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Why Was Muammar Qadhafi Really Removed?

2017; Wiley; Volume: 24; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/mepo.12310

1475-4967

Christopher Davidson,

Global Peace and Security Dynamics

In the wake of the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in late 2010 and early 2011, the conventional narrative, at least in the Western media, soon became one of an unstoppable tidal wave of emancipation. This was expected to leave no stone unturned, at least in the decaying Arab republics, which many academics continued to argue were structurally weaker than the region's monarchies.1 In this context, the Benghazi uprising in eastern Libya in February 2011 was widely portrayed as the start of yet another revolution — both nationwide and organic — that would soon see Muammar Qadhafi's regime swept from power by an overwhelming majority of the population. As the weeks dragged on, however, with Qadhafi still effectively in power and the bulk of the Libyan armed forces apparently remaining loyal, this narrative had to be abandoned and replaced by a new one depicting a desperate regime clinging to power by wielding extreme violence against its people and deploying vicious foreign mercenaries. Certainly, by March 2011 it was generally assumed that Qadhafi's fighters, whoever they were, would massacre thousands of civilians if they managed to re-enter Benghazi, and if the Western powers and their regional allies did not step up to the plate with some sort of humanitarian intervention on behalf of the “Libyan revolution.” Although at the time several analysts did try to question the details underpinning these two interlinked narratives,2 it took more than five years before any real willingness emerged in Western government circles to investigate more thoroughly the events of 2011. Published in September 2016, for example, a British parliamentary report recognized that the eventual NATO-led intervention (Operation Unified Protector) had gone badly wrong and conceded that the intelligence it was based on was not necessarily credible in the first place. Entitled “Libya: Examination of Intervention and Collapse and the UK's Future Policy Options,” it drew the conclusion that former British Prime Minister David Cameron was primarily to blame for the ensuing chaos in the wake of Qadhafi's removal, due to “his decision-making in the [UK] National Security Council” and his “failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy.”3 But beyond this superficial and heavily politicized reading of the Libya conflict, which offered little insight into its root causes or the real objectives of Britain and the other intervening external powers, a substantial body of evidence has now emerged that allows for a much deeper understanding of the Libyan uprising and the NATO intervention. In particular, the contents of hundreds of recently declassified files, court-subpoenaed materials and leaked official correspondence strongly suggest that the two mainstream narratives of 2011, and even the British parliament's belated findings, have largely obscured the real reasons behind Qadhafi's removal and the methods used to make it happen. After necessarily situating the Libyan conflict in its proper historical context and then identifying the patterns behind the numerous earlier attempts to remove Qadhafi from power, this article will draw heavily on this extensive and now accessible new evidence to demonstrate how the 2011 Arab Spring phenomenon was soon manipulated by external actors to provide diplomatic cover for the calculated dismantling of a Libyan regime that had remained largely resistant to the opening up of its economy to Western investment and, inconveniently, was still able to count on a significant domestic support base. Furthermore, it will be shown that, by this stage, the Libyan regime had not only failed to establish itself as a reliable partner in the long-running U.S. “War on Terror,” but had actually emerged as one of the strongest voices opposing the expansion of NATO and U.S. military power onto the African continent. Within this more nuanced framework, the article will also reveal how the Western powers’ regime-change agenda in Libya in 2011 was to a great extent shielded from public scrutiny, with some of the most significant and visible roles being assigned to key regional Arab allies. In this sense, mindful of the ongoing domestic backlash to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and wary of further international criticism of their Middle East policies, the Western powers this time made sure to orchestrate better a web of compliant Arab proxies that could effectively provide most of the financing and on-the-ground logistical and intelligence support for those Libyans who were willing to oppose the regime, even if they were in a minority and even if their Arab Spring or “pro-democracy” credentials were impossible to verify or completely non-existent. Soon advancing into the void left by the retreating British Empire, and quickly