Gaddafi's quixotic and brutal rule
By Tarik KafalaBBC News
Image captionA military coup brought Muammar Gaddafi to power 40 years ago
Libya after Gaddafi
Muammar Gaddafi came to power in Libya in September 1969 as the leader of a bloodless military coup which overthrew the British-backed King Idris.
He was 27 years old, inspired by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser and he seemed to fit the regional template of Arab nationalist from the military becoming president. But he outlasted his contemporaries.
During nearly 42 years in power he invented his own system of government, supported radical armed groups as diverse as the IRA in Northern Ireland and the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, and presided over what may have been North Africa's most totalitarian, arbitrary and brutal regime.
In the last years of his rule, Libya emerged from the international isolation that followed the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988. The country was once again courted by Western governments and companies drawn to its vast energy reserves and the rich contracts on offer in an ambitious infrastructure programme.
KEY FACTS: LIBYA
- Col Muammar Gaddafi has led since 1969
- Population 6.5m; land area 1.77m sq km
- Population with median age of 24.2, and a literacy rate of 88%
- Gross national income per head: $12,020 (World Bank 2009)
The uprising that eventually overthrew him started in February 2011 in Libya's second city Benghazi, a city he had neglected and whose residents he mistrusted throughout his rule.
Jamahiriya
Col Gaddafi was born to a Bedouin family in Sirte in 1942.
He always played on his humble, tribal roots, preferring to greet visitors in his tent, and to pitch it when on foreign visits. His legitimacy depended on his anti-colonialist credentials at first, and then on keeping the country in perpetual revolution.
His stated political philosophy, expounded at length in the Green Book, was "government by the masses".
In 1977, Gaddafi proclaimed the Libyan "Jamahiriya" - a neologism meaning roughly state of the masses.
The theory was that Libya had become a democracy of the people, governed through local popular Revolutionary Councils.
In practice, all key decisions and state wealth remained tightly under his control.
Col Muammar Gaddafi
- Born in Sirte, Libya 7 June 1942
- Attended military academy in Libya, Greece and the UK
- Seized power on 1 September 1969
- The Green Book published in 1975
- Married twice, with seven sons and one daughter
- Killed on 20 October 2011 in Sirte after two months in hiding
Social theories
Gaddafi was a skilled political manipulator, playing off different tribes against each other and against state institutions or constituencies. He also developed a strong personality cult.
More and more, his rule became characterised by patronage and the tight control of a police state.
The worst period for Libyans was probably the 1980s, when Col Gaddafi experimented on his people with his social theories.
As part of his "cultural revolution" he banned all private enterprise and unsound books were burned.
He also had dissidents based abroad murdered. Freedom of speech and association were absolutely squashed and acts of violent repression were numerous.
Image captionCol Gaddafi experimented on his people with his social theories during the 1980s
This was followed by a decade of isolation by the West after the Lockerbie bombing.
For Libyans critical of Col Gaddafi his greatest crime may have been the squandering of wealth on foreign adventures and corruption.
With a population of only six million and annual oil revenues of US $32bn in 2010, Libya's potential is huge. Most Libyans do not feel this wealth and living conditions can be reminiscent of far poorer countries.
A lack of jobs outside government means that unemployment is estimated to be 30% or more.
Libya's particular form of socialism does provide free education, healthcare and subsidised housing and transport, but wages are extremely low and the wealth of the state and profits from foreign investments have only benefited a narrow elite.
In 1999, the Libyan leader made a comeback from almost total international isolation when he accepted the blame for the Lockerbie bombing.
Image captionThe demonstrations spread to Tripoli after after cities in the east appeared to fall to the opposition
Following 11 September 2001, he signed up to the US government's so-called "war on terror". Soon after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Libya announced that it was abandoning its nuclear and biological weapons programmes. Both of these were seen by his critics as highly cynical moves.
In the final years of his rule, as questions of succession arose, two of his sons seemed to be in open and damaging competition against each other for his favour.
The influence of Saif al-Islam, the elder son who took an interest in the media and human rights issues, appeared to be waning as the influence of Mutassim, who had a powerful role in the security services, grew.
Inspired by neighbours to the west and east, Libyans rose up against 40 years of quixotic and often brutal rule in early 2011.
The Big Lie About the Libyan War
The Obama administration said it was just trying to protect civilians. Its actions reveal it was looking for regime change.
