFG) prisoners at Abu Salim jail and killed 1200, the burr under the saddle of the Islamists and the human rights lawyers that would finally push them to their rebellion in 2011?

History called Hifter back fifteen years later. In March 2011, Hifter flew into Benghazi to take command of the defected troops, joining al-Fattah Younis whose troops had been routed from Ras Lanouf on March 12. They faced the advance of Qaddafi’s forces toward Benghazi. It was in this context, with the uprising now firmly usurped by a neoliberal political leadership and a CIA-backed military leadership, that talk of a no-fly zone emerged.

In late March, the military wing went through its own power struggle. A new military spokesperson, Colonel Omar Ahmed Bani announced that Hifter, who had hitherto been no. 3 in the hierarchy but in command of the ground forces, would be the head of the rebel armed forces. A few days later, the NTC reversed Ahmed Bani’s announcement and declared that al-Fattah Younis remained in command. Hifter had his base among the civilians who joined the rebels, while al-Fattah Younis was thought to be popular among the defected troops. Many in the NTC felt that Hifter had returned with a great deal of arrogant self-assurance, with the belief that his history and his links to the CIA earned him the right to be in charge. “We defined the military leadership before the arrival of Hifter from the United States,” said Hafiz Ghogha, the vice president of the NTC. “We told Mr. Hifter that if he wants, he can work within the structure that we laid out.” Apparently this was not enough for Hifter, whose minions went for more.

In late July, al-Fattah Younis and two of his aides were arrested in Benghazi on the grounds that he was working for Qaddafi (or so it is said, since the entire episode remains murky). He was killed very quickly, and his body was burned. The remains of the three dead were found outside Benghazi, disposed of crudely. Benghazi went into crisis, as large crowds gathered for al-Fattah Younis’ funeral and his family remained angry at the events that led to his assassination. NTC chairman Abdel-Jalil said that the assassination was the result of a “conspiracy,” and on grounds of incompetence he dissolved the NTC and asked Mahmoud Jibril to reform a new government with Jibril as Prime Minister. The war was coming to a close, with all signs showing that the rebels and NATO had the upper hand. al-Fattah Younis was dispatched mysteriously, Jibril was given sole charge of the NTC and the new government of Libya, and the military command rested with the CIA’s Libyan, Hifter. Jibril, who the US State Department felt was a “serious interlocutor who gets the US perspective” was poised to govern the new Libya. People like Mahmoud Jibril and Khalifa Hifter were more accountable to their patrons in Paris and Washington than to the people of Libya, whose blood was spilled on both sides for an outcome that is unlikely to benefit them.

IV. NATO’s War

“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”

—Dame Agatha Christie, 1890–1976.

Neoliberal revolutions are bland. For heroism they require the courage of ordinary people, like those rag-tag looking young people who jumped on Toyota trucks, grabbed any old guns and went off to the front lines to face the rump of the Qaddafi army. Some of them had been steeled in Qaddafi’s prisons, others in his armed forces, and yet others by what they had seen from their fellows in Tunisia and Egypt. They had hopes that far exceeded anything that Qaddafi could satisfy. In 1969, they would have fought alongside him had the Idris regime put up any resistance. By 2011, they turned their guns against him. He had become their Idris.

Early in the combat, the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson met some of the young Benghazi rebels. “In the early days of Qaddafi’s counterattack,” Anderson writes, “youthful fighters were outraged that the enemy was firing real artillery at them. Many hundreds have died.” They came dressed to play the part of the martyrs, while behind the scenes, the bourgeois gladiators put on their pin-striped suits and tested out their French and English. Some of these young people found their courage and went into combat. But they were not the main fighting force. That came from the defected soldiers, the rebels from the mountains, the rebels from the Islamists and from the working-class who were willing to remove their guns from the oil-cloths and risk their lives in combat.

Among the soldiers going to the frontlines came the battle hardened fighters of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and the other smaller offshoots of political Islam. After the February rising in Benghazi, the old LIFG fighters and their political leadership formed the Libyan Islamic Movement (al-Harakat al-Islamiya al-Libiya). They entered the conflict in small bands. For example, in late March, one of the rebel frontline leaders Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi said that he had recruited about twenty-five men from the area around Derna who were now in combat around Adjabiya. These fighters, al-Hasidi told Il Sole 24 Ore “are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists,” but he added that “members of al-Qaeda are also good Muslims and are fighting against the invader.” Al-Hasidi had fought in Afghanistan and was captured in Peshawar, Pakistan in 2002, from where the US handed him over to the Libyans. He was jailed in Libya and released in 2008. Abu Sufian Ibrahim bin Qumu had fought in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, been captured in Sudan and taken to Guantanamo, and then released to the Libyan authorities in 2007. In 2005, the US government thought that Abu Sufian was a “probable member of Al Qaida and a member of the African Extremist Network.” He was released in 2010 when Saif al-Islam brokered a deal to rehabilitate the Islamists. In 2011, Abu Sufian led a section of fighters from Darnah. Like al-Hasidi and Abu Sufian, Abdel Hakim Belhaj (also known as Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq) was a veteran of the Afghan war. Unlike al-Hasidi, Belhaj had been a fighter in the late 1980s and a major force in the LIFG in its return to North Africa. Broken by the Qaddafi regime, Belhaj and his cohort fled. He was arrested in Malaysia in 2003, tortured in Thailand and returned to the Libyan government in 2004. In Tripoli, Belhaj was tortured with the connivance of the CIA and MI6. Like Abu Sufian, he was released in 2010 by Saif al-Islam. When Tripoli fell to the rebels, Belhaj, the emir of the LIFG, took over the city’s Military Council. Belhaj’s deputy is Mahdi Herati, who came into the battlefield from his boat on the Gaza Flotilla that tried to break the Israeli blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. When news of Belhaj’s elevation broke, the neoliberal reformers hastily tried to underplay his links and his role in Tripoli. Washington, Paris and London were chagrined. But among the rebels, Belhaj is a hero. He risked his neck on the front lines. NATO helped from the sky.

Men like Abu Sufian, al-Hasidi and Belhaj came from common stock. They were part of a Libyan Diaspora whose addresses were in the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the cities of Sudan and Yemen and in the rough country of the North Caucuses. Not for them the professional world of Beirut and Paris, London and Washington, DC. It was the more well-heeled Libyans who met in London to form the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition in 2005. Of the seven organizations that gathered into this Conference, the oldest and most established was the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (it was formed in Sudan in 1981, attempted to overthrow Qaddafi in the 1980s and then went into hibernation). The Libyan League for Human Rights, based in Geneva, was founded in 1993 by a series of important former regime liberals such as Soliman Bouchuiguir and the former Libyan Minister of Foreign Affairs in the 1970s Mansour Rashid el-Kikhia, killed in 1993. El-Kikhia was one of the most well-known dissidents of the Qaddafi regime until his mysterious death in Cairo. Another group, the Libyan Constitutional Union seems to have a singular purpose, to revive the constitution of the Idris era and perhaps to bring Prince Muhammed as-Senussi to the throne of his great uncle. The Union, based in Britain, is led by Sheikh Mohammed bin Ghalbon, who has nurtured a sentimental attachment with the royal family, including King Idris and Queen Fatima who lived in Cairo’s Sultan Palace (in Dokki, across the Nile from Tahrir Square). The most recent organization to join the Conference was formed in London in 2002, the Libyan Tmazight Congress. The Conference collapsed in 2008.

