| |
Lessons from Gaddafi
By Ronald
Bruce St John
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
In April 1986, American pilots bombed multiple
targets in Libya. One of the targets, the residence of
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, was destroyed and his
two-year-old adopted daughter was killed. The
"collateral damage" included the French embassy, a
chicken farm on the outskirts of Tripoli, and other
civilian sites. Unconfirmed reports put noncombatant
casualties at up to 100 people.
The attack was
in response to alleged Libyan involvement in a string of
terrorist incidents, including the bombing two weeks
before of a West Berlin discotheque in which two
Americans died. Following the air strikes, the Ronald
Reagan administration, completely misreading their
impact, argued that Gaddafi had changed his ways and
ended Libyan support for terrorism. The opposite was the
case. The Gaddafi regime responded almost immediately
with a string of terrorist reprisals lasting almost four
years.
The evidence suggests the immediate
Libyan response included the murder of a kidnapped
American and two Britons in Beirut, an attack on a US
embassy employee in Sudan, and a Libyan missile fired at
a US installation in Italy. Pan Am Flight 103 was later
destroyed in December 1988 over Scotland and UTA Flight
772 blew up over Niger in September 1989. Libyan
officials were eventually convicted of involvement in
both the Pan Am and UTA terrorist attacks.
Inside Libya, the air strikes rallied radical
elements behind Gaddafi and demoralized any opposition
in the Libyan armed forces. Outside, the American
crusade embarrassed exiled Libyan opposition groups,
undermining their credibility and left many to argue
that the military option was for Libyans and Libyans
alone. Internationally, the attack accentuated the very
real differences separating Washington and its European
allies on how to deal with terrorism in general and
Gaddafi in particular.
It was only in the 1990s
that Gaddafi began to change his ways. A combination of
bilateral US sanctions, quiet diplomacy and a
multilateral UN sanctions regime played a major role in
the shift in Libyan foreign policy.
Seemingly
terrorism-free for more than a decade, Gaddafi today can
best be described as a "rogue" trying to come in from
the cold. He immediately denounced the September 11,
2001 attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
Actively supporting the war on terrorism, Libyan
officials rushed to share with their American and
British counterparts intelligence on al-Qaeda and
related Islamic militant groups. Libya also paid
compensation to the families of the victims of the UTA
bombing and has agreed, in principle, to compensate the
families of the victims of the Pan Am tragedy.
The Bush administration should apply the lessons
learned from Libya to its treatment of Saddam Hussein.
Violence in the Middle East, as most recently
demonstrated in the Israeli-Palestinian case, most often
leads to retaliation, perpetuating an ongoing cycle of
violence. It can also have unexpected, undesirable
consequences.
With Gaddafi, the international
community achieved desired policy change only when it
moved from the use of force to the use of a basket of
commercial, diplomatic and legal remedies. In future,
the US would be well served to adopt such quiet
diplomacy.
Ronald Bruce St John is a
contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus. His latest book
is Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of
Strife.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in
Focus)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