overcoming their initial fence-sitting on Gamal Abdel Nasser's new nationalist administration in Egypt, by the mid-1950s U.S. planners acknowledged that securing the Middle East was going to be vital for the future prosperity and stability of the Western states and for holding the Soviet Union in check. As it was in the rest of the world, the extraction of natural resources was an obvious priority, so all indigenous attempts to nationalize economic assets — regardless of any progressive, liberal or even democratic agendas — needed to be intimidated or destroyed by the United States. In 1955, according to secret correspondence between British officials, President Dwight Eisenhower had even called for a “high-class Machiavellian plan to achieve a situation in the Middle East favorable to our interests which could split the Arabs and defeat the aims of our enemies.”4 Just two years later, the region got its own Eisenhower Doctrine: an evolution of the earlier Truman and Monroe doctrines that had sought to secure U.S. interests against international communism and foreign encroachment in the Americas.5 Stating that “the U.S. regards as vital to the national interest and world peace the preservation of the independence and integrity of the nations of the Middle East,” Eisenhower effectively made the Middle East a special zone of U.S. control. Moreover, as with Truman's more global declaration, Eisenhower sought to tie the Cold War to all threats to the Middle Eastern status quo by claiming he was “prepared to use armed forces to assist [any Middle Eastern country] requesting assistance against armed aggression from any country controlled by international communism.”6 He also proclaimed that “the existing vacuum in the Middle East must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia.”7 This sudden special treatment of the Middle East was, for the most part, due to the simultaneous deepening of U.S. dependency on crude-oil imports. Although still a net exporter at the end of World War II, by 1950 the United States was importing a million barrels per day, and by the 1960s more than a third of U.S. energy demands were being met by such imports, mostly from the shah's Iran and the Gulf monarchies, but also from the Kingdom of Libya, which had become the region's third-biggest oil producer.8 With Britain's oil needs also growing, its interests and relations in the region fell increasingly in the U.S. shadow, with Whitehall planners admitting that Middle Eastern oil was “a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination.”9 In this context, with the United States and Britain having repeatedly sought to undermine or overthrow several Arab and other Middle Eastern governments in the 1950s and the 1960s that threatened to nationalize industries or chart new foreign policies,10 the revolutionary Libyan Arab Republic that formed in 1969 soon emerged as yet another threat to the interests of the Western powers and their corporations. Typified by Muammar Qadhafi, who had joined the Libyan military in the early 1960s with the express purpose of launching a coup d'état against the Western-backed and increasingly unpopular King Idris al-Senussi, the republican forces seized their chance on September 1, 1969, while Idris was outside the country receiving medical attention. Having quickly arrested Idris's heir apparent,11 the 27–year-old Qadhafi then broadcast the “communiqué number one” that confirmed the birth of the new state.12 The revolution immediately cost Britain an estimated $pD100 million in lost oil-infrastructure investments and access to military bases, and frustrated British officials privately acknowledged that it was popular and that Qadhafi was a charismatic leader.13 The United States had been less badly damaged by Qadhafi, despite the rhetoric of President Richard Nixon's administration; staff at its Wheelus Air Base in Libya had already been preparing for a full withdrawal following an earlier agreement signed under Idris.14 Nonetheless, with the loss of lucrative Libyan oil concessions for Western companies and with Qadhafi soon accused of funding countless governments and movements around the world deemed antagonistic to Western interests, both Britain and the United States quickly began to formulate scenarios to bring Qadhafi's apparently anti-imperialist regime to an end.15 Searching for a casus belli, in 1981 Washington announced that a Libyan hit team had been intercepted while trying to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, who stated to the media, “We have the evidence, and [Qadhafi] knows it.” Problematically, however, officials involved in the task force set up by Deputy Secretary of State William Clark to investigate the plot admitted afterwards that “we came out with this big terrorist threat to the U.S. government. The whole thing was a complete fabrication.”16 In fact, as later reported in the British press, the “hit team” turned out to be made up of Lebanese citizens who had been in the United States to assist with negotiations to release U.S. hostages