The Conference from 2005 to 2008 set the template for the role of the Libyan Diaspora in the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council. When the NTC was formed in February 2011, it mimicked the kind of unity that was already there in the Conference. What united the thirty-one members of the NTC was hatred of Qaddafi. That was the alpha and the omega of their movement. Constitutional liberals sat side-by-side with Constitutional monarchists, religious conservatives took their place beside social democrats. They had a very limited platform, mainly galvanized as an opposition. On March 19, the Council released a “Declaration of the founding of the Transitional National Council,” whose purpose was to remove Qaddafi and restore order. Their “Vision of a Democratic Libya,” released in late March, reaffirmed the basic planks of liberal democracy: a Constitution, elections, political pluralism, human rights, freedom of speech and so on. Its seventh of the eight points introduce some ideas about the economy, but these are vague. The nation’s economy was to be used “for the benefit of the Libyan people by creating effective institutions in order to eradicate poverty and unemployment.” These institutions will, in hedged neoliberal language, be the product of “genuine economic partnerships between a strong and productive public sector, a free private sector and a supportive and effective civil society, which overstands corruption and waste.” But all this is very generic. To gain unity, the members of the NTC had to strike for the lowest common denominator of agreement. The NTC is not the National Liberation Front (FLN), entering Algiers in 1961 with a firm commitment to a specific program. Their eight principles are mainly about liberal democracy.

What the NTC has not projected is its neoliberal commitments. At its March 19 meeting, there were three points to the agenda. The first point was the war and the politics of the NTC with regard to Qaddafi’s continued hold on power. The second point was to designate that the Central Bank of Benghazi would be the authority for Libyan monetary policy (to run it the NTC chose one of its own Sadiq Amr el-Kabir, a venerable banker from the Arab Banking Corporation based in Manama, Bahrain). Hearing this news, Robert Wenzel of the Economic Policy Journal noted, “I have never before heard of a Central Bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.” Not on the council itself, but in its penumbra was Dr. Ali Tarhouni, a student activist at the University of Benghazi in the 1970s and later in exile a professor of economics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Tarhouni would become the new Finance Minister. Tarhouni was the financial brains of the Council. The third point was the establishment of the Libyan Oil Company with power over all oil production and oil policy in the country (initially headquartered in Benghazi before they moved to its offices on Bashir Saadawi Street in Tripoli, Saadawi being the Misratan leader of the National Congress Party who fought for Libya’s independence in the early 1950s). None of this was on the surface of the NTC’s program. It was hidden in plain sight, lost behind the verbiage about Qaddafi’s crimes—the glue that held the NTC and its troops together.

One of the crucial statements in the NTC’s document received almost no comment when it was published, “The interests and rights of foreign nationals and companies will be protected.” This pleased the multinational oil firms. No more erratic pronouncements from Qaddafi.

In late March, as the Council made these decisions, Mustafa Gheriani of the February 17 Movement told Jon Lee Anderson that they are “Western-educated intellectuals” who would lead the new state, not the “confused mobs or religious extremists.” The latter were the working-class, whose blood had already begun to lubricate the revolt against Qaddafi. The neoliberal reformers had not seen blood. Many of them were busy in the Atlantic capitals, pushing their agenda, making promises that would only be reveled after Tripoli had fallen to their minions. The general tenor was that “without NATO’s support from above, the rebels on the ground would have stood no chance of success” (as the Boston Globe put it on August 23). The narrative that would soon emerge was that NATO delivered Libya to the neoliberal reformers. The Libyans who fought on the ground would be treated as abstract heroes, but they would not be seen as the actual inheritors of the new Libya. That was foreordained in the conduct of the conflict, and in how NATO would seek to deliver the spoils. Libya, which began to march to the tune of Tunisian and Egyptian drummers, found itself being torn in two directions: silenced by the war-drums of Qaddafi on one side and those of Jibril and his neoliberal team on the other. A caricature of Tahrir Square mocked the Libyan dreams of a new society.

Once NATO got into the act, its bombardments set the stage for the war. The war took place in several overlapping, but distinct stages. It was remarkably well executed in military terms. Even though it seemed to take longer than it did, the collapse of the Qaddafi regime was swift.

Bombardment.

After March 19, Operation Odyssey Dawn conducted six weeks of sustained bombardment of Qaddafi’s military and communications infrastructure. The Libyan Air Force and military bases were put out of commission, as were oil installations, power grids, television and radio stations and the homes and offices of the leadership. In mid-June, one of NATO’s strikes killed some civilians in Tripoli. NATO’s operation commander, the Canadian Lt. General Charles Bouchard noted, “NATO regrets the loss of innocent civilian lives and takes great care in conducting strikes against a regime determined to use violence against its own citizens.” What was awkward about this apology is that it did not come to the heart of the NATO strategy. Its bombers routinely struck the major cities, targeting the oil installations and the bases. The massive firepower launched at Tripoli in particular seemed much less precision bombing (to take out some specific target) and more terror bombing (to break the morale of the civilian population). This was the philosophy of “shock and awe” or rapid dominance developed by Harlan Ullman and James Wade, with the basic premise that overwhelming force from the air would strike a society hard and “paralyze its will to carry on.”

The US State Department’s legal counsel, Harold Koh told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Libyan adventure “does not constitute a war” because there are no US ground troops in Libya, there is a limited risk of escalation, there is a limited means of military means and, remarkably, there are no US casualties. What you have instead are Drones and Cruise Missiles that strike at populations whose sorrows do not trigger any the legal terms that indicate warfare and suffering. We are back to the first aerial bombardment in world history, the Italian bombing of Tajura and Ain Zara in 1911. The first communiqué from the air force said what the NATO command would be more embarrassed to say, which is that the bombing had “a wonderful effect on the morale of the Arabs.”

Denials about the ferocity of the bombardment and the civilian casualties had been casual during the conduct of the war. On August 8, NATO aircraft targeted the town of Majer, south of Zlitan city. At that time, evidence of sustained bombardment of civilian homes had begun to emerge. The next day the New York Times noted, “There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but there were no bodies there, either. Nor was there blood.” Case closed. On December 18, 2011, when C. J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt of the Times went back over the story, they offered the following narrative:

The attack began with a series of 500–pound laser-guided bombs, called GBU-12s, ordnance remnants suggest. The first house, owned by Ali Hamid Gafez, 61, was crowded with Mr. Gafez’s relatives, who had been dislocated by the war, he and his neighbors said. The bomb destroyed the second floor and much of the first. Five women and seven children were killed; several more people were wounded, including Mr. Gafez’s wife, whose…lower left leg had to be amputated, the doctor who performed the procedure said. Minutes later, NATO aircraft attacked two buildings in a second compound, owned by brothers in the Jarud family. Four people were killed, the family said. Several minutes after the first strikes, as neighbors rushed to dig for victims, another bomb struck. The blast killed 18 civilians, both families said. The death toll has been a source of confusion. The Qaddafi government said 85 civilians died. That claim does not seem to be credible. With the Qaddafi propaganda machine now gone, an official list of dead, issued by the new government, includes 35 victims, among them the late-term fetus of a fatally wounded woman the Gafez family said went into labor as she died. The Zlitan hospital confirmed 34 deaths. Five doctors there also told of treating dozens of wounded people, including many women and children.

