Exit the Colonel Read Free Page B

context that produced Gaddafi in the first place, his early influences and stated aspirations, and the increasing difficulty he faced motivating a population that moved quickly from ecstasy to apathy to open hostility toward his ambitions. I then look at Gaddafi’s turn to rejectionism, and decision to play spoiler to the international (and particularly Arab and Western) community, largely at the expense of the livelihood and comfort of his own people.
    I explain how, for the better part of twenty years, Gaddafi became an international pariah, a status reinforced by a series of particularly heinous acts of state-sponsored terror. I describe how Gaddafi managed, for many years, to keep most of his internal and external opposition at bay, even as predominantly Eastern-based Islamists became an increasingly serious threat to the regime. I describe the odd alignment of internal and external circumstances that paved the way for a rapprochement dialogue with the West (and the US in particular). This rapprochement offered real opportunities for Libya and the US, subject to a well-structured deal, for which Libyan reform was not an afterthought. In reality, the process moved forward in an astoundingly ad hoc manner, producing a series of incompatible narratives, that, instead of saving Gaddafi and providing the US with a viable model for engagement with problem states, effectively preconditioned a very messy outcome, once the Arab Spring was under way. In the last chapters I look at how the US and the West came to intervene in the Libyan uprising on the side of the rebels, and why, and what prospects Libya has for becoming a productive, prosperous member of the international community.

PART I
    THE MAKING OF TROUBLE

PART II
    GATES OPEN

CHAPTER 4
    The Americans Return

    W ith the 2003 deal in hand, the US and Libya took practical steps to move the relationship forward. As a matter of priority, the Americans sent a team to Tripoli to help with removal of key elements of Libya’s WMD program. In early February 2004, the State Department announced the “possibility of assigning a small number of personnel to each other’s capitals, in the absence of functioning embassies” 1 and, nudged by the oil companies, lifted the ban on US citizens traveling to Libya.
    Soon after, a team of American doctors arrived to assess the Libyan medical and humanitarian-response infrastructure. At Libya’s request, the US agreed to host Libyan specialists to explore future educational exchanges. About a dozen senior Libyan educators and administrators arrived in Washington in summer 2004 for consultations and a tour of US universities. Shortly thereafter, a smaller US delegation flew to Tripoli for meetings with the heads of a number of Libyan universities. There was talk of holding a demonstration match between US and Libyan wrestling teams, though this ultimately never happened. 2
    In July 2004, the US presence was upgraded from an “interests section” within the Belgian embassy (a Belgian diplomat passed messages back and forth between the US and Libyan governments and was the point of contact with any US citizen in trouble) to a liaison office, one diplomatic rung below
a full-fledged embassy. This action released the second tranche of Libya’s promised compensation to the Lockerbie victims’ families.
    The US Liaison Office-Tripoli (USLO) was housed on the fifth and sixth floors of the newly constructed, sand-colored Libyan-Maltese Corinthia Bab Africa (Gate to Africa) hotel, a joint Libyan-Maltese concern. Completed the year before, the hotel, according to reliable sources, was built on the site of a Jewish cemetery—a hallmark Gaddafi maneuver, in the same vein as installing a sewage drain outside the Libyan Officers’ Club, at the beginning of Gargaresh Street (which not only created a foul smell on-site, but polluted much of the Tripoli corniche). These were not-so-subtle reminders of just who had