Libya

The Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and Qaddafi Regime

After World War II and 19 years of monarchy, Muammar Qaddafi took control of Libya in a bloodless coup d’état in 1969. Colonel Qaddafi, a military officer at the time of the coup, admired and modeled himself after the Egyptian Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Qaddafi’s rhetoric originally championed Arab nationalism and the Third Universal Theory, which sought to defy the limitations of capitalism and communism. Later Qaddafi’s Green Book described a system of direct democracy and popular committees that he used to shape the country, renamed the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, in 1977. By rhetorically placing himself outside the governing committees, Qaddafi railed against the government’s failures and argued for a degree of statelessness that contradicted the bureaucratic takeover of nearly every element of Libyan society.

Throughout the 1980s, Qaddafi estranged himself from the West through a foreign policy that supported contentious leaders and militant organizations around the world. These tyrants included Ugandan President Idi Amin, Liberian President Charles Taylor, Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, and Ethiopian dictator Megnistu Haile Mariam. He also spent lavishly in support of militant organizations around the world, including the Palestine Liberation Organization, Basque ETA, the Irish Liberation Army, Revolutionary United Front, Central and South American paramilitaries, and Muslim militants in South Asia. Some of these relationships also led to Libyan military operations in Egypt, Uganda, and Chad, where the Libyan military faced embarrassing and costly defeats time and again.

The defeat of Libya’s Revolutionary Armed Forces in Chad exemplified Qaddafi’s careful efforts to prevent professional identity and politicization of the Libyan armed forces. By 1985, Libya’s military had grown to 85,000 men from a paltry 7,000 in 1969. Flush with cash from high oil prices in the 1970s and early 1980s, Qaddafi spent nearly $3 billion annually on arms primarily supplied by the Soviet Union. The regime used weapons acquisitions to keep the military elite loyal and rotated leadership to prevent any potential uprising. Despite high spending, the armed forces intentionally remained disorganized and ill disciplined. The regime never relied on the military for protection, so it primarily served as an outlet for employment with advancement potential greater than other government bureaucracies and government-controlled businesses. As sanctions accumulated and the Soviet Union fell, Libya’s arms purchases shrank to record lows near $10 million annually, with no purchases in 1993 or 1995.

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