Exit the Colonel (52 page)

The chief medical officer at the Benghazi Medical Center, Dr. Laila Bugaighis, an MD and longtime advocate for women's rights in Libya, stresses the importance of Libyans reaching out to the outside world, expressing both their needs and understanding the outside countries' interests: “We will only move out of this drama if we start communicating with USA, UK, and France and know what they exactly want. Also we need to have our constitution written; otherwise we will not get out of this vicious circle of chaos we are in.”
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Abu Sofiyan Bin Qummu, the ex-Guantanamo detainee, has been tagged in the foreign press as one of the most extreme of Derna's West-hating Salafists. Yet in May, he gave an extensive interview in a local Derna paper in which he insisted he had no overt sympathies with Al Qaeda. “There was huge oppression of Derna during the Gaddafi reign,” he said. “We do not want to repeat all that again—it is necessary not to marginalize Derna. We need good education, and solid housing; we need to assume our rights, meaningfully, and materially along with the rest of the Libyan cities.”
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The United States and the West would be wise to respond to this challenge in force: helping the transitional and eventual permanent government rebuild and reengage the areas where desperation rules would do much to counter the proliferation of extremist ideologies. Relatively small actions can have big impact—a new clinic in a place like Derna, financed and staffed by Western organizations, a national diabetes campaign, greater connectivity, and so on. These are all things that are relatively cheap, for which the Libyans themselves can certainly pay and could demonstrate to the citizens of Derna and elsewhere in Libya who oppose extremism (currently, the majority) that they have national and international support.

Libyans weakly acknowledge the efforts of the US government. Most Benghaziites recognize French assistance, before American. The reasons for this include the fact that the French and British have talked about their political
roles substantially, while the US “led from behind.” Further, European companies are closer to Libya, have longer commercial relationships, and are far more willing to operate under conditions of uncertainty. This was true during the rapprochement, as it is now.

Regardless, the situation in Libya currently screams of opportunity for the United States and US firms and individuals to pick up traces of the “American exceptionality” that was created in the 1960s from an odd mutual respect (if imbalance) between the United States and the nascent Libyan state. That exceptionality continued to be exemplified and sustained by projects such as the more than two hundred Esso-sponsored fellowships for graduate study in the US, which created a kind of “fifth column” within the Libyan establishment during the rapprochement: a group that would mouth lines from Gaddafi's
Green Book
, while reminiscing about football games at Louisiana State.

Apathy is not universal. A number of US firms, some familiar to the Libyan scene, some very new, have been looking for ways to contribute to local welfare. Amerada Hess, for example, has attempted to adopt the cause of diabetes prevention and treatment (the company recently sponsored a STEPWise survey, supervised by the World Health Administration).
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Two Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and the Benghazi Medical Center (a twelve-hundred-bed facility, originally built in 1984 and mothballed by Gaddafi until 2009, as part of his collective punishment of Benghazi citizens), are discussing the possibility of developing BMC into a hub for emergency medicine in eastern Libya—a multimillion-dollar effort.

The situation is ripe for the United States, in particular, but the West as a whole, to reinvigorate that notion of American exceptionalism. Do we collectively want to repeat the mistakes of the past and find ourselves facing a Gaddafi in other garb? Postrevolutionary Libya has demonstrated courage and the desire for active participation in government and civil society. Yet enormous obstacles and well-funded spoilers remain. In order for the many Libyans at home and in the diaspora to contribute effectively, they must feel that the chances of success are at least as good as those of the revolution itself.

While there was a solid rationale behind the US strategy of “leading from behind”—militarily—this does not or certainly should not apply to reconstruction and organizational, technical, and commercial engagement. Libyans never responded well to offers of charity, even in hard times. Yet Libyans have historically been tremendously appreciative of the efforts
of those who showed up during difficult times with the tools they needed. While the Obama administration is right in saying it will deal with moderate Islamists if they play by the rules of the game—we may have no choice—the best way to ensure Libya does not retreat into intolerance and isolation is to engage wholeheartedly in commerce, culture, education, and medicine.