The new Libyan flag is raised during a parade in the eastern city of Benghazi to celebrate the second anniversary of Nato's first military operation in Libya on March 19, 2013. On 19 March 2011, Kadhafi's troops and tanks entered the city and the same day French forces began an international military intervention in Libya, later joined by coalition forces with strikes against armoured units south of Benghazi and attacks on Libyan air-defence systems, after UN Security Council Resolution 1973 called for using "all necessary means" to protect Libyan civilians and populated areas from attack by government forces. AFP PHOTO / ADBULLAH DOMA (Photo credit should read ABDULLAH DOMA/AFP/Getty Images)
In this fifth anniversary week of the U.S.-led Libya intervention, it’s instructive to revisit Hillary Clinton’s curiously abridged description of that war in her 2014 memoir,
Hard Choices. Clinton takes the reader from the crackdown, by Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime, of a nascent uprising in Benghazi and Misrata; to her meeting — accompanied by the pop-intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy — with Mahmoud Jibril, the exiled leader of the opposition National Transitional Council; to her marshaling of an international military response. In late March 2011, Clinton quotes herself telling NATO members, “It’s crucial we’re all on the same page on NATO’s responsibility to enforce the no-fly zone and protect civilians in Libya.”
Just two paragraphs later — now 15 pages into her memoir’s Libya section — Clinton writes: “[By] late summer 2011, the rebels had pushed back the regime’s forces. They captured Tripoli toward the end of August, and Qaddafi and his family fled into the desert.” There is an abrupt and unexplained seven-month gap, during which the military mission has inexplicably, and massively, expanded beyond protecting civilians to regime change — seemingly by happenstance. The only opposition combatants even referred to are simply labeled “the rebels,” and the entire role of the NATO coalition and its attendant responsibility in assisting their advance has been completely scrubbed from the narrative.
In contemporary political debates, the Libya intervention tends to be remembered as an intra-administration soap opera, focused on the role Clinton — or Susan Rice or Samantha Power — played in advising Obama to go through with it. Or it’s addressed offhandedly in reference to the 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. special mission and CIA annex in Benghazi. But it would be far more pertinent to treat Libya as a case study for the ways that supposedly limited interventions tend to mushroom into campaigns for regime change. Five years on, it’s still not a matter of public record when exactly Western powers decided to topple Qaddafi.
To more fully comprehend what actually happened in Libya five years ago, let’s briefly review what the Obama administration proclaimed and compare that with what actually happened.
On March 28, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama
addressed the nation: “The task that I assigned our forces [is] to protect the Libyan people from immediate danger and to establish a no-fly zone.… Broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake.” Two days later, Assistant Secretary of State Philip Gordon
declared, “The military mission of the United States is designed to implement the Security Council resolution, no more and no less.… I mean protecting civilians against attacks from Qaddafi’s forces and delivering humanitarian aid.” The following day, Clinton’s deputy, James Steinberg,
said during a Senate hearing, “President Obama has been equally firm that our military operation has a narrowly defined mission that does not include regime change.”
From the Defense Department, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen
informed David Gregory of
Meet the Press, “The goals of this campaign right now again are limited, and it isn’t about seeing him go.” Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
echoed the administration line: “Regime change is a very complicated business. It sometimes takes a long time. Sometimes it can happen very fast, but
it was never part of the military mission.” (Emphasis added.)
Now, contrast Gates’s assertion in 2011 with what he
told the
New York Times last month:
“I can’t recall any specific decision that said, ‘Well, let’s just take him out,’” Mr. Gates said.
“I can’t recall any specific decision that said, ‘Well, let’s just take him out,’” Mr. Gates said.
Publicly, he said, “the fiction was maintained” that the goal was limited to disabling Colonel Qaddafi’s command and control. In fact, the former defense secretary said, “I don’t think there was a day that passed that people didn’t hope he would be in one of those command and control centers.”
This is scarcely believable. Given that decapitation strikes against Qaddafi were employed early and often, there almost certainly was a decision by the civilian heads of government of the NATO coalition to “take him out” from the very beginning of the intervention. On March 20, 2011, just hours into the intervention, Tomahawk cruise missiles
launched from a British submarine stationed in the Mediterranean Sea struck an administrative building in Qaddafi’s Bab al-Azizia compound, less than 50 yards away from the dictator’s residence. (This attack
occurred just 100 yards from the building that Ronald Reagan authorized to be bombed by
F-111s a quarter-century earlier in retaliation for a Berlin discothèque bombing ordered by the Libyan leader.) Just as the dictator somehow survived the attack on his personal residence in 1986, he also did in 2011.
