Follow The Leader
Former 'mad dog' Muammar Qadhafi is taking Libya in a surprising new direction
Let bygones be bygones?
Making money is exactly Libya's aim in breaking out of its isolation. "We are looking to the future. . . . We want to concentrate on our economic development," Shokri Ghanem, the prime minister and leading government reformer, said in an interview with U.S.News .
Focusing on the future of U.S.-Libyan relations is almost certain to be more fruitful than the past, for the past is tortured indeed. After dethroning Libya's king in a 1969 coup, Qadhafi kicked the Americans out of Wheelus Air Base (but kept on U.S. oil companies). He championed the causes of radical revolution the world over. Libya was accused of harboring terrorists who set off explosions at airports in Vienna and Rome and of sending agents to bomb a Berlin disco crowded with U.S. military personnel, triggering American airstrikes in 1986 against Tripoli and Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city. But the raids, which seemed aimed at getting the man President Reagan labeled the "mad dog of the Middle East," instead killed 37 people, mostly civilians and including Qadhafi's adopted daughter. The United States intensified sanctions that forced the remaining American companies to withdraw.
Worse would follow. Libyan agents orchestrated two of the deadliest acts of modern terrorism before Sept. 11, 2001: the bombings of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people in December 1988, and a French UTA airliner nine months later, in which 171 people perished. The United Nations punished Libya by imposing broad sanctions--which were lifted only last September once Libya acknowledged responsibility for the Pan Am 103 attack and agreed to pay compensation to the victims' families. Washington, though, stuck with its sanctions out of worry that Tripoli--by then apparently out of the terrorism business--was still seeking a nuclear and chemical arsenal.
Just days before the United States and allies invaded Iraq in March 2003, Tripoli quietly moved to break its stalemate with the West. Libyan intelligence officials approached their British counterparts about ridding Libya of unconventional weapons if it would lead to diplomatic relations, trade, and investment with the United States. The Bush administration joined the secret talks, culminating in Libya's surprise announcement last December 19 that it would abandon its drive for weapons of mass destruction.
The Libyans have fulfilled their disarmament pledge with "amazing" speed, as a senior State Department official puts it. Atomic bomb designs, tons of centrifuge parts, tanks of uranium hexafluoride gas, and sundry other nuclear gear are now under lock and key in U.S. government warehouses in Tennessee. Some 3,300 munitions designed to hold chemical agents have been crushed and 26 tons of mustard gas secured for future disposal. A chemical factory at Rabta, south of Tripoli, will be converted solely to pharmaceutical production. "The Libyans could not have been more cooperative," exults one official. "It is absolutely unprecedented."
The Libyans have handed over information on the Pakistani-based nuclear supply network they relied on. They have disclosed previously secret weapons facilities. At one chemical site, a senior U.S. official tells U.S. News , a U.S.-British team was blocked by "crossed rifles." The team waited for a few hours, then word came from on-high: "Let them in." Whenever obstacles emerged, the Libyans took action: They opened one site by swinging a sledgehammer at a lock; at another, a truck dragged off a chain barring entry. Qadhafi's reversal on weapons prompted some "opposition and rancor" within Libya's military, says the U.S. official, but in every case arms materiel was hauled away or secured. The administration rushed out the most sensitive items first, worried Qadhafi might change his mind. The first available airplane--a nearly empty 747--was used to fly out a foot-wide box holding the engineering plans for a nuclear weapon.
advertisement
