Libya Regime Change: Week One

Ports of Call

If previous occupations taught NATO one thing, it is that formerly grateful populations sour very quickly when foreign troops start patrolling their cities. But can the West find the kind of dependable local allies that will allow it to claim third time lucky in its trilogy of Middle Eastern interventions?

People no longer under the rule of a modernizing ruler. Has the West miscalculated in supporting Libya’s religious rebels?

People no longer under a the rule of a modernizing ruler. Has the West miscalculated in supporting Libya’s religious rebels?

In 2001 they were greeted as liberators by ordinary Afghans (though not once they started accidentally bombing wedding parties and running over civilians with their armored cars). In 2003 they ingested their own propaganda and thought the Iraqis would welcome a Western occupation. This time, the West has absorbed the scale of the culture gap between itself and ordinary Muslims of the Persian, Pashtu or Arabic-speaking variety. But does that mean that it will change its intentions alongside its modus operandi?

Reality is in the eye of the beholder. Just as some called the overthrow of Libya’s leader a liberation, others view it as an occupation. But one thing is for sure: the Libyan leader of four decades has been removed and a yawning power gap exists in his absence.

Libya is not Iraq, where a strongman presided over a system of state institutions that could have functioned after him (never mind the Americans immediately dismantling all security forces and allowing the kind of looting that rendered a smoother transition impossible). It possessed institutions, a civil service, more thoroughly repressed tribes and a tradition of urban settlement going back four thousand years.
When he came to power, Qadhafi scrapped both the stayover institutions from the period of Italian colonialism and the indigenously-developed system of Sanussi Sufi lodges that provided social services
Tribal Libya has none of these. When he came to power, Qadhafi scrapped both the stayover institutions from the period of Italian colonialism and the indigenously-developed system of Sanussi Sufi lodges that provided social services. He brought into being a system of government by revolutionary committee that reordered the existing web of client relations. L’etat c’est moi, Louis XIV once said, though it might as well have been Qadhafi.

Enter the West, eager to shake its dice one more time in the nation-building boardgame. Though having learned little from its Afghan and Iraqi debacles, and currently falling on the wrong side of the global economy’s jarring reorganization, it seems anxious to engage in the kind of interventions for which it no longer has the capital.

The EU and the US believe Islamist terrorism to be their primary threats. In that case, they’ll be little helped by conspiring in the removal of Qadhafi – as staunch an enemy of the Islamists as similarly deposed Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali in North Africa. In Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s now creaking throne was built upon his father’s extermination of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. Little surprise then that across the Middle East a tide of political Islam is flowing in to fill the gaps left in their wake.

What we are witnessing is no less than the regional architecture’s complete reorganization. An old generation of pro-Western Arab secularists is swept aside by a younger generation of religious revolutionaries brought up on a decade of satellite television coverage of Western missteps in Muslim lands – a true Islamic Awakening as the Islamic Republic of Iran quickly labeled the uprising.

Now NATO planners are hoping that a number of missteps committed in previous interventions can be ploughed into Libya’s unfertile desert sands. Their first and riskiest bet is to guarantee security not through Western soldiers but by the same rebel forces whose path to Tripoli was opened up by NATO bombers and special forces. Should the rebels prove too divided or incompetent for this task, a UN peacekeeping mission or an Arab police force might be introduced.

Libyan soldiers and policemen received text messages assuring them that their salaries and employment were guaranteed. This may work short-term in dissuading them from joining an insurgency but may not survive the elevation into directorial positions of the same rebels they were fighting until recently whom they condescendingly view as eastern Libyan country bumpkins.

The rebels are also being run through an indecently hasty pageantry of state intended to consolidate them in the global consciousness as the legitimate government of Libya. Some have been rushed to a Tripoli still echoing with gunfire while others hobnob with French, Italian and Turkish leaders in global capitals against the backdrop of their black-red-and-green royalist tricolor.

But even if salaries are paid on time, services reestablished and international legitimacy assured, there is no guarantee that the rebels will be legitimized in the eyes of ordinary Libyans who have occupied front-row seats in the extraordinary theatre mounted by NATO over the past six months. Many will condemn the haste with which group of former and current imperialist powers backed a coalition of neo-liberals, regime turncoats, anti-Western Islamists and political unknowns. Or perhaps those same fighters who struggled on shifting sandy frontlines against Qadhafi’s troops will turn against a political leadership they identify as too pliant to their Western paymasters.

The lyrical Pepe Escobar made this disturbing prediction of a not-too-distant Libya:

“A weak TNC puppet government; shock doctrine neo-liberal troops alienating many who were used to free education, free health services and free housing; a guerilla force against foreign occupation; Salafi-jihadis from other Arab latitudes joining the fray; desert towns developing as guerilla bases; pipelines from the southeastern desert being bombed; a replica of Baghdad from 2004 to 2007; a surge; a non-stop civil-tribal war scenario; and Afghanistan 2.0 with a twin guerilla front – the Qadhafi group against the rebels/NATO, and the Salafis against NATO, because the West will never allow Libya to become an Islamic state.”

Or maybe the naysayers will be proven wrong and the US will finally achieve what it sought to create in Iraq and Afghanistan: a Dubai-on-the-Med featuring all-Western service providers.

Iason Athanasiadis

Writer, photographer and documentary film producer based between Istanbul and Kabul. He studied Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University, Persian and Contemporary Iranian Studies at Tehran's School of International Studies, and he was a 2008 Nieman fellow at Harvard University. He has worked for BBC World, Al-Jazeera and Arte, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, the Financial Times and Global Post. His photography has appeared in Der Spiegel, Marie Claire, The Guardian, and the New Statesman.