Modest Mission?
The U.S. Plan to Build a Libyan Army
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Post-Intervention Libya: A Militia State
Two apparently related and revealing incidents have turned public attention briefly back to Libya just after the second anniversary of the NATO intervention that helped anti-Qaddafi rebel forces overthrow his regime. The first incident involved the infringement of Libyan sovereignty by an American special forces operation that seized the alleged al Qaeda operative, Abu Anas al-Libi (also known as Nizah Abdul Hamed al-Ruqai), on October 5, supposedly with the knowledge and consent of the Libyan government. The second incident, evidently a response to the first seizure, was the kidnapping a few days later of the country’s prime minister, Ali Zeidan, while he lay asleep in his hotel lodgings in the center of Tripoli. He was easily captured by a squadron of 20 militia gunmen who arrived at the hotel around 2:00 am and proceeded without resistance from security guards to carry off the head of the Libyan state. Such a bold assault on the state’s essential character as the sole pu...
The Evolving Scorecard on Libya
Many episodes, or aspects of episodes, in American foreign policy quickly get pigeon-holed as successes or failures. The label gets stuck to the episode, as a frozen judgment from an earlier time, and then the episode gets repeatedly referred to in such terms. The Western intervention in Libya two years ago customarily gets labeled this way as a success. The basic facts underlying that judgment are that the intervention helped to topple a dictator who was widely loathed, and did so with minimal direct cost to a war-weary American public. In the ensuing two years, a difficult and unpleasant reality in Libya has displaced many of the hopes and assumptions that prevailed when Muammar Qadhafi was ousted and killed. That is, it has displaced them on the ground in Libya, but not necessarily in the American consciousness. Early dramatic chapters in a foreign policy story generally have more effect on the judgments prevailing in American minds than do less dramatic chapters that are s...