Last post, I went out on a limb and said I thought Qaddafi would be gone by “August, plus or minus a month.” We’ll know soon enough if I’m right! Meanwhile: what then?
A couple of thoughts on post-Qaddafi Libya (PQL).
One, the dismount is going to be tricky. Much depends on how Qaddafi leaves the building. If he flees like Ben Ali, that’s one thing. If he’s taken out by a coup, that’s another. If it ends with rebel columns rolling into Tripoli ... that’s actually pretty unlikely. So, flee or coup.
Say it’s a coup. Then what? Qaddafi’s inner circle are still around. Say they can be sidelined. (How? Could get messy.) You’ve still got a functioning state government in Tripoli. And that’s great — nobody wants a Somalia on Europe’s doorstep. But whoever ends up running it, that state government is not going to be eager to hand over power to a bunch of scruffy rebels in Benghazi. (Never mind a bunch of Berbers. Ugh, Berbers.) On the other hand, the National Transition Council (NTC) — the guys in Benghazi — are reasonably going to ask why they should acknowledge the authority of a bunch of guys in Tripoli who, until last Tuesday, were loyal apparatchiks of the Supreme Leader. So, watch for some sort of National Reconciliation Council, possibly brokered by friendly foreign powers.
Two, legitimacy. PQL is likely to be a troubled place in various ways. Qaddafi did a pretty good job of crushing civil society. The country is divided by regions and tribes. Nobody has any meaningful experience with civil liberties or democratic institutions. Everyone’s going to be armed. A significant amount of nation-building type assistance is going to be required, and frankly it’s none too soon to start.
Meanwhile, who’ll have legitimacy? The NTC can advance a plausible claim if they’ve reached a clear point of military dominance — control over most of the country’s territory and population, Loyalists clearly falling backwards. They’re nowhere near that point today. Otherwise, legitimacy will have to come from, sigh, democratic elections. I sigh because those are likely to be... problematic. Libya’s a country that has never had anything remotely approaching a fair and clean election. And being in political opposition, in Libya, has not historically been a great career choice. So everyone is likely to enter this thinking winner-take-all, so our side must not be allowed to lose! Things could work out, but...
Three, God only knows what PQL’s foreign relations are going to look like. People are saying “pro-Western,” but what does that even mean? Late-period Qaddafi — since 2004 or so — may have deployed a lot of nasty rhetoric, but in actual fact Libya has been a mildly pro-Western neutral country for the last few years. Qaddafi had closed down his nuclear program and given up his obnoxious habit of interfering in neighboring countries. He paid off the Lockerbie fine (which it’s still not very clear he was actually responsible for), normalized economic relations with everyone, allowed foreign investment in his oil industry, and had pretty much given up on anything but token support for the Palestinians. By 2010 he had signed tax and extradition treaties with most of the major members of the E.U. Yeah, Qaddafi could still deliver multi-hour spittle-flecked speeches at the U.N. about imperialist aggression, but Libya was about as “anti-Western” as Iceland.
Anyway, PQL is going to be everyone’s friend at first. That won’t last. It’s a rough neighborhood.
Four, the Berbers. They’re the ones doing most of the fighting in the Western Mountains, down below Tripoli. Qaddafi has been dumping on them for forty years nonstop, so pretty much every Libyan under 60 has been indoctrinated with anti-Berber prejudice. I don’t think that’s going to magically disappear after Qaddafi leaves the building.
I do wonder how much aid is being offered to the Berbers, and of what sort. If we arm the Berbers, it puts a lot more pressure on Qaddafi, which is great. But then the new government will have to deal with the fact that the Berbers have heavy machine guns and artillery stashed away in caves or wherever. (Because they’re not going to just hand them over once the shooting stops.) If the new government is wise enough to clasp the Berbers to their bosom, offer them some sort of limited autonomy, and buy off a majority of their elites with oil revenue, that might not be a problem. But if they reflexively fall into the groove of viewing the Berbers as dimwitted, treacherous primitives, there could be some trouble.
As a guy who’s broadly sympathetic to oppressed ethnic minorities, I’m inclined to view arming the Berbers as a good thing. Today, they’ll use them to fight; tomorrow, why should they have to rely upon the kindness of a post-Qaddafi government? A cold-hearted realist, however, might suggest that having a heavily armed minority that (1) has serious historical grievances, that is also (2) causing problems for a (presumably) friendly and more or less pro-Western government in a none-too-stable post-conflict country, while also (3) sitting adjacent to a major oil exporting region and astride a major pipeline — might be, from that cold-hearted realist’s view, suboptimal. I have no idea which side the Obama administration is coming down on; I merely note that it’s not a simple question.
Thoughts?
Most Americans are concerned only with whether PQL will be under fundamentalist control.
Posted by: Peter | June 11, 2011 at 09:28 PM