in Beirut. They were understood to have had no connection whatsoever to Qadhafi.17 Brushing this fiasco aside, five years later, Reagan's administration was nonetheless ready to try again, especially after Libya was condemned for firing missiles at U.S. aircraft and its intelligence services were publicly blamed for the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. military personnel. Both charges seemed to stick, and within 10 days of the Berlin tragedy the United States began to launch retaliatory strikes on both Tripoli and Benghazi.18 It soon transpired, however, that Operation El Dorado Canyon was far more than just an effort to punish Qadhafi and, as is now becoming clearer, also had nothing to do with either the missile attacks or the disco bombing. As a former U.S. pilot and squadron leader who served in the operation has described, El Dorado Canyon had been in the planning stage “for about four months from the beginning of 1986.” He understood it to have primarily been an assassination attempt on Qadhafi using the pretext of broader air strikes.19 Certainly Qadhafi's personal compound at Bab al-Aziz in Tripoli was directly and heavily targeted, with nine of the 45 aircraft involved in the operation having been assigned to it.20 Four bombs were dropped on the building thought to be Qadhafi's house within the compound, but due to warnings from either a Maltese or Italian politician, Qadhafi had managed to escape beforehand.21 Although a later U.S. trial took the view that the Berlin bombing had been “planned by the Libyan secret service and the Libyan Embassy,” a trial held in Germany after its reunification concluded that, while “Libya [bore] at the very least a considerable part of the responsibility for the attack,” there was nonetheless no proof that Qadhafi was personally responsible.22 As for the missile attacks, the original account seems equally spurious; a group of British electronic engineers based in Libya at the time later described how they had watched on their radar as U.S. aircraft flew deep into Libyan territory. As one of the men stated, “I don't think the Libyans had any choice but to hit back. In my opinion they were reluctant to do so.”23 Meanwhile, in other reports, anonymous British officials have been quoted as saying that during this period, U.S. intelligence on Libya was “wildly inaccurate” and had been passed on to Britain in an effort to “deliberately deceive.”24 Although the Cold War may have been coming to an end, the safeguarding of access to Middle Eastern oil naturally remained a top priority. With viable alternative energies a distant speck on the horizon, in 1990 the journal Science concluded that nearly half of total U.S. oil needs were still being met by foreign imports.25 In many ways, speaking for the entire U.S. governmental and military-industrial complex, Norman Schwarzkopf, commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), put it best: Middle Eastern oil is the West's lifeblood. It fuels us today and … is going to fuel us when the rest of the world has run dry. It is estimated that within 20–40 years the U.S. will have virtually depleted its economically available oil reserves, while the [Middle East] will still have at least a 100 years of proven oil reserves.26 Still surviving, by the mid-1990s, Qadhafi's regime was proving particularly problematic. Not only were Libya's vast oil reserves still largely off limits to Western companies;27 it had convinced itself that the Western powers’ key Arab ally, Saudi Arabia, was in fact at the root of the dramatic resurgence in Sunni Islamic extremism across the region. Awkwardly for the U.S. and British administrations — both heavily implicated in the Saudi-CIA-funded jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s that had aimed to deal a body blow to the intervening Soviet Union28 — the Libyan government became the first in the world to collect evidence on Osama bin Laden's activities and even supply it to Interpol.29 In early 1998, some five months before al-Qaeda's bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, Qadhafi had formally requested an Interpol arrest warrant for Bin Laden.30 According to a former adviser to French President Jacques Chirac and a French investigative journalist, both the CIA and MI6 had then actively tried to stop the Interpol warrant from being issued and had sought to “downplay the threat” posed by Bin Laden.31 From Tripoli's perspective, not only was the Arab world under threat from the scourge of religious radicalization, so too was its own domestic survival: a large number of the “Arab Afghans” earlier recruited by Bin Laden and his associates were Libyan citizens. Established in the dying days of the Afghan jihad, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was the most prominent cadre of radicals, but there were others, too, including a number of smaller Libyan units that “mostly consisted of a leader and a handful of followers.”32 Those who had not moved on from Afghanistan to other campaigns, such as the fight against Serbian