This is one incident. There are many others. When asked by Human Rights Watch to allow an investigation, the new Libyan authorities were clear. Fred Abrahams of HRW was quite mute in his allegations (he touted a figure of fifty civilians killed by NATO, hardly a credible number given the New York Times analysis). “We’re not alleging unlawful attacks, let alone war crimes,” said Abrahams. “We believe the onus is on NATO to investigate these cases thoroughly so they can identify and correct the mistakes.” NATO denied the “mistakes.” Ibrahim Dabbashi, the Libyan representative to the UN, asserted that forty thousand people had died in the civil war, but that “Qaddafi was responsible for these deaths.” If NATO or the rebels had killed anyone it was because Qaddafi had used them as human shields. “There is no need for a NATO investigation,” Dabbashi noted, “Usually it is acceptable that there will be some civilian casualties because of some errors.” Mistakes, errors: that is as far as memory is going to allow for the NATO bombardment. Humanitarian intervention cannot permit its preferred means to be tarnished. Given this attitude, we shall never know the scale of the civilian deaths as a result of the NATO bombardment, conducted to protect civilians.

The bombardment of Libya between March and August 2011 was a massive campaign, with twenty thousand sorties launched to erode the power-base of Qaddafi. No regime can last such an assault. It was remarkable that Qaddafi was able to hold off for as long as his regime did.

Serbian Model.

The NATO states followed their playbook from the later stages of the break-up of Yugoslavia. Early into the conflict, Paris, London and Washington shifted their allegiance to the NTC, the rump government that stood in for the 1990 declaration of Kosovo by its “parliament.” The sustained bombardment degraded the forces and the morale of the government (the bombing of Tripoli from the first day of the NATO attacks standing in for the bombardment of Serbia). The entry of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to call for an investigation of the now isolated enemy (Qaddafi = Milosevic). The ICC’s erratic and arrogant lead investigator Luis Moreno-Ocampo opened an investigation into Qaddafi and his family on March 3, long before the UN Resolution 1973 of March 17. He aggressively made statements as if of fact about alleged war crimes by the Qaddafi regime. For instance, Moreno-Ocampo stated that Qaddafi’s regime was giving Viagra to its troops to promote mass rape of women. Moreno-Ocampo said this at the same time as the US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, made these allegations. “The coalition is confronting an adversary doing reprehensible things,” she told a closed-door meeting at the UN, but was reluctant to offer any specific details. Margot Wallstrom, the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, was equally reticent to talk about specifics, but nonetheless was confident that reports of rapes had been “brutally silenced.” It took Amnesty International’s very experienced investigator, Donatella Rovera, three months to uncover that there was no fire for this smoke. It was a figment of the imperial imagination.

Moreno-Ocampo did not open any investigation into the NATO civilian bombings in Libya (as he has not in the earlier experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq). The August 8 bombing of Majer is a test case. Abubakr Ali, who watched the funeral of his family told a CNN reporter, “This was a civilian home. No army, no military, no Qaddafi forces. It’s a family sleeping safely in their place. This is the protection of civilians,” he added in disgust. A local official told the reporter, “NATO is waging wide-scale war on the people. They are destroying everything.” Amnesty International called for an investigation, but got no response from the ICC. On January 19, 2012, three human rights organizations released a comprehensive report on war crimes by NATO in Libya. The Arab Organisation for Human Rights, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and the International Legal Assistance Consortium studied the areas which NATO deemed as military targets and found that they were civilian areas. “We are not making judgments,” said Raji Sourani of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “That is not the mission mandate. But we have reason to think that there were some war crimes perpetrated.” NATO dismissed the report, and the ICC did not bother with it. There would be no investigation of the war. The final nail in the coffin of the investigation was struck by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon late in 2011: “Security Council resolution 1973, I believe, was strictly enforced within the limit, within the mandate.”

On a few occasions NATO targeted the radio and television stations in Tripoli, arguing that this was “to disrupt the broadcast of Gaddafi’s murderous rhetoric.” How NATO could see this as part of Resolution 1973 is unbelievable, and how this can pass by the foreign media as acceptable (the killing of journalists) beggars belief. The Coalition to Protect Journalists wrote a careful and correct letter to NATO command, “As an organization of journalists dedicated to the defense of press freedom around the world, we are concerned any time a media facility is the target of a military attack. Such attacks can only be justified under International Humanitarian Law if the media facility to being used for military purposed or to incite violence against the civilian population. For this reason, we believe it is essential for NATO to provide a more detailed explanation as to the basis for July 30 attack on Libyan broadcast facilities.” No such explanation was forthcoming. There was no outrage on CNN or al-Jazeera. The “international media” showed its hand as an adjutant in NATO’s war, calling into question its trustworthiness. Moreno-Ocampo yoked the ICC to the NATO strategy, and undermined the integrity of the ICC in the process.

Snake Oil.

It was essential to control the narrative about the war. Amnesty International’s press releases did not bother the “international media.” Meanwhile, al-Jazeera, which had played a cheerleaders role in Tunisia and Egypt, did the same in Libya. But this time, al-Jazeera did not have to distinguish itself too far from its paymasters, the Qatari royals who were the biggest boosters of the rebels. “Al-Jazeera was producing uncorroborated reports of hospitals being attacked, blood banks destroyed, women raped and the injured executed,” reported Patrick Cockburn. He talked to Amnesty’s Libya expert, Diana Eltahawy, who told him, “We spoke to women, without anybody else there, all across Libya, including Misrata and on the Tunisia-Libya border. None of them knew of anybody who had been raped. We also spoke to many doctors and psychologists with the same result.” Investigation was irrelevant. What was important was the story. No wonder that the US State Department helped Jibril’s NTC hire a series of Washington, DC public relations (lobby) firms, such as Patton Boggs (Vincent Frillici, the former director of operations for NATO, ran the NTC’s account at Patton). The fulminations at the mouth continued, despite the lack of evidence. The White House Middle East strategist, Dennis Ross brushed aside the briefing books to tell a group of foreign policy experts at the White House Roosevelt Room, “We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on Steroids’—the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it.” Such numbers and such fears would remain on the surface of news reports. It would eclipse news of rebel attacks on what they called “mercenaries” (but were often dark-skinned migrant workers or southern Libyans who were either fighters or else were simply hapless civilians), of NATO civilian deaths or of other such unsavory information.

When news came of the displacement of the entire population of the town of Tawergha, only twenty-five miles outside Misrata, as the war came to the close, it produced a little embarrassment and then silence. Tawergha once housed thirty thousand people. It is now empty. An unusual story in the Wall Street Journal (June 21) provided some context for the events. The rebels from Misrata who fashioned themselves as “the brigade for purging slaves, black skin” rode into Tawergha, a town that housed mainly dark-skinned Libyans. Ibrahim al-Halbous, commander of the rebel force, said of these townsfolk, “They should pack up. Tawergha no longer exists, only Misrata.” The fate of ethnic cleansing had already taken place within Misrata, where the Ghoushi neighborhood saw its Tawerghan natives driven out. Ibrahim Yusuf bin Ghashir, an NTC member, told HRW in October, “We think it would be better to relocate them somewhere else—Tripoli, Benghazi, the south—give them housing and compensation for their losses in Tawergha.” He was angry at the atrocities allegedly committed by some Tawerghans against the people of Misrata. Qaddafi did recruit amongst the darker-skinned Libyans and the Bedouin. What the rebels did in places such as Tawergha, on the other hand, was not to fight Qaddafi loyalists, but to deliver collective responsibility on an entire town. There has been no investigation of the Tawergha ethnic cleansing by the new Libyan government. This is soon to be a forgotten story.

The rebels had to be the White Knight, unsullied, as Qaddafi had to be the Dark Prince, repellent.

Along the Mediterranean Road.