THE WEIGHT OF THE PAST

EDMUND BURKE
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE

 

 

 

 

I
f there is one theme that runs through the story of the Gaddafi regime and the colonel's exit, it is the role of the past, that is, to what extent countries and individuals are shackled by their previous experiences. If there is hope for Libya—and indeed, Western policy in the Middle East—it is contained in the fact that time and human interactions produce discontinuities, which like genetic mutations, contain opportunities for adaptation. Looked at from a different perspective, Libya is not a near-failed state, but a fresh canvas. As a prominent Libyan businessman said recently, “If we Libyans truly want it, Libya can be fixed in no time. We are just 6 million people—a modest multiple of General Motor's global workforce. We are wealthy, and we are not extreme by nature.”
¹

Popular discontent with King Idris and the still-fresh memories of the Italian occupation gave a poor, undereducated but singly focused person such as Gaddafi the opportunity to stage an unlikely coup; Gaddafi's early experience and deprivations conditioned his half-baked worldview, as well as the tools and strategies he used to maintain power and provoke the West. The Lockerbie (and UTA) bombings appear to be manifestations of Gaddafi's burning desire to right what he saw as past wrongs committed upon him by the outside powers, not only for ordering the raids against him in 1986 but for any number of slights to his person and policies.

The United States decided to engage with Gaddafi after a separation of over twenty years, for reasons that had far less to do with Libya per se and any of Gaddafi's idiosyncrasies, but more with a fixation on the recent past: What to do about a horrendously planned and incompetently executed invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, which itself followed from 9/11, which itself can be linked to US support for the Afghan
mujahideen
against the Soviets back in the late 1970s, through the creation of Al Qaeda.

Due to a collection of historical anomalies, the 2003 deal with Libya—notwithstanding its context—afforded an opportunity for both sides, Libya and the West, to make a break with the past, to refashion the relationship into something more mature and potentially sustainable. That Gaddafi did not rise to the occasion is not a tremendous surprise. By the same token, one would have expected the more stable, advanced, knowledgeable bureaucracies of the West to understand Gaddafi's game and inoculate themselves against it. They didn't.

The fact is that, fundamentally, neither side saw the potential of the deal, understood what it represented to the other, or made particular effort to parse it. Thus, historical factors and other pressing policy issues blinded both sides to potential discontinuities. Gaddafi, by accounts, was briefly surprised by his success in springing his country from sanctions, but was too enamored of himself (and paranoid) to consider that his future might be brighter if he actually went faster with a reform plan, rather than sticking to the superficial makeover. The United States and the West were, generally, too distracted by the apparent low-cost media distractions and financial benefits to think beyond the short term.

Halfway measures on both sides and, equally important, the absence of any precise commitments to actuate or (more importantly) enforce reform, in the form of a unified Western approach to sanctions, led to a situation in which each party—the West and Libya—could (and did, loudly) claim the other had reneged on original terms of the deal, whether these had to do with Lockerbie payments, the disposal of parts related to Libya's WMD efforts, the disposition of convicted Pan Am bomber Megrahi, and so on, thus effectively invalidating the deal and creating opportunities for new kinds of side deals and creative misunderstandings. Gaddafi, further, was (perhaps literally) like a schizophrenic who had gone off his medications—without a strong structure to enforce good behavior, relapse was practically assured.

One moment Gaddafi was celebrating his amazing success and a few new titles (King of Kings of Africa, for one), and the next he was face to
face with a major catastrophe. True to his nature, and to history, instead of doing something different, he offered a knee-jerk reaction, when a more progressive touch might still have saved him (or at least bought the regime time to make more considered decisions). The window for a potential resolution in favor of a live exit for Gaddafi appeared to have been open for some months. When he was finally pulled from a drainpipe in Sirte in October, Gaddafi was Neihoum's Sultan, facing the black dog, cast as a Misuratan militia, twice-victimized: once by Gaddafi's past policies, and a second time by relentless loyalist shelling of their hometown. One of the most intriguing cases in the Libyan saga of history conditioning the present lives in the Leader's self-styled diplomat son, Saif Al Islam, his role in the rapprochement and remake of Gaddafi's Libya, and subsequent turn against a process he claimed to champion. Saif may, or may not, have been a reformist at heart. Some who knew him insist he was, and would have done great things for Libya had he been given the chance. Others (themselves not in a position to cast stones) claim to have seen evidence of a dark side, years before February 2011: simmering anger and resentment at the position his father (and History, with a capital H) had put him in and a proclivity for violence that may have, until that point, been sublimated to a far greater extent than in his brothers, but was not fully under control, either.

