After Gadhafi, the West Eyes the Libyan Prize

By Phyllis Bennis
Salon.com
October 22, 2011

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/20/after_gadhafi_the_west_eyes_the_libyan_prize/singleton/

The death of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi will likely
- though it's too early to know anything for sure -
mean the end of the current stage of Libya's civil war.
Whether it will set the stage for peace, national
reconciliation, democracy, normalization with the
region or other goals is far less clear. And what post-
Gadhafi Libya's relationship with the United States and
other NATO countries will look like remains uncertain.

A Libyan commentator on Al Jazeera this morning,
celebrating the death of Gadhafi, described it as the
"third fall" of dictators in the Arab Spring. But while
the overthrow of Gadhafi's 42-year-old regime found its
origins in the same Tunisian- and Egyptian-inspired
nonviolent mobilizations as those still underway in
Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, Libya's trajectory
was profoundly different.

It began the same way, with a home-grown call for
protests against a dictatorship responsible for
terrible repression, the massacre of prisoners and
more. But when Libyan protesters took up arms, and
especially when leaders invited NATO and the U.S. to
become the "air force of the Transitional National
Council," the links between Libya's rebellion and those
of the rest of the Arab Spring began to fray.

Early on, the TNC's call for a "no-fly zone" had little
popular support. Many described it warily as
undermining the independence of Libya's revolution. But
support appeared to grow with talk of an "inevitable"
and "imminent" massacre in Benghazi, where the armed
rebels were concentrated. Even among rebels, support
for the U.S./NATO intervention was never unanimous,
perhaps because of uncertainty about Gadhafi's
intentions and, crucially, his capacity.

A massacre was certainly possible. But the people of
Benghazi had already shown their ability to protect
their city. When the first French-piloted NATO bombers
attacked the four Libyan tanks outside of Benghazi,
they were targeted in the desert outside the city
precisely because they had already been driven out of
the city by anti-Gadhafi fighters.  The rebel military
capacity at that moment was unknown, but the visible
contradiction between that initial victory and the
claim that only Western airstrikes could save the
people of Benghazi may have been part of why the unease
over the U.S./NATO role remained for so long.

The question now is whether and how the new post-
Gadhafi Libya, having overthrown its longtime leader in
essentially a civil war in which the U.S. and NATO
backed one side, rather than through the kind of
independent, and largely nonviolent revolutionary
processes underway in the other countries of the Arab
Spring, can claim pride of place within that regional
awakening.

War for control, not oil

The U.S. was not the original instigator of the NATO
intervention. That role lay in Europe, starting with
France, whose president was still smarting from
political attacks for his too-little-too-late response
to the Tunisian uprising. Sarkozy's domestic popularity
concerns were joined in the United Kingdom by the
Conservative Party government, which was eager to claim
a position in what they anticipated would be the
winning side of the Libyan struggle. This set the stage
for privileged European positions vis-à-vis influence
with the new post-Gadhafi government and, of course,
privileged access to Libyan oil.

So France and Britain took the lead in the U.N.
Security Council, drafting an initial resolution
calling for a "no-fly zone," ostensibly to "protect
civilians" in Libya. The United States military was not
thrilled at the prospect. Top U.S. officials, including
Chief of Staff Michael Mullen, described how a "no-fly
zone" by itself wouldn't work - that it would require
bombing Libya first, to "take out" anti-aircraft
weapons and protect the Western pilots. The White House
showed little enthusiasm.

Then a State Department-based group led by Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, and
White House advisor Samantha Power, officials who had
histories of often urging military action in response
to human rights violations, won out. So instead of
simply voting "no" on the resolution that the Pentagon
agreed wouldn't work, the U.S. took the British-French
draft and "improved" it by calling for "all necessary
means" to protect civilians - a green light for the use
of all weapons, against any targets, for as long as the
Pentagon and NATO chose to stay in Libya. That marked
the end of the Libyan Spring and the opening of a very
difficult - and for civilians, deadly - civil war.

The U.S./NATO intervention in Libya was not a "war for
oil." Access to oil wasn't even the main issue during
the 1970s or 1980s, years of U.S. opposition to Libya's
role in supporting national liberation movements during
the Cold War, or through the 1990s when the U.S.
isolated Libya for its involvement with terrorism.
Libya's sweet light crude was always widely available
on the world's oil market.

But after 2001, when the Bush administration was eager
to round up new recruits for its "global war on
terror," emissaries were sent to make nice to the long-
excoriated Libyan leader. Within a couple of years,
Gadhafi had beenbrought in from the cold. He had agreed
to dismantle Libya's nascent nuclear program, he had
offered compensation to families of the Lockerbie
bombing, he offered normal diplomatic relations with
his once-and-future enemies in the U.S. and Europe. By
2003 or so European and U.S. oil companies were
standing in line to sign contracts. By 2007 and beyond,
photos of Gadhafi arm-in-arm with Sarkozy, Tony Blair,
Silvio Berlusconi - as well as both Bush and Obama and,
famously, Condoleezza Rice - were staples of newspaper
front pages and websites around the world.

For the United States in 2011, the strategic interest
in turning on Gadhafi after years of chummy good
relations was primarily rooted in fear of loss of
control. Gadhafi was our guy now, yes - but Washington
had to ask, What if? What if the mercurial Libyan
leader, under pressure from anti-dictatorship
democratization processes next door, reversed course
and turned to Washington's enemies for strategic ties?
China continues its expansion of investment and
influence in Africa: What if? Gadhafi's opponents
include Islamists of various stripes, including some
Salafis, followers of the Saudi Arabia-based branch of
extremist Islam favored by some militants: What if?
Libya's own people might decide that an alliance with
the West was not in their best interests: What if?

