Exit the Colonel (8 page)

Gaddafi was clearly disturbed, at least in the early years, by his inability to connect with the people whose interests he insisted he held dear. As the people's apathy became more obvious, Gaddafi hedged his bets by building up his security forces, including the
jihaz al aman al dakhili
(internal security), the Revolutionary Committees, the Jamahiriya Guard, and the
haras as-shaabi
(youth guard). Presumably, he reasoned that if his people did not appreciate the innate appeal of his ideas, coercion would work just as well.

Although during the first five years of the revolution Gaddafi had addressed health care, education, and some economic issues, his early initiatives were not enough to stave off popular unrest. The pan-Arab ideology that had instilled such passion in the young Gaddafi had already begun to seem a cruel
joke by the time of Nasser's death in 1970, all the more after the Egyptians' disastrous loss of the Sinai Peninsula to the Israelis in the Six-Day War in 1967. The first organized anti-Gaddafi demonstrations occurred in Benghazi in March 1975, and in the same year there were significant protests by Libyan students.
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The real shocker for Gaddafi in 1975, and perhaps the most seminal event in terms of what it portended, was an attempted coup from within his own circle. Omar El Muhayshi and Bechir Hawwadi led the coup, supported by other more technocratic members of the RCC. Having now witnessed five full years of increasingly bizarre rulings, many of Gaddafi's former core supporters united against what appeared even then to be a systematic dismantling of the state apparatuses key to efficient economic management.
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In the wake of the attempt, Abdelmonem El Houni, lightly implicated, escaped to Cairo, from where he directed aspects of the Libyan opposition in Egypt for many years, before Gaddafi “forgave” and invited him back. Originally assigned by Gaddafi to oversee the security and administration of the eastern regions, Mohammed Megaryaf was sidelined and died in a suspicious car accident in 1972. Omar El Muhayshi managed to escape to Morocco, but was ultimately extradited to Libya and killed. Khouildi El Hamidi and Abu Bakr Younes (known for his “unconditional and unswervable devotion” to Gaddafi
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), Mustapha El Harroubi, and Abdelsalam Al Jelloud were the only “surviving” members of the RCC.

In 1976, continued popular disinterest in Gaddafi's political platform led the self-styled “adviser, guide, and leader” to create a more nefarious organization. Members of the Revolutionary Committees were essentially cadres of well-paid informants, enforcers, spies, and publicists, combined into one. The first Revolutionary Committee was formed at Al Fateh University on April 11, 1976, though Gaddafi claimed to have developed the concept over the previous three years.
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Suddenly, a person could not expect any kind of advancement or status within Libya, or avoid attracting attention, if he were not affiliated with or seen to be cooperating actively with the committees.
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By 1985, core Revolutionary Committee members (all well vetted for their ideological verve) were estimated to number three thousand to four thousand.
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The intrusiveness of the Revolutionary Committees further alienated the people from their wayward leader.

In early April 1976, the nucleus of what would become the Revolutionary Committees initiated a program of persecution against dissidents, mostly students, some who had recently returned from abroad and some who had
(or had not) been part of the public protests the year before.
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Many were rounded up, held, and executed without trial. Some were hung within the universities or forced to beg for their lives on live television before being executed. These student hangings were repeated almost annually for several years, and symbolized Gaddafi's most capricious, violent side for decades.

By 1978, Gaddafi had subjugated nearly all commercial activity to state control. His policy of
Beit li sakinihi
(the house for he who lives in it) created a new generation of squatter-nonowners, displaced families, and led to cloudy deeds of ownership, problems that still plague Libya.