While most commentators attributed Saif 's dramatic transformation to the circumstance of war and the possibility of the loss of privilege, one might just as well tie his change in behavior to a sudden, twisted change in psychological orientation vis-à-vis his father. As we have seen, Saif was not able, over the course of several years (though he appeared willing at various points), to push reform into the realm of politics. He was certainly not able to convince his father or brothers to ease up on the uprising once it began, whether or not he tried. Once Gaddafi had made the decision to fight to the last man, Saif went from what former Assistant Secretary David Welch called “somewhat soft,” to exhibiting exactly the kind of qualities that might have enabled him to retain the Gaddafi dynasty, had it not been too late—decisiveness, perhaps ruthlessness, a clear vision of what he wanted, or needed, to accomplish. From all of this emerges, however, a question for any prospective judge and jury: does the fact that Saif 's actions had a positive effect in loosening the media and human rights climate in Libya prior to the Arab Spring—and in creating this new class of “regime-enabled, half-in, half-out reformists,” who would play such an important role during and after the revolution—mitigate whatever crimes he may have committed
shortly before, or after, February 17, 2011? Ironically, the Iraq debacle conditioned both the US and Western involvement in Libya since 2004, and also conditioned the desire of President George W. Bush's successor, Barak Obama, to try to reassure the people of the Middle East that the United States was, in fact, capable of change and a return to its founding values, which he attempted to do through the 2009 Cairo address. While many in the region dismissed the speech at the time as eloquent talk, it clearly played a key role in the US response to Libya's spring.

On the Libyan side, there were those who wanted to convince the world (the Libyan people, and themselves, presumably), that Gaddafi's Libya could change. When the Revolution arrived, these people—former regime officials, regime interlocutors, Saif 's direct associates (about whom much has been written here), and others who served as regime mediators—convinced the Libyan people that they were sufficiently “anti-Gaddafi” that they could be trusted to guide the revolution. All said, collectively, they did a pretty good job.

While many would challenge Washington lobbyist Randa Fahmy Hudome's pre-Revolution statement that Saif deserved a Nobel Prize for his role in the West-Libya rapprochement, without a “Saif-like figure” and “his people,” the Libyan version of the Arab Spring would likely have taken a very different course—and not necessarily a better one. When Saif chose to stand with his family and regime, his previous protégés stepped in to fill the void. With Saif now playing the role of his father, they collectively became, and did, what Saif perhaps could not have been, or done.

With Libya's liberation from Gaddafi's regime, it arrived at a new, odd, and—with hefty recognition of the personal sacrifice made by the Libyan people—fairly accidental, discontinuity. Ten years from now, we may find that the contours of history have been redrawn, or re-traced: a new strongman, a repressive Islamic state. Or, one might find that all, or parts, of North Africa has reached a more or less comfortable equilibrium under a collection of representative governments in which moderate Islam is the principal political currency; or Libya will continue to prove its “uniqueness” in safeguarding its Islamic character under a more or less secular, representative government. It is too early to tell. The fact that, as of July 7, Libya had succeeded in holding free and fair elections, one national and several local, and that an alliance of “non-Islamist, culturally conservative moderates” had won 80 and 60 percent, respectively, of the vote in Tripoli and Benghazi—and a majority in the infamous city of Derna—vindicates those who
insisted a year earlier that Libya was a “wholly different animal” from Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Despite the very real constraints facing the United States and the West with respect to intervention in other Arab Spring states (Bahrain and Syria are the two most obvious cases), the fact is the West
did
intervene in Libya; the United States did
not
repeat the mistake it made in buying off the Karamanli warlord before William Eaton and his Benghazi soldiers could overthrow him (nor, for that matter, did the US repeat the “watch and see” approach pursued during massacres in Rwanda or Bosnia). The Secretary of State has reinforced US willingness and interest to deal directly with moderate Islamic groups, wherever they gain power through popular mandate, and as long as they “follow the rules.”
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This would all seem to be very reasonable and evolutionary. At the same time, it is important to ask, given how much history was ignored in the formulation of the West's recent policies toward Libya: What have we learned? What are we doing now to assure that the subterranean “American exceptionalism,” the bonds formed by the United States with Libya in the late years of the monarchy and the early years of Gaddafi's reign, is unearthed and restored in a manner that helps Libya avoid falling back into dysfunction, which, if it resurfaces, will inevitably come back to bite the West again?