forces in Bosnia and Kosovo, had returned to North Africa, bringing with them both military experience and strong convictions about the secular nature of Qadhafi's republic. According to one former Libyan jihadist, the reason they had gone to Afghanistan in the first place was that “a lot of young [Libyans] felt desperate because the regime made it very hard for people of Islamic persuasion to express their opinion.”33 Disturbingly, however, a number of key LIFG members had also moved to Britain, most living in London and Manchester. They appear to have been offered sanctuary and soon began to make repeated public calls for the overthrow of the Qadhafi regime.34 Britain had not designated the LIFG a terrorist organization, despite its obvious connections to al-Qaeda and other extremist groups in Central Asia; it was clearly a potential, if volatile, ally against Tripoli. Among its members was Nazih al-Ruqail, also known as Abu Anas al-Libi, who had moved to London in 1995 and been granted political asylum. He was known to have participated in an earlier failed al-Qaeda plot to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and was later implicated in the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, after having flown to Nairobi to train al-Qaeda members in surveillance techniques.35 Described by a former jihadist as having been a key player in al-Qaeda in Afghanistan since the early days, al-Libi eventually fled Britain in 2000. A subsequent raid on his Manchester apartment led to the discovery of a 180–page “terrorist training manual.”36 Meanwhile, other key LIFG members had been living freely in Ireland, one remaining in Dublin until 2004, when he left to join the growing Islamist insurgency in Iraq against the Baghdad government and U.S. coalition forces.37 Going a long way towards explaining their tolerated presence in Britain, there is evidence that in 1995–96, al-Libi and his LIFG associates were working closely with British intelligence. Having correctly identified Qadhafi's vulnerability to jihadist organizations, MI6 developed a plan that would involve Libya-based LIFG veterans leading an assassination attempt and “producing unrest” across the country, while a simultaneous coup led by army officers would take control of the capital.38 Although six innocent bystanders were killed, the LIFG attack failed and the regime remained in place. With fingers soon pointing at Britain, Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind unequivocally denied any British involvement in the plot.39 Unfortunately for Rifkind, however, two years later former MI5 officer David Shayler came forward and gave an interview to the BBC in which he claimed MI6 had indeed reached out to the LIFG, paying it $pD100,000 and providing it with 250 weapons to carry out the assassination of Qadhafi.40 Shayler's allegations were substantially reinforced in 2000, when a leaked MI6 document corroborating most of these details appeared on a U.S.-based server. Marked “UK Alpha Eyes” and reported by the BBC, the document's authenticity was confirmed to the British press by Whitehall sources, while the secretary of Britain's “D Notice” censorship committee requested that the document's contents not be published.41 Rather belatedly, in February 2004, former CIA director George Tenet told the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence that “one of the most immediate threats [to U.S. national security] is from smaller Sunni extremist groups that have benefited from Al-Qaeda links. They include … the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.” Tenet repeated his assessment to the 9/11 Commission the following month, with the United States finally designating the LIFG a terrorist organization shortly after and issuing a $5 million bounty for the capture of al-Libi.42 After another year Britain finally followed suit when the Home Office Special Immigration Appeals Commission stated that the LIFG's primary aim had been to “overthrow the Qadhafi regime and replace it with an Islamic state.”43 Only in 2007 was it officially considered by Western intelligence agencies to be a part of al-Qaeda.44 Despite the failed plots to remove him and the apparent self-sufficiency afforded by Tripoli's oil wealth, by the early 2000s Muammar Qadhafi had tried to improve his relations with the Western powers and their constituent corporations by offering to open up key parts of the Libyan economy to foreign investment. Having witnessed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and later publicly warning at an Arab League summit in Syria that “America hanged Saddam and we might be next,”45 Qadhafi apparently realized he had little choice but to “switch sides,” or at least be seen trying to do so. Others have pointed out that his increasingly grasping sons and inner-circle members were pressuring him to take advantage of the lifting of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Libya in the early 1990s for suspected terror links.46 Their aim was to facilitate foreign direct investment and the