Later that day, Vice Adm. William Gortney, director of the Joint Staff, was
asked by the press, “Can you guarantee that coalition forces are not going to target Qaddafi?” Gortney replied, “At this particular point, I can guarantee that he’s not on a targeting list.” When it was then pointed out that it was Qaddafi’s personal residence that had been attacked, Gortney added, “Yeah. But, no, we’re not targeting his residence. We’re there to set the conditions and enforce the United Nations Security Council resolution. That’s what we’re doing right now and limiting it to that.”
In fact, not only was the Western coalition
not limiting its missions to the remit of the U.N. Security Council resolutions, but it also actively chose not to enforce them. Resolution 1970 was supposed to prohibit arms transfers to either side of the war in Libya, and NATO officials claimed repeatedly that this was not occurring. On April 19, 2011, a brigadier general stated, “No violation of the arms embargo has been reported.” Three weeks later, on May 13, a wing commander admitted, “I have no information about arms being moved across any of the borders around Libya.” In fact, Egypt and Qatar were shipping advanced weapons to rebel groups the whole time, with the
blessing of the Obama administration, while Western intelligence and military forces provided battlefield intelligence, logistics, and training support.
Yet, the most damning piece of evidence comes from a public relations
video that NATO itself released on May 24, 2011. In the short video, a Canadian frigate — the HMCS
Charlottetown — allegedly enforcing the arms embargo, boards a rebel tugboat and finds small arms, 105mm howitzer rounds, and “lots of explosives,” all of which are banned under Section 9 of Resolution 1970. The narrator states, “It turns out the tugboat is being used by Libyan rebels to transport arms from Benghazi to Misrata.” The
Charlottetown captain radios NATO headquarters for further guidance. As the narrator concludes, “NATO decides not to impede the rebels and to let the tugboat proceed.” In other words, a NATO surface vessel stationed in the Mediterranean to enforce an arms embargo did exactly the opposite, and NATO was comfortable posting a video demonstrating its hypocrisy.
n truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start.
In truth, the Libyan intervention was about regime change from the very start.
The threat posed by the Libyan regime’s military and paramilitary forces to civilian-populated areas was diminished by NATO airstrikes and rebel ground movements within the first 10 days. Afterward, NATO began providing direct close-air support for advancing rebel forces by attacking government troops that were actually in
retreat and had abandoned their vehicles. Fittingly, on Oct. 20, 2011, it was a U.S. Predator drone and French fighter aircraft that
attacked a convoy of regime loyalists trying to flee Qaddafi’s hometown of Sirte. The dictator was injured in the attack, captured alive, and then extrajudicially
murdered by rebel forces.
The intervention in Libya shows that the slippery slope of allegedly limited interventions is most steep when there’s a significant gap between what policymakers say their objectives are and the orders they issue for the battlefield. Unfortunately, duplicity of this sort is a common practice in the U.S. military. Civilian and military officials are often instructed to use specific talking points to suggest the scope of particular operations is minimal relative to large-scale ground wars or that there is no war going on at all. Note that it took 14 months before the Pentagon even
admitted, “Of course it’s combat,” for U.S. soldiers involved in the ongoing mission against the Islamic State in Iraq. Meanwhile, the public learned just this week — only because Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin was killed on Saturday — that there is a previously unannounced detachment of Marines in northern Iraq providing “force protection” for the Iraqi military and U.S. advisors. The gradual accretion of troops, capabilities, arms transfers, and expanded military missions seemingly just “happens,” because officials frame each policy step as normal and necessary. The reality is that, collectively, they represent a fundamentally larger and different intervention.
During the theatrical and exhaustive Benghazi hearing in October 2015, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) asked Clinton about a video clip that read, “‘We came, we saw, he died [meaning Qaddafi].’ Is that the Clinton doctrine?” Clinton replied, “No, that was an expression of relief that the military mission undertaken by NATO and our other partners had achieved its end.” Yet, this was never the military mission that the Obama administration repeatedly told the world it had set out to achieve. It misled the American public, because while presidents attempt to frame their wars as narrow, limited, and essential, admitting to the honest objective in Libya — regime change — would have brought about more scrutiny and diminished public support. The conclusion is clear: While we should listen to what U.S. and Western officials claim are their military objectives, all that matters is what they authorize their militaries to actually do.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/03/22/libya-and-the-myth-of-humanitarian-intervention/