Libya: A Foreign Policy Test Case

One of my fine colleagues is Benjamin Barber, who wrote very eloquently about the danger of citizens being turned into passive consumers rather than serving as active participants in the political process. He is the first to tell you that what he really wanted to be in life was not to be a political science professor but an actor. He puts his talents in this department to good use by giving lectures that could be readily be put onstage at any old place Off Broadway. Recently he dropped by to visit with none other than the Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, Barber found him a much more attractive figure than the Western media has long depicted as the “implacable despot” from Tripoli.

I could not agree more. I dedicated my book From Empire to Community to Gaddafi—and nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, because he gave up his plan to build weapons of mass destruction and stopped supporting terrorism. (He thus contributed to international security a hell of a lot more than many others who received that prize, such as Yasser Arafat, yet Arafat got the Prize.) Note that Gaddafi did not open his nuclear program to inspection, which is what the West usually seeks and which in my judgment is inherently an unreliable way to promote security. Gaddafi allowed the tools and assets involved to be crated away and sent out of the country in cargo plans and ships. He deserves three cheers. Now the time is ripe to urge him to also democratize. He is the poster child for the security first approach I advocate. Some details of this approach follow, excerpted from Security First.

"In 2003, the United Nations lifted the economic sanctions previously imposed on Libyafollowing its agreement to accept responsibility for the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing and to pay $2.7 billion in damages. Toward the end of the year, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi dramatically announced that his nation was voluntarily dismantling its nascent nuclear program and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs, as well as committing Libya to fight international terror. Indeed, Libya’s centrifuges and mustard gas tanks, as well as some SCUD missiles, were loaded onto a U.S.ship and removed. Sensitive designs of nuclear warheads were transported on a chartered 747 to the United States. Thirteen kilograms of highly enriched uranium were moved to Russia (America has no blending-down facilities for uranium), and chemical weapons shells were destroyed.Tripoli has been credited with helping the United States to shut down a global black market for nuclear weapons technology run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. In short, major contributions to international security were made on two most important fronts: nuclear disarmament and prevention of terrorism.

If Libya may be said to have earned an A in deproliferation, it earned at best a D in advancing human rights. It remains a crime to criticize the government or ‘‘the Leader,’’ and Law 71 forbids opposing the Revolution, the September 1969 uprising in which Qaddafi seized power. Although the infamous People’s Court and the People’s Prisons were abolished in 2005, this amounts largely to window dressing, as the People’s Prisons inmates were shipped to other prisons. Torture is outlawed, but several allegations of torture remain unresolved, including those concerning a 1996 uprising at the Abu Salim prison. In another troubling case, five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, charged with infecting 426 children with HIV, were tortured until they confessed, and were then sentenced to death. Freedom House, a U.S.-based group, continued to list Libya as one of the five worst nations in stemming the flow of free information.  For all these reasons, rather than rewarding Libya for its contributions to global security, human-rights groups demand that the international community continue to limit Libya's access to the world's markets and to put off normalizing relations.

How the international community responds to Libya’s nuclear disarmament and cessation of support for terrorism—without a shot being fired—is of considerable importance, given that most analysts strongly agree that the world would be much more secure if other nations would follow the same course, especially Iran and North Korea. By recognizing that Libya has met international security standards, other rogue nations will note that if they move in the same direction, efforts to bring down their authoritarian regimes will cease. They will be given full access to various international institutions, all sanctions will be lifted, and investment will be encouraged, although promotion of democratization by nonlethal (educational and cultural) means will continue. That is, if a threatening nation meets the security standards set by the

United States and its allies and largely supported by other parts of the international community, without necessarily meeting human-rights standards, it would reap substantial rewards. By contrast, if these rogue nations are told that they will be restored to good standing as members of the international community only if they also replace or drastically alter the form of their regimes, they will be much less likely to consider abandoning their programs of developing weapons of mass destruction and their support for terrorism. The first strategy is in line with the Security First approach; the second—with the Neo-Con notion that democratization drives security.”

The first strategy is now pursued in dealing with North Korea, in which the nations involved are no longer pushing for regime change, or for the right to inspect facilities that have the wherewithal to make nuclear weapons, but work to replace them with other sources of energy. The second strategy is still being adhered to in dealing with Iran, where the US is openly promoting an uprising, while asking merely for the right to inspect nuclear sites. That is, Iran is expected to show that the enriched uranium and plutonium it possesses and makes are not deflected to make bombs, rather than follow the Libyan mode - shutting down facilities that are in the gruesome business of producing weapons of mas destruction.