denationalization of state assets — much as Hosni Mubarak had been doing in Egypt — so that the assets Qadhafi himself had once nationalized could now be bought up by his cronies. Trying to spin this as an extension of the “popular control” called for in his Green Book manifesto, Qadhafi's own relatives were angling for their share of Libya's global value.47 Problematically, on top of Qadhafi's earlier intransigent stances on al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, and other Western allies and assets, there was a multitude of additional obstacles still preventing rapprochement between the West and Libya, even if strictly for business. Qadhafi's intelligence services had executed numerous dissidents in Western Europe and were understood to have been particularly active in London, where the Libyan embassy supposedly had a long list of targets it was working through.48 Moreover, the Qadhafi regime continued to be blamed for a 1984 gun attack on demonstrators outside its London embassy that had led to the death of British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher, and of course for the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. With that plane now known to have been carrying at least four U.S. officials and their bodyguards, including the CIA's Beirut station chief and a Defense Intelligence Agency officer on secondment to the CIA, the mid-air explosion was likely seen by the U.S. government as a direct attack on its secret Middle East operations.49 With money on the table, however, all soon seemed to be forgiven; Qadhafi himself even began to make qualified apologies. In 2003, his government formally accepted responsibility for Lockerbie, even though no direct role was admitted, and most fingers had by then already begun to point elsewhere.50 Trying to boost the Qadhafi regime's repentance further, reports also began to circulate that Libya had hired the U.S.-based Monitor Group to undertake a public-relations “cleansing campaign.” One of the group's letters sent to a senior Libyan official promised, “We will create a network map to identify significant figures engaged or interested in Libya today. We will identify and encourage journalists, academics and contemporary thinkers who will have an interest in publishing papers and articles on Libya.”51 From about this time, Libya had also begun to cooperate heavily with Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA and MI6. According to the Jamestown Foundation, Qadhafi's intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, had begun handing over names of Libyan Islamic Fighting Group members living in exile. Although hailed as a “major intelligence windfall” by the United States, they were the same characters MI6 had been working with during the 1990s. Nonetheless, according to documents later discovered in the former office of Koussa, who had defected to Britain almost immediately after the 2011 uprising and was then safely rehabilitated in Qatar, the Western powers had been deporting such dissidents back to Libya, where Western intelligence officers would then attend interrogation sessions. Bizarrely, the same captured documents detailed how British officials were even helping to draft Qadhafi's speeches, and how MI6 had sought to arrange a public-relations stunt for Qadhafi and Tony Blair in 2004. This now infamous “meeting in the desert” was to take place in a Bedouin tent: “The English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it.”52 On top of processing renditions, Qadhafi also appeared willing to alleviate the North African refugee crisis in the Mediterranean. He offered to forcibly prevent African migrants from leaving Libyan shores in exchange for $5 billion of Italian investments into Libya and six Italian-manufactured naval patrol boats.53 It was clearly an act of extortion, with one of Qadhafi's sons warning a Western official that without his father in power, Europe would face “unprecedented illegal immigration from Africa” and Qadhafi later telephoning Blair to warn of a jihadist invasion of Europe. Nonetheless, the Western intelligence agencies sought to portray the regime's cooperation as further evidence of Libya's coming in from the cold.54 As a useful proxy, the U.S. and British ally Qatar also had a role to play in smoothing Libyan-European relations. In 2007, it had helped facilitate the extradition of a number of Bulgarian nurses imprisoned in Libya for allegedly infecting children with HIV, and two years later facilitated the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from British custody.55 With relations improving, at least on paper, the Financial Times reported that Western businessmen quickly found “rich and willing clients” among Libya's new generation of business elites.56 Rising to the fore was Saif al-Islam Qadhafi, the dictator's second-eldest son and a postgraduate at the London School of Economics, identified in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables as the point man for Libya's pending “political and economic reforms.”57 As the Libyan