Qaddaf’s Libya in World Politics by Yehudit Ronen

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTE RENDUS 397 Yehudit Ronen, Qaddaf’s Libya in World Politics. Boulder, London, Lynne Rienner Publishers. 2008.VII, 243 pp. As if to underscore Moammar Gadafi’s absolute domination of Libyan domestic and foreign affairs over the past 40 years, recent books about the country usually manage to include him in their titles. Thus it is “Gadafi’s Libya” or “Libya’s Gadafi”; it is his Islam, his revolution, his Green Book, his ideology. Yehudit Ronen’s title is no exception to this practice, hers stressing yet again how Gadafi continues to control the foreign affairs of the country he has led since 1969. Setting out her stall on page one, the author claims that her work is “based largely on Libyan and other primary Arab sources” and “offers insights into Libya’s foreign relations throughout Qaddafi’s prolonged tenure”. Here is the by-now familiar story of Libya’s foreign ventures in the first 20 years of the Gadafi revolution, up to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 198990 . This account once again reminded this reviewer of the continuing validity of what Count Oxenstierna wrote as long ago as 1648: “With how little wisdom is the world governed!” A nation that has been blessed (or perhaps cursed?) with the unearned wealth from large but finite sources of oil, natural gas, and even fossil water, has simply squandered much of that wealth on foreign ventures for which the leadership has usually failed to give any coherent or convincing explanations. It is, for instance, doubtful whether Gadafi or his advisers ever had any clear understanding of the role, importance or interests of the loyalist majority in Northern Ireland when it was decided in the 1970s to help fund what was thought to have been an Irish “anti-colonial struggle” against the British occupier. Ronen quite rightly emphasises the importance of the collapse of the Soviet Union in ushering in the so-called “New World Order” and the predominance of the United States as the sole superpower. But perhaps she attaches too much importance to the ties between Tripoli and Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, and thus to the impact on Libya of the eventual loss of the “Soviet ally”. It was surely American success in ending the Cold War rather than Soviet failure that in the long run concentrated Gadafi’s mind on the need to put his own foreign relations in order. The USSR was never an “ally” of Libya in the strict sense of the word. The Soviets were indeed Tripoli’s main source of military training and suppliers of excessive arms stockpiles, paid for in the US Dollars Moscow needed to buy American grain; but in practice the Soviets largely (and wisely) avoided any close involvement in Gadafi’s foreign ventures. Ronen considers two episodes in Gadafi’s African policy to merit separate chapters of their own. These were the direct military intervention in Uganda in the 1970s and the much deeper and more prolonged adventures in Chad in the 1970s and 1980s. While the Chadian chapter gives a detailed account of the complex and confusing sequence of events in that unhappy country, there is 398 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTE RENDUS little explanation of why Libya found it necessary to became so heavily involved in a poverty-stricken, deeply divided and constantly-warring state with which it also happens to have a long, almost defenceless frontier. There is little explanation of the historical, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, commercial or other ties across the central Sahara that perhaps contribute to any understanding of Libya’s past and continuing concern for the course of events in this particular neighbour. The Aozou Strip issue was only one of the differences between two states on opposite sides of the central Sahara. The most valuable part of this book are the chapters covering the post-1990 period, dominated by the Lockerbie and French UTA airliner sabotages and the imposition of fairly draconian international sanctions. Then came Libya’s volte face, the turning to the west in general and to the US in particular; the renunciation of the WMD programme that may always have had more fantasy than substance; a half...