By early April a pattern set in. The rebel forces drew Qaddafi’s broken up armed columns into the east. The rebels followed the example of the Toyota War in Chad, likely learning their lessons from Hifter. They used retrofitted pick up trucks and land cruisers that are faster and easier to maneuver than Qaddafi’s tanks and armed columns. One would have thought that after the Chad debacle, Qaddafi would have learned his lessons. But obviously he did not. In the Chad war, the French provided air cover, and here it was NATO’s planes. If you do not fear an aerial attack, the pick-up truck is an adequate way to move swiftly into and out of engagements with the enemy. Qaddafi’s forces moved toward the oil-processing facilities near the towns of Ras Lanuf, Brega and Bin Jawad. The rebels, like mosquitos, would dart toward them, and then retreat to Adjabiya. This meant that Qaddafi’s forces had to keep coming along the roads, being drawn into open territory where they were being bombed from the air by NATO’s aircraft and cruise missiles.

When it appeared clear that Qaddafi’s forces were being boxed in, Saif al-Islam gave his amazing interview to the New York Times (August 3), offering the paper a window into the regime’s thinking. The regime needed to peel away the body armor of the rebels, which meant that they needed to make a link with the political Islamists. Arguing that it was the Islamists who killed al-Fattah Younis, Saif al-Islam said, “They decided to get rid of those people—the ex-military people like Abdul Fattah and the liberals—to take control of the whole operation. In other words to take off the mask.” Saif al-Islam, who had long fashioned himself as one of those liberals, now said that he was ready to sign an agreement with the Islamists to turn Libya into “Waziristan on the Mediterranean, an Islamic zone, like Mecca.” The Islamists “are the real force on the ground.” It was a move of great desperation. The Islamists disdained the Qaddafi regime. It wanted no pact with it. Saif al-Islam’s interview was a sign of the weakness of the Qaddafi regime along the Mediterranean road.

If By Sea.

Qaddafi’s troops oscillated along the Mediterranean road and garrisoned Tripoli, but they did not have access to the air or to the sea (the “no fly” zone morphed into a “no water” zone). The rebel forces outflanked Qaddafi’s now degraded armed forces with a naval landing at Misrata, providing relief to the rebels in that city. It is likely that at this stage the British SAS troops joined the rebels. The SAS had fought in Tobruk in 1941 and Benghazi in 1942. Rather than admit that official SAS troops had now returned to Libya, the British first said that these were “experienced military officers” who were former-SAS and were now in Misrata by on their own accord. After Tripoli fell, the British no longer made such a mess about them being former-SAS. These SAS troops with the Misrata rebels became the conduit to NATO command in Naples (under the supervision of the Canadian commander, Lt. General Charles Bouchard).

The sea landing was important but not essential. Arms had already been airdropped into the city, and so had supplies. But the maritime channel allowed much greater volume to enter the city. The sea landing demonstrated that Qaddafi had few options even in the western part of the country. It relieved the Misrata fighters from a long siege. Qaddafi’s most wretched violence took place against this city. He had given orders to his commanders to turn the “blue sea red,” and to treat the entire city as hostile territory. Qaddafi’s main commander Youssef Ahmed Bashir Abu Hajar told his forces, “It is absolutely forbidden for supply cars, fuel and other services to enter the city of Misrata from all gates and checkpoints.” Such collective punishment against Misrata mimics what the Misratans did to Tawergha.

Guns In the Mountains.

One of the most contentious moments in the UN Security Council debate over Resolution 1973 was on arms delivery. Resolution 1970 had declared an arms embargo against both sides in the conflict. When the draft of 1973 returned to the Council, the US insisted on adding a crucial phrase: the Council authorized members to “take all necessary measures, notwithstanding paragraph 9 of 1970, to protect civilians and civilian populated areas.” Paragraph 9 of the February 26 resolution established the arms embargo. The new resolution upheld the embargo, but then this curious, bureaucratic phrase with “notwithstanding” at its core seemed to circumvent the strict embargo. On March 26, White House spokesperson Jay Carney told the press that the resolution provided the US with “flexibility within that to take that action [supply military equipment] if we thought that were the right way to go.” In other words, the arms embargo was flexible. The next day, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told NBC’s David Gregory that on the question of the arms supply, “No decision has been made about that at this point.”

The French were less chary about arms delivery. They moved weaponry by air to Benghazi, and then to Misrata before they were parachuted into the Jebel Nafusa and into the southern part of Libya. The French justified their action by saying that their arms drops were in the same league as the use of NATO attack helicopters against Qaddafi troops in Misrata— to “unblock what has become a blocked situation,” as Philippe Gelie of Le Figaro put it on June 28 (more colorful in French, donner un coup de pouce afin de sortir d’une situation bloquée). The Imazighen who got some of the arms in the Jebel Nafusa intensified their campaign in the mountains. Having gained control of the highlands, the Imazighen moved to link up with rebels in Az Zawiya, just west of Tripoli. When Az Zawiya fell, Qaddafi’s regime lost access to its supplies.

This was a crucial blow. Evidence of the retribution set in early in the conflict. In Yafran, the homes of those of the Mashaashia who supported Qaddafi were “set upon and burned,” as the New York Times put it (August 9). “These occupants vanished from the mountains, apparently having fled. Many Amazigh residents say the Mashaashia are not welcome back.”

Operation Mermaid Dawn.

By August 17–18, the NATO and rebel assault moved toward Tripoli. The “target set became larger,” a NATO official admitted, and so NATO’s aircraft and cruise missiles could strike large troop detachments, or simply their bases. An early plan for the war called for the NATO strikes to become “unbearable.” During the final bombardment of Tripoli, by all accounts, the strikes were a form of annihilation. The troops were now concentrated and easy to strike. US satellite imagery showed where Qaddafi’s troops were, and this information was relayed to the rebels on the ground. In other words, NATO provided logistical and communication support to the rebels in the final stage. As well, Special Forces units from Qatar, France, Britain and the United States were on the ground with the rebel units, helped call in air strikes and offering leadership for some of the more difficult strikes. The communications systems in Tripoli had been knocked out. The city was a sitting duck.

Between August 18 and 20, NATO hammered Tripoli with a bombardment that some describe as apocalyptic. One of the more dramatic events of the weekend was the aerial attack on a tent-city outside Qaddafi’s compound. Forbes notes, “The identities of the dead were unclear, but they were in all likelihood activists who had set up an impromptu tent city in solidarity with Qaddafi in defiance of the NATO bombing campaign.” Such incidents are apparently legion. The Qaddafi regime, before it disappeared, claimed that the bombings in this period in Tripoli killed about 1,300 with 5,000 wounded. These figures will never be verifiable. They are gone in the dust of the fall of Tripoli.

The bases of the 32nd (or Khamis) Brigade were strewn with corpses, many of “deserters” killed by the troops as the bombs fell and others felled by the bombs themselves. Whatever happened to the defensive unit around Tripoli is mysterious. It is likely that they vanished into their kin networks. Or they might have been less disposed to the regime than supposed, and went into hiding, waiting to reappear as civilians. Or they were scared by the massive bombardment and simply decided to throw in the towel. There was no al-tarbur al-khamis, no special uprising to defend Qaddafi and his regime.

The bombing raids on August 20 weakened the city. At 8pm on August 21, just when the Ramadan fast was to break, the sirens went off in the mosques of Tripoli (the main one was at the Ben Nabi mosque on Sarim Street, in the city’s center). This siren was the call for the underground rebels to seize the city. Rebel leader Fathi al-Baja said that over the past three months the NTC had worked to build up armed “sleeper cells” inside Tripoli. It was a daring move, and swift.

