Libya : isolation or integration?

Abstract

It is exceptionally difficult to pinpoint what it is about Gaddafi that so infuriates the world outside Libya. He has employed terrorist tactics or supported terrorist organisations but no more than many other leaders or governments in the region. Iran, Iraq and Syria have each been responsible for at least as many terrorist activities as Libya. Perhaps Gaddafi's fault lies in his naïve exposure of hypocrisy for in relation to both Arab unity and Arab opposition to the state of Israel he has demanded action where a majority of the Arab world would prefer to take no action. Denunciation alone has never been enough for Gaddafi and where other leaders employ the rhetoric of denunciation in place of positive action, Gaddafi has used it as a prelude to action. Possibly, his greatest crime has been successfully to defy the West. The major Western powers and most particularly the United States and Britain, have revealed a marked reluctance to forgive small powers which have defied them and, instead, have demonstrated an unpleasant bullying aspect to their international characters which emerged clearly in their respective vendettas against Castro and Nasser. Both powers have also been unrelenting in their determination to reach Gaddafi a lesson or put him in place. Gaddafi's capacity to annoy depends upon his oil wealth. Here again the West dislike him for at the beginning of the 1970s it was Gaddafi who insisted upon nationalising the international oil companies, setting an example to the whole region which resulted in the break of monopolistic power of the Western oil giants. Libya's success in taking on the oil companies was all the more important because once the Western bases had been removed, all the West ever wanted from Libya was oil on the one hand and the lucrative development contracts or arm deals on the other. These they obtained but what they did not get was the client relationship they had come to expect from Third World countries. Gaddafi always behaved as though he had a mind and policy of his own and failed to be amused by the big powers. Instead he developed the habit of lecturing them about the policies which they pursued and never behaved in any sense like a client state. On the international stage, Gaddafi began as the classical revolutionary but then, instead of mellowing, he continued to act in the same way. In this sense, he was exceptionally difficult to deal with in the context of the Cold War and this was particularly the case as far as the United States was concerned.