Counterterrorism Blog

Today it was announced that the Bush administration will be removing Libya from the list of state sponsors of terror and restoring diplomatic ties with it. One of the most prescient articles written about possible U.S. rapprochement with Libya is Ray Takeyh's "The Rogue Who Came in from the Cold," published in the May/June 2001 Foreign Affairs. In it, Takeyh notes three potential barriers to re-establishment of relations: Libya's support for terrorism, its development of WMD's, and its opposition to the Arab-Israeli peace process. Progress has been made on at least two of these issues since then.

On terrorism, Libya had severed ties to its terrorist clients by 2001. There was concern that Libya had neither accepted responsibility nor made restitution for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103; but it did that when it paid the families of victims $2.7 billion. On WMD's, after the invasion of Iraq Qadaffi acknowledged the country's nuclear weapons program and agreed to allow international inspectors to verify that he was ending his WMD programs. And on the peace process, despite Qadaffi's often shrill rhetoric, Takeyh noted back in 2001 that "on a practical level Libya has yielded to American demands by terminating its support for rejectionist Palestinian groups and accepting the Palestinian Authority's right to negotiate with Israel."

Another interesting aspect of Takeyh's article is its discussion of the impact that the sanctions regime had on changing Libya's orientation:

Another reason for Qaddafi's shift was the much-derided U.N. sanctions regime imposed on Libya after the Lockerbie bombing. The colonel had long believed that Libya's oil wealth and commercial appeal would undermine any cohesive opposition to his revolutionary excesses. But the Lockerbie sanctions, enacted by the United Nations in 1992, shattered that conviction. The United States managed to convince even states with close economic ties to Libya, such as Italy and Germany, to support the sanctions as a way to force Qaddafi to hand over the bombing suspects. . . .

Prior attempts to coerce Libya had proven ineffective: U.S. air strikes in 1986 only enhanced Qaddafi's domestic power and led to his lionization in the developing world. But the U.N. sanctions -- particularly the prohibition on the sale of oil equipment and technology and a ban on financial transfers -- hit Qaddafi where it hurt the most, undermining his government's ability to extract and export its main source of revenue. Libya estimates that the sanctions have deprived its economy of $ 33 billion, whereas the World Bank puts the damage at the lower but still daunting sum of $ 18 billion. Whatever their actual cost, the basic efficacy of the sanctions demonstrated Libya's special vulnerability to such multilateral coercion. Libya's economic vitality and its government's popularity depend on access to international petroleum markets. Thus the same resource that gave Qaddafi the power to upset the international order also let the world community undermine him.