In March 1979, Gaddafi effectively banned private ownership, forcing Libyan citizens to turn in their liquid assets to the Central Bank for a set (much lower) sum. This was the final stage of a systematic asset- and land-grab, which transferred wealth from those with skills to those offering fealty. Though these moves were, of course, highly unpopular among those whose assets were confiscated, those lower down on the socioeconomic scale were either “in favor” or, at least, did not feel strongly enough to object. Whatever the United States might have done, directly or indirectly, to hasten the fall of King Idris, and however much it wanted to see Gaddafi as an antiCommunist, within a short period of time, it came to see his actions as a potential threat.
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Gaddafi published his largely incoherent governing manifesto,
The Green Book
, in 1977. Partly a further exposition of the Third Universal Theory, the work was a framework for “participatory government” devoid of political parties. According to Gaddafi, Democracy—according to the Western interpretation—did not truly express the will of the people, as elections were won via majority rule. One of his favorite examples: if 51 percent of the people want to do one thing, and 49 percent another, the latter's desires would be subverted to the former. Gaddafi's solution to this problem was a completely Byzantine structure of committees and congresses.

The fundamental unit of his three-tiered system was the Basic People's Congress (BPC). BPCs, numbering over four hundred in 2009, were regionally anchored consultative units that were to propose legislation and draft local budgets, which were then passed up to higher-level committees for review. At the top of the system was the General People's Congress (superficially resembling a Western parliament), whose committee heads, People's Secretaries, collectively served in something resembling a cabinet, with the secretaries in charge of “ministries.” Those who spent much time analyzing how this system was supposed to work were missing the
point: most consequential decisions were left outside the purview of the structure under Gaddafi's control. This was all an elaborate subterfuge to detract attention from himself and sow confusion throughout the rest of Libyan society.

Even after the failure of his initial forays into quasi-political unions with neighboring Arab states, Gaddafi continued to hunger for influence on the international stage. So he began projecting revolutionary ambitions beyond Libya.

The bulk of Gaddafi's foreign adventures were poorly conceived and ill-advised. Sometime in 1972, Gaddafi had befriended fellow Nasser worshipper and sociopath Idi Amin Dada, then newly installed as president of Uganda. Gaddafi later came to Amin's assistance when Tanzania invaded Uganda in 1979, itself in response to Amin's disorganized attempt to forcibly seize part of northern Tanzania. Gaddafi sent two thousand completely unprepared and lightly trained Libyan troops to Amin's aid. Speaking no Swahili, many of them became lost or were forced by a loose contingent of Tanzanian soldiers into adjacent swamps where they were picked off one by one or eaten by crocodiles.
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In the late 1970s and 1980s, Gaddafi backed numerous insurgencies and independence movements in Angola, Niger, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Ireland, Namibia, South Africa, Cape Verde, Liberia, Algeria, and Zimbabwe.
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A Libyan-backed coup against Nigerian president Seyni Kountché was foiled by the Nigerian government in 1976.

Gaddafi's longest and most expensive foreign campaign was the invasion of his impoverished southern neighbor, Chad, in 1973. Gaddafi made it very clear he considered Chad little more than an extension of Libya. He set his sights early on annexing the Aouzou strip, a one-hundred-mile area straddling the never formally ratified, six-hundred-mile-long Chad-Libyan frontier, via an alliance with the Transitional National Unity government of Goukouni Oueddei. The Libya-Chad border was, to some extent, fair game for negotiation, the result of a hastily executed, never ratified treaty between the French and Italians in 1935. After absorbing the Aouzou strip, Gaddafi effectively annexed the northern half of Chad, which Libya managed to hold, weakly, until the mid-1980s. The situation deteriorated in the 1980s, when the Libyan army failed to pursue and
eliminate rebel forces led by French-backed rebel leader Hissène Habré, who forced Libya out of Chad in 1987.
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While heavily armed, the Libyan forces were abjectly unmotivated. Many veterans of the Chad campaigns would say they had no idea why they were there, whom they were fighting, or why. Ali Abusha'ala, a 27-year-old prisoner of war in 1986, recounts how the other side (the Chadians) would send the Libyans notes saying “they really did not want to kill us, they just wanted us to go back to our country, because the war was a lost cause.”
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Gaddafi himself seemed impervious to the losses and may have used the conflict to purposefully wipe out a generation of senior generals whom he distrusted intensely. Many of these men were from the Eastern cities of Al Beida, Derna, Al Marj, etc.

