Libya Since Qaddafi: Chaos and the Search for Peace

Regime change is sometimes simple but managing its consequences is always messy. As cerebral a president as Barrack Obama was, he ruefully acknowledged as much when he told Fox News correspondent Chris Wallace in 2016 that “failing to plan for the day after” in Libya was probably the worst mistake of his presidency.[i] Even though “President Trump is not known as a student of history,”[ii] he was reportedly[iii] wary about bombing Iran “due in part to concerns about creating ‘another Libya’ if Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is toppled.” Nonetheless, Trump still chose to proceed with military attacks that could do exactly that, and his characteristically ambiguous remarks suggest that regime change in Iran is his real objective.

U.S. experiences over nearly 25 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya underscore that regime change does not result in political stability. Libya Since Qaddafi: Chaos and the Search for Peace by Stephanie T. Williams documents this reality and the tremendous difficulties in restoring social order to fractured nations. It is a comprehensive account of UN mediation efforts to broker a political framework to end the violence and chaos that enveloped Libya following Qaddafi’s overthrow and death in 2011. As Ghassan Salamé (who was the head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya [UNSMIL] from 2017 to 2020) writes in his foreword to the book, the UN’s challenge was “to recompose the complex puzzle of a fragmented nation.” No one—certainly no Westerner—is better placed to recount and analyze these efforts than Williams, an experienced former Foreign Service Officer who served as Salamé’s deputy and then headed UNSMIL when he resigned due to health issues. This author had the pleasure of being colleagues with Williams at the State Department.

As Williams explains, Libyans hold wildly disparate views of the UN. On the one hand, it is revered for its role in establishing the country in 1949-1951. But at the same time, Libyans (egged on by Qaddafi regime propaganda) despised the UN sanctions imposed following the Qaddafi regime’s bombings of flights Pan Am 103 and UTA 772. Resentment over UN authorization for the 2011 NATO intervention and the UN’s subsequent failure to affect a transition to political stability added to Libyan disdain for the international organization. In short, UNSMIL had to deal with both unrealistic expectations of what it could accomplish and pervasive antagonism.

Like Caesar’s Gaul and (some would argue) Libya itself, Libya Since Qaddafi is divided into three parts. Williams aptly quotes William Faulkner (“the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”) to describe the Libya she encountered when she returned in 2018 and thus entitled the first chapter “Qaddafi’s Ghost.” It provides a succinct but masterful foundation for the rest of the book.

Williams devotes the core of the book to the UN’s political mediation and state-building endeavors in Libya. Libyans seeking a truly impartial account of those efforts and anyone who wants to understand diplomatic mediation and/or how the UN operates in the field will find these chapters to be of particular interest. A recurring theme, unfortunately, is the unhelpful role external actors played, including the United States and Russia. The most obvious example, of course, is Russian support for the mercenary Wagner Group. Another prime example was Trump’s April 15, 2019 telephone call to Libyan Arab Armed Forces Commander Khalifa Haftar (whom a U.S. court found liable for war crimes in 2022) wherein he praised his “significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources” according to the delayed White House read-out.[iv] The call, which came in the midst of Haftar’s military assault on Tripoli, completely upended longstanding U.S. policy and confounded Libyan citizens and U.S. diplomats alike. Equally feckless was the joint U.S.-Russian opposition[v] to a British UN resolution criticizing Haftar’s attack on the Libyan capital and calling for the fighting to end.

The absence of international consensus on how to proceed led Salamé and Williams to revamp their approach. In Williams’s words, “We could not begin to tackle the divisions inside Libya until, and if, there was some semblance of cohesion on the international front. We had to flip our mediation strategy from an ‘inside-out’ process in which we would take the outcome of the Libyan-Libyan talks to the international community to an ‘outside-in’ process, focusing first on mending the international divisions.” The result was the Berlin process, which got off to a promising start but was ultimately derailed by continued UN Security Council squabbling and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Williams moves from a chronological to a thematic approach in the third part of Libya Since Qaddafi. She highlights the need for security sector reform, with a special focus on the need for the demobilization of the armed militia groups that have proliferated since Qaddafi’s overthrow in 2011. As Williams points out, these groups “fronted for business interests that wanted to muscle in on deals or place their favorites in coveted government jobs.” In other words, unlawful and unaccountable armed groups exacerbate the country’s considerable economic challenges. Williams also examines what she rightly calls the “bleak” human rights landscape in Libya. Rather than wringing her hands, however, she offers several concrete and well-informed measures that the international community should take to address the appalling human rights situation in Libya. Her recommendations range from maintaining international sanctions on bad actors to increasing UN training programs that promote the rule of law to supporting Libyan civil society and human rights organizations. The recommendations are specific, sensible, and low-cost, but whether the disjointed and distracted international community will take advantage of her expertise and implement them is, unfortunately, an open question.

Wonderful writing abounds, offering welcome relief from assessments that are on the mark and thus frequently grim.

Libya and Iran are only superficially similar countries. They share a common religion and an abundance of oil, but little else. But should regime change occur in Iran—whatever form it takes—Iran’s citizens, its neighbors, and the broader international community will hope that the social and political situation stabilizes in relatively short order. A careful reading of Libya Since Qaddafi would help all three constituencies address some of the obstacles that Iran would undoubtedly encounter under such a scenario.