Inside Tripoli, sections of Qaddafi’s security staff had already reached out to Benghazi and given over their allegiance to the new regime. People such as Mahmoud Ben Jumaa, a senior officer in Qaddafi’s personal security team, worked closely with the Tripoli underground in his neighborhood of Fashloom. Ben Jumaa made contact with the neighborhood committee that included people like Abdel Basat al-Tubal, a brigadier general in the local police. In Souq al-Jouma’a, a nearby suburb, Hakim Boulsayn worked closely with another informer in the internal security service. In the industrial suburb of Tajoura, the local underground was also in touch with the security services, who shielded them from the crackdown in March.

Weapons had also come into the city from the sea over the previous days, as NATO vessels filled with weapons docked in Tripoli (according to the Benghazi military commander Colonel Fadlallah Haroun). An amphibian assault on the city came alongside renewed aerial bombardment. The 15,000 strong Tripoli Task Force (trained in Qatar, and helped along by Qatari Special Forces) pushed into the city. They were the spear. Tripoli fell to the rebels. They stormed into the Green Square, now the Martyrs Square.

Gunfire rent the air. It could have been both celebratory and accusatory, joy or anger. In some places, it meant that scores had to be settled. Rebels marched around taking out their anger on the “loyalists” or the “mercenaries.” One rebel, Ahmed Bin Sabri showed The Independent’s Kim Sengupta the bodies of thirty men, hands tied behind their backs, bound and dumped on the side of the road. “Come and see,” he said, “These are blacks, Africans, hired by Gaddafi, mercenaries.” Racism combined with a visceral hatred for Qaddafi found its outlet on these dark-skinned soldiers and migrant workers. “Any Libyan with a black skin accused of fighting for the old regime may have a poor chance of survival,” wrote Patrick Cockburn in late August. It was a pitiful start to the new order. Amnesty International found that the rebels had killed detainees at two camps in Tripoli. At one of them, Khilit al-Ferjan, about 160 detainees tried to escape. “As the detainees barged through the hanger gates, two other guards opened fire and threw five hand grenades at the group,” wrote Amnesty in a report. Twenty-three detainees survived the attack. Much the same kind of blood-letting took place in the southern desert oasis of Ghadames, where the Tuareg were forced out because of their support for the Qaddafi regime. Some of them decamped to Mali, where they joined the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad and went to war against the Malian government in early January 2012.

The regime refused to fall fully immediately. The rebels said they had some of the Qaddafi family in custody, including Saif al-Islam. Then, remarkably, Saif al-Islam appeared in person for a press conference, said that the fight was still on and disappeared. A few days later, it appeared that Qaddafi’s family, minus Saif al-Islam and the old Colonel had arrived in Algeria. Towns such as Bani Walid, Sirte and Sabha (in the south of the country) refused to give up. They held fast, under siege from the rebels. NATO bombed them at will. They were the bouches inutiles, the useless mouths that could be done away with. Qaddafi remained defiant, but scarce. He was already now irrelevant. NATO had fired him.

V. The Son et Lumiére at Sirte

On the dusty reaches out of Sirte on October 20, a convoy flees a battlefield. A NATO aircraft fires and strikes the cars. The wounded struggle to escape. Armed trucks, with armed fighters from Misrata, rush to the scene. They find the injured, and among them is the most significant prize: a bloodied Muammar Qaddafi stumbles, is captured, and then is thrown amongst the fighters. One can imagine their exhilaration. A cell-phone video camera traces the events of the next few minutes. A badly injured Qaddafi is pushed around, thrown on a car, driven around on its bonnet, and then the video gets blurry. The next images are of a dead Qaddafi. He took a bullet in the side of his head.

These images go onto Youtube almost instantly. They are on television, and in the newspapers. It was impossible not to see them.

One of the important ideological elements during the early days of the war in Libya was the framing of the arrest warrant for Qaddafi and his clique by the International Criminal Court’s selectively zealous chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo. It was enough to have press reports of excessive violence for Moreno Ocampo and Ban Ki-Moon to use the language of genocide; no independent, forensic evaluation of the evidence was necessary. NATO sanctimoniously said that it would help the ICC prosecute the warrant (this despite the fact that the United States, NATO’s powerhouse, is not a member of the ICC). This remark was echoed by the National Transitional Council, the rebels’ political instrument in Benghazi.

Humanitarian intervention was justified on the basis of potential or alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions. It is disquieting that the intervention is to “end” with a violation of those very Conventions, notably the Third Geneva Convention (article 13 on the treatment of prisoners) and the Fourth Geneva Convention (article 27 again on the treatment of prisoners).

It would perhaps have been inconvenient to see Qaddafi in open court. He had long abandoned his revolutionary heritage (1969–1988), and had given himself over to the US-led War on Terror at least since 2003 (but in fact since the late 1990s). Qaddafi’s prisons had been an important torture center in the archipelago of black sites utilized by the CIA, European intelligence and the Egyptian security state. What stories Qaddafi might have told if he were allowed to speak in open court? What stories Saddam Hussein might have told had he too been allowed to speak in an open court? As it happens, Hussein at least entered a courtroom, even as it was more kangaroo than judicial. No such courtroom for Qaddafi. Dead men tell no tales. They cannot stand trial. They cannot name the people who helped them stay in power. All secrets die with them.

A month later, on November 19, Saif al-Islam was detained in Ubari, in the south of Libya. He was flown to Zintan, where he was held in custody by the rebels. There was no transfer to any judicial authority. Three months later, in January 2012, Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International, worried about this delay. “At the moment,” she noted, “there is no central authority to speak of, so it’s difficult to speak of an independent judiciary.” City-based rebels acted for themselves. The Zintan rebels had plans for Saif al-Islam. They were not willing to hand him over to the ICC or to the new government. But Saif al-Islam is not the only person. Seventy thousand Qaddafi fighters sit in Libyan jails without recourse to any judicial procedure. This worried the UN’s Human Rights office. Mona Rishmawi and Hanny Megally of the UN made several trips to Libya, pointing out the situation is a “recipe for abuse.” The Qaddafi-era prisons remain, and only the nature of the prisoners has changed. The Islamists and liberals are now the jailers; the pro-Qaddafi fighters are enchained.

Libya’s cities celebrated the fall of Qaddafi. But what are the people celebrating? Certainly there is jubilation at the removal from power of the Qaddafi of 1988–2011. That Qaddafi had alienated everyone. It is in the interests of NATO and the neoliberal clique to ensure that in this auto-da-fé the national liberation anti-imperialist of 1969–1988 is liquidated, and that the neoliberal era is forgotten, to be reborn anew as if not tried before. That is going to be the trick: to navigate between the joy of large sections of the population who want to have a say in their society (which Qaddafi blocked, and Jibril would like to canalize) and a small section that wants to pursue the neoliberal agenda (which Qaddafi tried to facilitate but could not do so over the objections of his “men of the tent”). The new Libya will be born in the gap between the two interpretations.

The manner of Qaddafi’s death is a synecdoche for the entire war. NATO’s bombs stopped the convoy, and without them Qaddafi would probably have fled to his next redoubt. The rebellion might have succeeded without NATO. But with NATO, certain political options had to be foreclosed. NATO’s member states are now in line to claim their reward. However, they are too polite in a liberal European way to actually state their claim publicly in a quid-pro-quo fashion. Hence, they say things like: this is a Libyan war, and Libya must decide what it must do. This is properly the space into which those sections in the new Libyan power structure that still value sovereignty must assert themselves. The window for that assertion is going to close soon, as the deals get inked that lock Libya’s resources and autonomy into the agenda of the NATO states. One hopes for Libya that the original leaders of the February 2011 rebellion (Fathi Terbil Salwa, Idris al-Mesmari and Salwa al-Dighaili) will produce a revolution within the revolution, seizing the dynamic from NATO and its allies and reviving Libya’s independent road. If they do, they might redeem the fallen promise of 1969.

