Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

After the 2003 agreement, President Bush said that any nation that gave up WMD would “find an open path to better relations” with the United States and that “Libya has begun the process of rejoining the community of nations.” By late 2004, the United States had revoked the travel ban to Libya, established limited diplomatic relations, and lifted many remaining trade restrictions. What Saif calls “this cocktail of problems and sanctions” had, it seemed, been largely addressed. Certainly the Bush administration was eager to see American companies compete for oil-exploration rights in Libya, and it has facilitated economic engagement. But issues such as the 2003 anti-Saudi plot and the affair of the Bulgarian nurses have stalled the entente, and Libya remains on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. Until the country is taken off the list, the United States must vote against IMF and World Bank loans to Tripoli, and substantial sanctions remain in place.

“It’s almost the same as during the embargo,” the head of the National Oil Company said. Libyan hard-liners point out that US officials have acknowledged that no act of terrorism has been linked to Libya in years, and they complain that while Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schröder, and Silvio Berlusconi have all visited Tripoli, the United States has sent no one above the undersecretary level. The United States has no official consulate in Libya; Libyans who want visas apply in Tunisia, and the United States does not grant them freely. Libyan reformers who thought that settling Lockerbie and renouncing WMD would allow the resumption of normal relations talk about “receding goalposts.”

David Mack, a former high-ranking US diplomat who has served in Libya, told me, “It’s been useful to us to be able to engage in intelligence exchanges with Libya; it’s quite clearly been useful to them.” He pointed out that the United States had agreed to list the dissident Libyan Islamic Fighting Group as a terrorist organization and got it banned from Britain, where some of its members had been based. “Having made all this progress,” Mack said, “if we now just let things drift, inevitably there will be relapses.” So while the Bush administration holds up Libya as a role model for disarmament—“If Libya can do it, Iran can do it, too,” John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, has said—some policy analysts think that the administration has done too little to promote that example. Ronald Bruce St John, a Libya scholar at Foreign Policy in Focus, observes that America’s priority has been to control WMD and get support for the war on terror; Libya’s priorities are the rationalization of commercial and diplomatic relations. American goals have been met; Libyan goals have not. In Tripoli, hard-liners seethe that Libya gave away the store, while the reformers feel undermined.

The reformers’ own diplomatic efforts have had limited success. Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat, of California, and Senator Richard Lugar, Republican, of Indiana, both have visited Libya, where they met with Saif, Shukri Ghanem, and Qaddafi himself, and have taken an optimistic view. “Qaddafi has clearly made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn,” Lantos said to me, “and we are turning around the aircraft carrier that is US policy.” But when Lantos sought a cosponsor for the United States–Libya Relations Act, which was meant to strengthen bilateral relations, nobody was interested. Mack said, “We need to show the world, particularly governments like Iran and North Korea, that there is an alternative paradigm for dealing with the United States, and much to be gained by having a normal relationship with us,” and suggested that American interests would be served by improved relations with an Arab leader who opposes fundamentalism and has substantial oil reserves.

“Deep down, the Libyans think the US will not be satisfied with anything short of regime change,” one of Saif’s advisers said. “And deep down, the Americans think that if they normalize relations, Qaddafi will blow something up and make them look like fools.”