Not only was Chad a dismal failure, as with many of Gaddafi's foreign gambits, it was enormously costly, both in monetary terms and in Gaddafi's loss of credibility with his own people. Between 1973 and 1994, Libya spent an estimated $23 billion on its southern campaigns
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and deployed more than fifteen thousand poorly trained troops (of which, between a third and a half were lost). Libya lost a significant amount of military hardware in the process and acquired the stigma of having used chemical weapons in battle.
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While Gaddafi may have used the war with Chad as an excuse to purge some of his internal opponents, he created many new ones in the process. Many disaffected veterans of the Libyan campaign were easily recruited by foreign agencies to work against the Libyan regime in the following years.

Yet prolific as Gaddafi was in his warmongering, much of his global notoriety came from his evolving and worsening relationship with the United States, effected initially through support for various proxy terror groups and harassment of US commercial interests in-country. Gaddafi had been both fascinated and repulsed by the superpower from the start. The United States had supported King Idris's hated monarchy and was an ally of Israel. However, Gaddafi's dislike of the United States was not just ideological, but also personal. Gaddafi loved to tell, perhaps apocryphally, how he was denied entrance to Wheelus Base by an American GI, and claimed this was a seminal event in his political consciousness.

Once in power, Gaddafi demanded that the US and UK cede their Libyan bases. Having little choice, the US agreed to a low-key handover ceremony on June 11, 1970, with the proviso that there be no crowds and no media. Gaddafi, of course, brought crowds and media.
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On the receiving end of increasing unpleasantness, and unable to convert Gaddafi to an ally
against Communism, the United States removed its ambassador, Joseph Palmer II, in late 1972.

Though tensions rose steadily, commercial interests kept the relationship alive for another seven years. The United States was willing to separate politics from trade to some extent, so long as Libya kept pumping oil for the US market and numerous US-owned multinational corporations could do business there. This relationship was transformed after the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Flexing its muscles in the anti-imperialist struggle that followed the Yom Kippur War, Libya nationalized Hunt Oil and 51 percent of Armand Hammer's Occidental Petroleum, while Libyan diplomats sought unsuccessfully to convince the Saudis to cut off oil shipments to the US.
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By manipulating the oil companies in Libya, Gaddafi determined the tone of US-Libya relations for decades to come, emulating the earlier strategy of his idol Nasser who nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. Many analysts have traced Gaddafi's long antagonism toward the West and an ineluctable collision course with the US to this period.
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Besides expanding his international profile, Gaddafi was intent on increasing the share of oil revenues that went to the Libyan government. Agreeing with objections voiced a decade earlier by the monarchy's oil ministers, Gaddafi thought the West had been undervaluing Libya's high-quality, sweet crude. Moreover, unlike Persian Gulf crude, Libya's resources did not have to transit the volatile straits of Hormuz and the Red Sea, and were closer to Europe and the US. By shaking down companies like Occidental, an independent operator that relied on Libya for the bulk of its production, Gaddafi successfully broke the global universally accepted fifty-fifty profit split and posted-price system, according to which the large, mostly American oil companies had long bought and sold much of Middle East oil. In the words of Columbia Law professor Michael Graetz, an energy policy expert, “Our problems started with Muammar al-Qaddafi. Before he came along, OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) had been an ineffectual and unimportant oil cartel.”
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Despite—and perhaps because of—Gaddafi's demonstrated ability to affect US global interests, the US chose to treat Gaddafi as if he did not matter. Perhaps its true feeling was that he
should
not matter. Thus, a strange parody of the story of David and Goliath played out, as Gaddafi attempted to goad the US into acknowledging his relevance through entreaties, threats, and then terrorist actions. For the most part, US presidents saw Gaddafi as a nuisance. For whatever reason, Gaddafi got under Ronald Reagan's skin,
and the two engaged in an odd war of colorful insults, which while absurd, had far-reaching consequences. Gaddafi's flamboyant “mad dictator” persona and Reagan's demonization of the Libyan strongman seeped into the American consciousness through comedy sketches and works of popular fiction, notably the thriller
The Fifth Horseman
, in which Gaddafi holds the US hostage by smuggling a three-megaton H-bomb into New York in a shipping container.
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