VI. Aftermath

Right until the end of August, the war appeared to linger in a stalemate. The fighting was fierce, but no side seemed to make great ground. The NATO bombings, the arms drops and the use of the naval logistical route hastened the collapse of Qaddafi’s regime. But before the end, those who had thrown their lot in with the rebels worried about the outcome. Early in the conflict, on March 2, Hillary Clinton warned that if the rebels did not prevail Libya might become a “giant Somalia.” Before the “no-fly” zone came into effect, Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Center in the UAE told the Los Angeles Times, “People might not like it but the only other option is to allow a civil war to develop in Libya. You’re going to create another Somalia.” On March 30, Moussa Koussa, now defected to the Atlantic world and a featured speaker at the Libya Contact Group meeting in Doha, Qatar pleaded, “I ask everybody to avoid taking Libya into civil war. This would lead to so much blood and Libya would be a new Somalia.” It was this fear of the Somalia outcome that led NATO and its adjutants to push for the opinions of artillery. They would smash Qaddafi fast and prevent a civil war from germinating any further. Moussa Koussa, who knew the ground realities as well as anyone else, feared that absent a hasty dispatch of Qaddafi this is precisely what would happen.

The leadership of the rebellion came from out of the bowels of the Qaddafi regime. But that has been so in most revolutions, since Louis-Marie, vicomte de Noailles and Armand, duc d’Aiguillon began the great orgy against feudal privileges in the 1789 Estates-General in France. George Washington, who once wore the uniform of the British army, asked de Noailles to accept the sword of Cornwallis when the British surrendered, this in honor of de Noailles and his brother-in-law the Marquis de Lafayette for their service in the American Revolution. From de Noailles we come to al-Jalil, Jibril and their inheritor Abdurrahim el-Keib. But there is a warning for al-Jalil, Jibril and el-Keib: de Noailles fled revolutionary France for the United States when the unstoppable revolution could no longer tolerate his background and his wealth. It is not clear what will happen to al-Jalil, Jibril and el-Keib, but what is already evident is that the rebels from below have no patience for signs of the continuation of the old regime into the new dispensation. They have other things in mind, other ways to conceive of their Libya.

Mortal Combat.

“The ‘humanitarian’ intervention introduced to save lives believed to be threatened was in fact a political intervention introduced to bring about regime change.”

—Richard Haass, Council on Foreign Relations, “Libya Needs Boots on the Ground,” Financial Times, August 22, 2011.

Qaddafi’s collapse has sent an important message to the other “rogue states.” His major error was to give up his nuclear weapons agenda. The nuclear cover is now seen from Pyongyang to Tehran as the only adequate insurance policy against the agenda of NATO. Despite the averted cataclysm, few would not discount the blue chip standard of the nuclear shield. Particularly after Hillary Clinton noted that the military intervention in Ivory Coast in April 2011 “sends a strong signal to dictators and tyrants throughout the region and the world” that they “may not disregard the voices of their own people.” A UN official said of those events, “The action in the Ivory Coast was given a psychological lift by the fact that it is happening against the backdrop of Libya, and supports Mr. Obama’s narrative that intervention is justified in some cases.” Despite political deadlock and a divided polity, it is for the “international community” (the G7) to translate the voice of the people, or to provide the narrative of justification for intervention. Interventionism is back, thanks to NATO’s Libyan adventure.

On August 22, President Obama interrupted his Martha’s Vineyard holiday to release a simple statement, “NATO has once more proven that it is the most capable alliance in the world and that its strength comes from both its firepower and the power of our democratic ideals.” Not sure how those “democratic ideals” came into play over the skies of Libya, but certainly NATO’s firepower showed it to be extremely capable. Once Qaddafi’s regime fell in late August, NATO’s Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen began to crow about NATO’s role. “NATO is needed and wanted more than ever,” he said, “from Afghanistan to Kosovo, from the coast of Somalia to Libya. We are busier than before.” To celebrate its Libyan glory, NATO’s Sea Breeze 2011 naval exercise entered the Black Sea, close to the Sebastopol-based Russian Black Sea Fleet. The pressure on Russia, exercised earlier in Georgia and in the Black Sea, was once more to be increased. The idea of the Mediterranean as NATO’s lake was at the forefront, so too was the idea that NATO was the most effective force to deal with political problems (notwithstanding the Afghan example).

Under cover of the Libyan war, Obama’s administration released the Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities (PSD-10) that defines the prevention of mass atrocities as both “a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” PSD-10 gives the US government carte blanche in authorizing an escalating series of actions against a country that on the basis of its analysis is endangering its civilians: sanctions can go to an embargo, and eventually to military intervention. The basic thrust of PSD-10 is that the United States is the only country with the muscle capable of enforcing the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, and so it must do its duty. The National Security Staff’s Senior Director Samantha Power has pushed for the PSD-10, and the Libyan conflict allowed it to go through.

Not only would the United States and NATO be the gendarmerie of the planet, but they would also be able to blow life into hitherto suppressed peoples. “We can help the Arab Spring well and truly blossom,” said NATO’s Rasmussen after Tripoli’s fall. This was a view repeated in many policy circles in the Atlantic world. In late August, former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow wrote in the Financial Times (August 22) that Qaddafi’s fall “will renew a sense of momentum” to the Arab Spring. The Spring, for Zelikow and for Rasmussen, is not in the people who thronged the squares or took bullets in the frontlines. It is to be found elsewhere.

Much of the drive in Arab Spring policymaking is currently coming from the Persian Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. It is their hour. The Saudi government is playing a critical role in the Arab diplomacy now isolating Syria. The UAE, with the Saudis, came up with the funds that allowed Egypt’s interim rulers to hold off the conditional packages being offered by the international financial institutions. The Qatari government has played a vital role in the Libyan revolution.

Humanitarian intervention sweeps in from the skies. It helps save civilians, who are then given their freedom. Those who are so generous are then authorized to “help” with the reconstruction. This assistance seems a lot like the mandates of the post-World War 1 era. The intervening powers stay around, set up bases, offer technical support and send in their multinational corporations to take charge of raw material extraction. We are already far from the open racism of A. J. Balfour who warned in December 1918 that self-determination could not be applied “pedantically where it is really inapplicable…. You cannot transfer formulas more or less applicable to the populations of Europe to different races.” Now we are all to enjoy the fruits of liberal democracy, with elections as the sweetest offering. Meanwhile, behind the electoral process, the technocrats who demonstrate their fealty to the international bond markets and the IMF will control the Central Bank and the Oil Company. From this perch they will try to turn over the Spring to the old circuits of power and property. They will try to continue the neoliberal reform agenda of Saif al-Islam, now without the impediment of the old guard. That section, beholden to the Revolution of 1969, has now exited power. It no longer has the basis to make its objections plain. In the neoliberal dispensation, such views have been rooted out by the removal of Qaddafi. All that will be allowed is marginal debate on aspects of governance that have nothing to do with the neoliberal agenda—on that agenda, I doubt very much that the new Libyan government will allow much debate.

