WASHINGTON, 2 April 2004 — The world should have breathed a sigh of relief when Tony Blair became the first British prime minister to visit Libya since Winston Churchill was there in 1943 during World War II.
Setting aside decades of acrimony over Tripoli’s sponsorship of terrorism, Blair praised Libya’s progress in dismantling its chemical, nuclear and biological programs, and said the Libyan leader could be an important partner in the war on terror. “It is possible for countries in the Arab world to work with the United States and the United Kingdom to defeat a common enemy of extremist fanatical terrorism driven by Al-Qaeda,” Blair told reporters.
Meanwhile, in the highest-level meeting in decades, a US envoy gave Qaddafi a letter from President Bush commending Libya’s progress in eliminating weapons of mass destruction. Since then, Bush administration spokesmen have portrayed Libya’s decision as the direct result of the US invasion of Iraq.
But some analysts are questioning whether President Bush really deserves the credit for Libya’s U-turn. One of these is Martin S. Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and former US ambassador to Israel. President Bush implies that Qaddafi gave up his WMD programs because Saddam Hussein was defeated. But according to Indyk, Bush “completed a diplomatic game plan initiated by President Clinton.”
Indyk writes: “Embarrassed by the failure to find Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, President George W. Bush is trying to find another WMD-related justification for his pre-emptive war on Iraq.”
As Bush himself put it in his State of the Union address: “Nine months of intense negotiations succeeded with Libya, while 12 years of diplomacy with Iraq did not.”
Indyk differs. He points out Libya’s offer to dismantle its WMD programs was conveyed to the US in May 1999, and that it was the Clinton administration that opened secret talks with Libya in Geneva that year. At the first meeting, the US used the promise of official dialogue to persuade Libya to cooperate in the campaign against Osama Bin Laden and provide compensation for the Lockerbie families.
At that time, Libya’s economy was in a shambles.
Its economic policies, mismanagement of oil revenues, and UN and US sanctions prevented Libya from importing oilfield technology and thus made it impossible for Qaddafi to expand oil production. Libya had no choice but to try to get the US to the negotiating table.
From the start of the Clinton administration, Indyk contends, “Mr. Qaddafi had tried to open back channels, using various Arab interlocutors with little success. Disappointed, he turned to Britain, first settling a dispute over the shooting of a British policewoman in London and then offering to send the two Libyans accused in the Lockerbie PanAm 103 bombing for trial in a third country. For the US, accepting this offer had the advantage of bringing Libyan terrorists to justice. But it also generated pressure in the UN Security Council to lift sanctions.
The task of US diplomacy then was to maintain the sanctions until Mr. Qaddafi had fulfilled all other obligations under the UN resolutions: ending support for terrorism, admitting culpability and compensating victims’ families.”
Perhaps it is enough that Libya’s WMD program has been ended, and the world should not care who gets the credit. But it now seems clear that it did not take a war with Iraq to accomplish it.
— William Fisher has managed economic development projects in the Middle East and in many other areas for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration.