"What if?" quickly became "yes let's." And so it began.
The new U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) had its first
chance to show its stuff (although it appears AFRICOM's
chief was replaced by the commanders of U.S. airpower
at NATO bases in Italy). The Libyan opposition leaders
who first said, "We can do it ourselves," started
saying, "just a no-fly zone, but no foreign
intervention" - even though top U.S. generals had
already said you couldn't have one without the other.
And with UN Security Council Resolution 1973 including
the expansive language of "any means necessary"
regarding military attacks, the resolution's other
calls for negotiations and especially for an immediate
cease-fire, were disregarded by Western powers. Of
course, Gadhafi scorned a cease-fire too, but the U.N.
resolution should have led to a much greater emphasis
on negotiations to end the violence.

The question of whether, when and to what degree a new
Libya can break free of its current dependence on
Western militaries and other strategic backers remains
unanswered.

A divided society

As was the case in Egypt and Tunisia, it appeared that
most Libyans supported the calls for more democracy,
more rights, even for an end to the regime. But not
all. A significant number of Libyans clearly supported
the regime, a situation closer to the ongoing crisis
still playing out in Syria.

It would have been surprising if this had not been the
case. In his 42-year reign, Gadhafi had concentrated
power in his own hands, and had allowed little freedom
of speech, freedom of assembly or political opposition.
He had used Libya's oil revenue to arm and train a set
of geographically and politically separate militias,
many of them commanded by his sons and other relatives
but answerable only to him, while the official national
army remained relatively weak.

But Libya's oil wealth is massive enough, and its
population small enough, that Gadhafi's "Green Book"-
style quasi-socialism, idiosyncratic as it was, still
mandated national systems of healthcare, education and
social security that led to top United Nations rankings
in human development indicators. And because of the
singular concentration of power in one person's hands,
Gadhafi was popularly credited not only with repression
but also with providing jobs, access to hospitals,
university scholarships and the like.

Certainly those economic and social rights were not
equally available. Libya's modern history as a unified
nation was based on an often uneasy joining of Western
and Eastern parts that had long histories, under
colonial rule and before, as separate provinces.
Gadhafi had always found stronger support in Libya's
west, including Tripoli, than in the eastern half of
the country, where Benghazi is the largest city. His
own hometown of Sirte, where he was killed Thurdsay,
lies on the coast almost exactly half way between east
and west. Sirte especially, and the western half of
Libya more generally, had received relatively
privileged access to the benefits of Libya's petro-
wealth.

The challenge facing post-Gadhafi Libya is daunting.
The power, accountability and especially the legitimacy
of the interim governing structure remains contested.
The civil war created new divisions and consolidated
others between parts of the Libyan population. Rifts
between east and west have amplified, with the
Benghazi-based TNC widely distrusted in other areas of
the country. They have already had difficulty setting
up shop in Tripoli, where anger remains at the
disproportional Benghazi/Eastern Libya representation.

The anti-Gadhafi militias largely remain independent of
the TNC, with fighters from the western town of Misrata
and the Nafusa Mountains, making public their lack of
accountability to the TNC.

Divisions have been exacerbated between Arab and Tuareg
Libyans, as well as between those with different
languages, local tribal or clan or regional identities.
The divide between lighter-skinned Arab Libyans and
black African Libyans has been further worsened by the
widespread attacks on dark-skinned Libyans as well as
on sub-Saharan African workers by anti-Gadhafi fighters
accusing them of serving as mercenaries for Gadhafi.
While African mercenaries were indeed part of some pro-
Gadhafi militias, the vast majority of Africans in
Libya are there as economic migrants, working in the
lowest-paid and hardest jobs across the country. The
racism inherent in those attacks is now a bleeding
wound across Libyan society.

How will the TNC - or whatever governing structure
follows it - include representatives of Sirte, which
many in and around the TNC have condemned as being all
Gadhafi loyalists? Certainly Sirte's population
included many supporters of the ousted and now dead
leader, but many had fled the city before the fighting
escalated in recent weeks. They are now returning to
find their city in ruins, with blocks of houses looted
and destroyed .

The TNC has committed itself to holding elections
within eight months of the "final liberation" of the
country - expected to be announced sometime today or
tomorrow. The U.S.-backed appointed prime minister has
promised to step down immediately after that
announcement. Whether those promises are kept, whether
anything remotely resembling a free and fair election
can be arranged in eight months in a country with no
recent legacy of political parties or civil society
institutions, remain huge challenges.

There was a fascinating Freudian slip on Thursday
afternoon when Secretary of State Clinton, referring to
Libya now being awash with weapons, described a U.S.
"concern as to how we disarm" the country, only then
catching herself and correcting her statement to "or
how the Libyans disarm everybody who has weapons."

Whether U.S. and European offers of "help" will serve
as cover for ensuring the election of a pro-U.S.
government, maintaining Libyan dependence on the West,
and thus keeping a U.S. foothold in the very center of
the otherwise independent Arab Spring, are questions
hovering just behind today's celebrations on the Libyan
street.

_______________________

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy
Studies. Her books include Calling the Shots: How
Washington Dominates Today's UN.

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