It is a terrific irony that the neoliberal reformers could transform into the rebel leadership, while the Old Guard now seems identified with Qaddafi. In the last decade, it was this Old Guard that fought against Qaddafi’s new allegiance to the neoliberal view. They are now scared, sullen, withdrawn. Some have fled Tripoli for the outer reaches of Libya or to neighboring Algeria. Others are incognito. They do not wish to be named. Politics is the poisoned chalice. They have drunk enough for many lifetimes. There seems to be no room in this new Libya for their old socialist visions. It is simply jahiliyya [ignorance] to the Islamists, and obstinacy to the neoliberals.

By November, when it was clear that the war was over, Jibril left his post as interim Prime Minister. He had completed his historical mission, which was to be the liaison between the National Transitional Council and NATO. Jibril was too closely linked to the neoliberal reformers to be capable of bridging the gap between the fighters and the neoliberals. Mustafa Abdel-Jalil remained in office as the chair of the NTC. He appointed Abdurrahim el-Keib to replace Jibril. El-Keib came to his post with little tarnish. He had left his native Tripoli for the United States where he trained as an engineer, taught at the University of Alabama, and went to work at the Petroleum Institute in the UAE. Being from Tripoli, having lived outside Libya for much of his life, all gave the oil engineer a great deal of credibility. He would be the new face that bridged the fragile new regime with its overseas brokers.

Petrol and Dollars.

On the day that Tripoli fell, the New York Times ran a story with the transparent headline, “The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins” (August 22). The use of the word “scramble” could not be accidental. It was the word used to describe the period after the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, when the Atlantic powers began a “scramble for Africa,” having divided it up on a map in Germany. Three years later, Otto von Bismarck, the host of the conference said, “The map of Africa is in Europe.” This was a prescient remark, for it made clear that the disputes over Africa were not about Africa itself but about inter-European (and US) rivalries. Much the same kind of activity emerged once the NTC consolidated itself, and created its National Oil Company. Oil executives streamed into the country, holding the elbows of diplomats whose aerial power had to be translated into commercial benefits. “We don’t have a problem with Western countries like Italians, French, and UK companies,” Abdeljalil Mayouf (of the Libyan oil firm, AGOCO) told Reuters. He didn’t add the United States to the list. That was probably an oversight. The problems lay elsewhere. “But we may have some political issues with Russia, China and Brazil.”

As Cameron and Sarkozy toured Tripoli in the company of the NTC leadership and BHL, the veritable Tintin, the NTC’s spokesperson Jalal al-Gallala told the BBC that those outsiders who helped the rebels would get “special consideration” in all future contracts. He specifically noted that the ones at the head of the line included the French, the British and the Qataris. The United States was again conspicuously absent.

The BRICS states that did not fully support the Benghazi rebellion were going to be punished, and the G7 states and their Arab allies would be rewarded. It was simple arithmetic morality: you help us, we reward you. “We have lost Libya completely,” said Aram Shegunts, director general of the Russia-Libya Business Council. Russia’s Gazprom Neft and Tatneft are off the board. The Chinese, who previously had seventy-five companies in Libya with thirty six thousand staff and fifty projects worth $18 billion, are silent. There is no word from Brazil’s Petrobras and Odebrecht. All their projects are on hold.

France’s Total, Italy’s ENI, Austria’s OMV, Britain’s BP and Vitol, and the United States’ Hess, ConocoPhillips and Marathon jostled at the head of the queue. Beside them were Qatar Petroleum and BB Energy of Turkey and Jordan. During the war, Qatar Petroleum came into the country with its experts and its own access to cash and oil. During the fighting, Qatar helped get the oil port of Marsa el-Harigh working, and overhaul a Liquefied Natural Gas plant in Brega. They also worked to bring in oil supplies via BB Energy. From having almost no interests in Libya, Qatar is close to the head of the line. “It’s not a single country that’s helping—the NTC is working now with all its international partners,” said Aref Ali Nayed who is the Libyan ambassador to the UAE. “The Libyan people are very proud people, they will never forget their friends.” Much the same came from Finance’s Ali Tarhouni, “We are indebted to the French, and I cannot find the right words to say it. If everything else is the same, of course we will remember our friends.”

Libya’s oil reserves are prized for their quantity (largest reserves in Africa) and quality (proximity to Europe and easy to process). Before the war, Libya produced 1.6 million barrels a day. As the Times’ Clifford Krauss put it, “Colonel Qaddafi proved to be a problematic partner for international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands. A new government with close ties to NATO may be an easier partner for Western nations to deal with. Some experts say that given a free hand, oil companies could find considerably more oil in Libya than they were able to locate under the restrictions placed by the Qaddafi government.” In other words, in a few years, oil production from Libya might far exceed the 1.6 million barrels. BP had already begun to explore for oil in the Gulf of Sidra and other firms had conducted explorations in the deserts of the southeast. Estimates place Libya’s oil reserves at 46.4 billion barrels (three percent of the world’s oil reserves), and five trillion cubic feet of natural gas: but this might turn out to be an underestimate.

David Tafuri, partner at Patton Boggs, traveled to Benghazi in August to discuss how to move the US Treasury to help unfreeze the Libyan sovereign funds and other assets in Atlantic banks. Jibril and Ali Tarhouni had been to Washington in May to talk to the Treasury officials. They were pressured on a pledge to ensure that Libyan oil sales are conducted in dollars, not in Euros (and certainly not in the Gold Dinar that Qaddafi had been trying to concoct for the African continent, a revival of the Gold Dinar proposal that Malaysia’s Dr. Mahathir put on the table in 2003). This new currency was frowned upon by the IMF. It is utterly off the table for the new Libya. It was one of the things that the neoliberals disdained. The Central Bank did make one change with the currency: in January 2012 it announced that Qaddafi-era banknotes were to be transferred for a new design.

By May, at the G7 meeting in Deauville, France, the ministers of the Atlantic world created the Deauville Partnership. This Partnership was a mechanism to tie in the countries of the G7 with the Middle East and North Africa, alongside the IMF. Atlantic aid and IMF support was premised upon certain responsible steps from the various West Asian and North African countries—strengthen governance, support private sector-led growth, target subsidies and transfer payments to “free up resources for investments in infrastructure and education and support for the neediest,” and finally to “avoid measures that will have adverse long-term fiscal consequences or be difficult to unwind later.” Tunisia and Egypt jumped on board, and soon were joined by Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Libya joined soon after its National Transitional Council was recognized by the IMF as the legitimate government of Libya in September. As IMF chief Christine Lagarde put it in line with the Deauville Partnership requirements, “The new authorities will need to quickly restore oil production to generate revenues, stabilize the currency, reestablish a payment system, introduce sound public financial management, and start reforms to foster a more inclusive and sustainable growth for the benefit of all Libyan citizens.” Full neoliberalism is on the march into Tripoli, called forward by the Libyan neoliberal “reformers” and their IMF-G7 ideological allies.

