The Foreign Service Journal, January 2011

J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 27 and 1943, and very few Libyans benefited frommodern agri- culture, education or health care. After U.S. forces landed in French North Africa in 1942, our diplomats gained a place at the table for postwar plan- ning. In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt began a new policy toward Libya when he opposed plans for further Eu- ropean agricultural settlement. At the 1945 Potsdam Con- ference, President Harry Truman declined to take a trusteeship for Libya, and in 1949 we supported a United Na- tions resolution for Libyan independence. The Importance of Oil The new U.S. policy was cradled in the rhetoric of moral- ity dear to Americans: self-determination and independence of colonial peoples. It also reflected the power politics of the Cold War. With its vast spaces and year-round flying weather, Libya was the perfect place for an air base. Moreover, Libyans were among the poorest people in the world, with an annual per capita income of less than $50. Their postwar economy was based on subsistence agriculture, the export of esparto grass for fine paper and scrap metal from the battlefields. So rental paid by the U.S. and British governments for air bases looked like a good deal to a Libyan government with few options. Even before Libya achieved inde- pendence in 1951, Washington start- ed an aid program emphasizing sec- ondary education, English-language and vocational training. While foreign assistance was desperately needed during this period, by the 1960s it was dwarfed in economic importance by the investments and training programs of foreign oil com- panies, especially the American ones. Libya’s first oil ship- ment was in 1961, and its oil income expanded rapidly during the decade. By 1969, the U.S. and British air bases in Libya were of declining strategic importance, but Tripoli had become a pro- ducer of energy vital to the economies of our Western Euro- pean allies and profitable for American companies. Although Washington still enjoyed a cozy relationship with an aging monarch and his sclerotic political system, Libyan popular at- titudes were not isolated from the rest of the Arab world. The war of June 1967 had left Arabs everywhere with a feeling of humiliation and a conviction that Washington had aided Is- rael’s victory, achieved in large part by its devastating surprise attack on the Egyptian Air Force. This set the stage for the Libyan Revolution of Sept. 1, 1969. Eventually, U.S. policy adapted to these new realities. Henry Kissinger, who was President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, claims in his memoirs that he favored a covert action program to overthrow the new Libyan leaders and keep the airbase, but yielded to the State Department view of the primacy of the oil interests and declining value of our mil- itary base. Much later, during the Reagan administration, the U.S. supported and provided some military training to Libyan émigré opponents of the Qadhafi regime. They proved un- reliable. Ambassador Joseph Palmer left Tripoli in 1972, as U.S.- Libyan diplomatic relations were becoming more troubled. Not until 2009 did a U.S. ambassador return to Tripoli. Nonetheless, the volume of U.S.-Libyan trade grew until 1979, and large numbers of Libyan students received higher education in the United States. But after a Libyan mob sacked the U.S. embassy in 1979, we withdrew our remaining official per- sonnel from Tripoli and gave Libyan diplomats in Washington their walk- ing papers. Once Libya was placed on the terrorism list, the flow of busi- ness people and students between the two countries ground to a near halt. Between 1980 and 1992, several acts of terrorism dominated the U.S. image of Libya. U.S. policy toward Libya featured military pressure, diplomatic isolation and unilateral sanctions. By 1992, we were able to make our punitive policy more effec- tive with the passage of U.N. sanc- tions. Libyans began to feel the economic and political weight of being a pariah state. Movement Toward Reconciliation Starting in 1992, Libya took initiatives for secret talks to improve relations. After years of U.S. rebuffs, the Clinton administration joined Great Britain in secret talks with Tripoli in 1998. The George W. Bush administration continued the dialogue. The combination of this diplomatic framework with well-crafted and nearly universally applied U.N. sanctions led to the Libyan decision to change course. The Libyan government took steps to end support for ter- rorism and cooperate with the Scottish court established to prosecute the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Nearly all of the families of the victims of Libyan- linked terrorism eventually accepted its offer of compensa- tion. By December 2003, Washington, London and Tripoli were ready to formalize changes in Libyan foreign policy that were already evident. Libya’s full implementation of the agreement to rid itself of chemical and nuclear weapons pro- Even before Libya achieved independence in 1951, Washington started an aid program focused on secondary education, English-language and vocational training.