equivalent of Mubarak's business-friendly son Gamal, he had become a frequent visitor to Western capitals as part of his self-proclaimed infitah, or “opening,” strategy, and was regarded as “ultra-cool, charming, a modernizer.” Understood to have assumed control over the Libyan Investment Authority — the country's major sovereign-wealth fund — he had paid Goldman Sachs $1.3 billion to manage its future investments in currencies and stocks.58 Among the first big movers was Royal Dutch Shell, which began to go forward quickly from an initial 2004 agreement with Qadhafi. It subsequently held 26 meetings over the next few years with British government officials hoping to facilitate the deal. British Petroleum joined in, too, winning a Libyan concession in 2007 worth $15 billion. By the end of the decade, hundreds more British companies were operating in Libya in what had become an annual bilateral trade worth $1.5 billion.59 From the U.S. side, the optimism was no less palpable; Senator John McCain toured Libya in 2009, noting the “hydrocarbon producing potential” and the “high expectations of international oil companies.”60 With Qadhafi pictured shaking the hands of world leaders and finally beginning to receive some good press in Western media, Libya was also ripe for arms deals. Ahead of the competition were the British companies… Unsurprisingly, perhaps, with Qadhafi pictured shaking the hands of world leaders and finally beginning to receive some good press in Western media, Libya was also ripe for arms deals. Ahead of the competition were the British companies, which sold large quantities of advanced military equipment to Libya from 2007, including the usual panoply of crowd-control hardware: armored personnel carriers, sniper rifles, smoke canisters, stun grenades and water cannons. A sophisticated communications system for Libyan tanks was also sold after being approved for export by the British government, which had already designated Libya a “priority market” worthy of “high-level political interventions.”61 In 2009 alone, approximately $500 million worth of British, French, German and Italian arms were believed to have shipped, and as late as November 2010, just weeks before the Arab Spring began, more than 50 British companies attended a Libyan arms fair at an airport in Tripoli. Later interviewed by the Daily Telegraph, the spokesman for one of the companies explained that “it [was] not embarrassing for us. The Libyans were a favored regime with our government. Tony Blair was out there and they had become a country we could trade with. Our politicians were more than happy to allow us to export out there.”62 Indeed, when Libyan regime offices were raided in 2011, a letter was found from Blair addressed to Qadhafi. Dated 2007, it thanked Qadhafi for his “excellent cooperation” after beginning with “Dear Muammar” and ending with “Best wishes yours ever, Tony.”63 In parallel to the euphoria surrounding Libya's apparent reintegration into Western markets, there were several early warnings that the regime was unlikely ever to be as compliant as expected. According to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables from 2007, Washington was already becoming frustrated with the speed of Qadhafi's liberalization, complaining of his merely “lukewarm embrace of U.S. corporate interests.”64 The cables also indicated that U.S. officials were wary of lingering “Libyan resource nationalism” and had tried to demonstrate the “downsides” of this approach to the Libyan government.65 In many ways, the U.S. Department of State was right to be suspicious, even if some U.S. politicians were not; there were soon ample indications that Qadhafi was not such a supplicant after all. As soon as they had signed concessions with Libya, both ExxonMobil and Total had been strong-armed into a new oil-sharing agreement that gave them much less favorable terms and called for $5 billion in upfront payments to the Libyan government. A 2008 U.S. cable warned that a U.S. consortium including ConocoPhillips would be “next on the block,” despite its having already paid out substantial sums to Tripoli. By 2009, things seemed to be getting even worse: halfway through a video conference with Georgetown University students, Qadhafi abruptly threatened to renationalize Libyan oil.66 Behind the scenes, this sort of rhetoric was already translating into action. Libyan ministers had begun to force U.S. oil companies to contribute to a new “claims compensation agreement,” that was supposed to support the victims of U.S. and Libyan bombings in both countries. Balking at such moves, the U.S. ambassador described them as “red lines,” although the Department of State was a bit more realistic, suggesting that “smaller operators and services might relent and pay,” and The New York Times noted that several did just that. European companies seemed to be faring no better, with Italy's hopes of winning development contracts seeming to hang on its government's paying $200 million a year for 25 years as “compensation for colonial injustic