The point of view of petrol and dollars leads inexorably to a convergence with the ideology of the pillars of stability. Already murmurs can be heard amongst the neoliberal reformers that Israel’s security must be paramount and that NATO military interests must not be scoffed at. Ahmed Shebani, whose father was in the last of Idris’ cabinets, formed the Democratic Party of Libya in July as a political adjutant of the NTC. Shebani is a businessman who has long been one of the promoters of neoliberal reform in Libya. In an economic conference hosted by Saif al-Islam in Tripoli in March 2007, Shebani joined businessmen and human rights activists who wanted to put pressure on the regime to push their agenda. It was important to yoke the economic reforms to political ones, partly to maintain the wide coalition. “Do you think we can create social and economic prosperity without political reform,” Shebani asked? The main thrust for political reform was to wrest control from the blocked Qaddafi regime to more pliable hands. It was not a surprise then to read Shebani tell Haaretz in the midst of the rebellion, “We are asking Israel to use its influence in the international community to end the tyrannical regime of Gadhafi and his family.” Political reform would mean an entry into the system of brokerage that includes Israel and has the United States at its apex. It is why critics of the NTC fear that once Libya is pacified, the new government will welcome the US, or NATO, to settle into one or more bases in the country, to bring AFRICOM to Africa. None of this will happen in a hurry. If it were so, it would look bad. First Libya must settle into a modicum of independence. Then the quid pro quo will occur.

Perhaps it has already begun under the table. In early January 2012, journalist Franklin Lamb offered a chilling story from Tripoli. Oil has been flowing to the NATO countries, Lamb says, but with no recompense. A Central Bank official told Lamb this, and it was verified by another employee who told Lamb that she had not seen any money coming in as well. This outraged her because of the long lines outside local banks with account holders waiting hours for their savings. Why is there no money coming for the oil that has exited? “The reason is said to be that NATO countries are being shipped oil (also to gas and oil rich Qatar) free of charge,” Lamb reports, “under a payback arrangement with NATO for its regime change services.”

Rebels From Below.

In August, I heard from US Ambassador David Mack, who, as the second secretary at the US Embassy in Libya from 1969–72, had met Qaddafi a few times and was since 2005 the honorary chairman of the US–Libya Business Association. Mack, who was ambassador to the UAE in the 1980s, has a very sound grip of the Libyan dynamic. He spoke with fluency and compassion about events in Libya, and hoped for an outcome that best approximated the radical imagination sparked by the revolt. At one point in the discussion, however, Ambassador Mack faltered. He said that one of the problems in Libya is that the Libyan people have an unusual expectation of democracy: for them, democracy means housing, food, work and health. The Libyans will have to be schooled in what democracy really is, Ambassador Mack noted, which is to say, political democracy: elections and rule of law. The other matters, social and economic democracy, are simply not guarantees.

What Ambassador Mack says is not offensive, but realistic. This is what “democracy” has come to mean in the Atlantic world. When Obama, Sarkozy and Cameron speak of democracy for Libya, they mean the electoral sort. This is also what the neoliberal reformers mean by democracy.

Ambassador Mack is enough of an anthropologist to know that this is not what the average Libyan means when they talk of democracy. They mean much more, including a fundamental desire for dignity. This is why, for instance, the rebels of Misrata refused to allow Jibril to foist Albarrani Shkal, a former army general, on the town as Tripoli’s head of security. Jibril was simply adhering to the seventy page plan drafted by his cousin ‘Arif Nayid, that cautioned against the Iraqi experience (“Disbanded elements should be integrated into society and provided economic opportunities so as to discourage them from taking up arms, as happened in Iraq”). The people of Misrata did not understand this sort of logic. They were not willing to allow the “blood of the martyrs” to be sacrificed for expediency. The protestors believed that Shkal was the operations officers for the 32nd (Khamis) Brigade, and this history should not be ignored in his appointment. “We won’t follow Shkal’s orders, no,” said Walid Tenasil. “Our message to the NTC is: just remember the blood. That is it.”

That is it.

A modern state is defined by its monopoly over violence. The new Libyan regime tried to yoke the various city-based militias and the political Islamists into one command, but failed. The refusal to hand over Saif al-Islam to the central authority is one indication of the lack of control. The frequent clashes amongst the militia groups and then between the militias and the Libyan National Army are also signs of this failure.

In December, General Khalifa Hifter’s forces fought against fighters en route to the airport in Tripoli. The National Army, under Hifter, is often derided as “bodyguards of Hifter,” or as militias from the East (these are the words of Colonel Mukhtar Farnana, head of the militia in the west of Tripoli). If Libya is freed from Qaddafi and his sons, it has now to contend with Hifter and his male progeny. His son Belqasim Hifter and his grandson Saddam Hifter have taken to such shenanigans as armed robbery of the Aman Bank in Tripoli’s Gurji neighborhood and an attack on Tripoli’s Rixos Hotel. Liam Stack, in the New York Times (December 12, 2011), noted that Hifter has “emerged as the army’s most influential officer” even though Yousef al-Manqoush is the official leader.

In this impasse, the Libyan authorities cannot name a proper army command. In early January, el-Keib’s government proposed Yousef al-Manqoush, its Minister of Defense, as the Chief of Staff. The Coalition of Libyan Thwars (revolutionaries) and the Cyrenaica Military Council vetoed this decision. They wanted their own chap, Salah Salem al-Obeidi. Al-Manqoush, they said, has his roots in the Qaddafi establishment. Al-Obeidi, rather, is an Easterner.

Into this mess comes Abdel Hakim Belhaj, head of the Tripoli Military Council and a former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Belhaj has sued the UK and MI6 for its role in sending him and his wife back to Libya in 2004 to be tortured. He has no special fealty to the G7 and NATO. It was his armed column that spilled blood on the ground; NATO only fired from the skies, and the neoliberals did not join him on the battlefield. Belhaj has a real following in Libya, which is why it is assumed that the Muslim Brotherhood will put him forward as their electoral leader when elections inevitably take place in Libya. The Brotherhood is backed by Qatar, whose emir had similarly stroked the ambitions of political Islam’s leaders from Tunisia to Egypt. The moves by Qatar and the popularity of Belhaj scared the neoliberals and the G7. Ali Tarhouni, speaking for the neoliberals, warned, “Anyone who wants to come to our house has to knock on our front door first.” A “senior diplomat” from the Atlantic world carped, “Qatar is not being respectful, and there is a feeling that it is riding roughshod over the issue of the country’s sovereignty.” Political Islam is in a good position to take command of the Arab Spring in North Africa.

The rebellion from below has its own radical imagination. It will not be satisfied with the neoliberal phraseology of transparency, empowerment, tolerance, rights and green jobs. It does not want the verbiage of twenty-first century delusions, all the right words strung in the right order that offer little more than the right to vote, empowerment at the polls, transparency of consumerism and jobs that bring the green to a small minority of enfranchised neoliberals. That is inadequate. It has a much more plebian taste, but absent a working-class mass party, it seems to tend to the legions of political Islam.

But the rebellion from below might be constrained by the new electoral rules that emerged from the National Transitional Council in early January 2012. Those who could run in the elections to the General National Congress had to have “professional qualifications,” had to have demonstrated “early and clear support for the February 17th Revolution,” had to have no role in the Qaddafi regime and could not have received their university degree “without merit.” These barriers would mean that most of the Libyan population is ineligible to stand for election, certainly the vast mass of the workers without “professional qualifications” would be barred from Democracy.

When Tripoli fell, the residents of the city hastened to create order through the creation of reconciliation committees (lijan al-sulh), and to form new neighborhood police forces. Disorder raged as the militia forces marched around, searching for spoils, but nonetheless it was already clear that the Libyan people were eager to forge a new life now that Qaddafi had done. One of their leaders, Isma’il al-Salabi, a well-regarded Islamist told Reuters, “The role of the executive committee [NTC] is no longer required because they are remnants of the old regime. They should all resign, starting from the head of the pyramid all the way down.” This is the rebellion from below. It will not be silenced. What it says, on the other hand, might not be pleasant to the Atlantic powers or to the secular ear. That is the price of democracy.