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a revolution in oil pricing, wresting pricing power away from the major oil companies and putting it into the hands of the oil-producing countries. Gaddafi’s money and meddling caused political havoc in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, particularly during the 1980s, as he supported a range of terrorist groups and revolutionary movements. Libya was almost certainly responsible for blowing up two Western civilian aircraft and their passengers and crew, and for cosponsoring acts of terror that caused Presidents Carter and Reagan to label Libya a “significant threat” to US interests. More recently, Libya became the field on which the West was able to take a decisive public stand in support of the Arab Spring, despite opposition from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and others who argued that the United States had no significant policy interests in the country.

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    I AM ONE OF THOSE WHO BELIEVE that the Obama administration, supported by the Europeans, did the right thing by intervening in Libya, even if the intervention was preconditioned by a host of factors that were not at all transparent. The US did have critical interests in Libya—as poorly explained as they may have been—and also moral obligations. US actions in the years 1998–2004, and the process of rapprochement itself, as I will describe in detail, set in motion a whole series of actions that made a bloodless revolution less, not more, likely. I also believe that had this process been managed differently, the result might well have been different, and the West’s strategic and moral obligations to intervene less clear.
    What foreigners tend to overlook is that those who fought in the revolution—largely young men between the ages of seventeen and thirty—clearly believed a clean break from Gaddafi was worth the grave risks they took to topple the regime. In other words, even though Libya was looking a bit shinier, and there were promises of jobs and new housing, there was no sense, particularly in Eastern Libya, that this process would benefit any but the top layers of society or that there would be fundamental change. In my many pre-Revolution conversations with Libyans of all kinds, I sensed that, in all this talk of weapons of mass destruction, and foreign investment, ordinary Libyans felt they had been betrayed by perhaps the one country that had the power to save them from further decades of rule by Gaddafi(s).
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    I RETURNED TO LIBYA for the first time since the revolution, in late July 2011, almost five years to the day after my first visit to Benghazi. My colleague and I arrived on a UN transport literally hours after the assassination of rebel commander Abdelfattah Younes. One had the sense, in this highly charged atmosphere, with multiple hours-long gun battles raging across the city, that the residents of the epicenter of the Revolution were starting to feel—not for the last time—that perhaps they had miscalculated, that the forces of darkness, whether they be embodied in regime “fifth columnists,” in foreign meddling, or simply man’s morbid attraction to chaos, were possibly too great to overcome. I had experienced this atmosphere of collective angst twice before—in Aden, Yemen, just before the USS Cole bombing, and in Asmara, Eritrea, in 1999, during an escalation of the hugely bloody Eritrean-Ethiopian war; the National Transitional Council was struggling to control renegade militias, which it feared remained loyal to Gaddafi. At the same time, the city was alive with as many opinions as weapons. People were proud of what they had accomplished and in the
sacrifice of the martyrs and the mafqoodeen (the missing), whose images were posted everywhere, along with the newly-revived monarchy flag. My colleagues and I witnessed a country in the throes of shedding the influence of Gaddafi and quickly remaking itself.
    The book begins by looking at the historical and sociological