"Nice Kadaffi! Down boy, just lick my hand."
Analysis
Two Decades of Sanctions, Isolation Wore Down Gaddafi
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, December 20, 2003; Page A01
Libya's stunning decision yesterday to surrender its weapons of mass destruction followed two decades of international isolation and some of the world's most punishing economic sanctions. In the end, Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gaddafi was under so much pressure that he was forced to seek an end to the economic and political isolation threatening his government -- and his own survival, according to U.S. and British officials and outside experts.
The turning point in Gaddafi's undoing may have been the U.S. intelligence investigation that eventually tracked a tiny piece of the bomb that blew up Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, back to two Libyan intelligence agents, U.S. and British officials say. The evidence mobilized the world and produced an international effort that may now peacefully disarm Libya.
"What forced Gaddafi to act was a combination of things -- U.N. sanctions after the Lockerbie bombing, his international isolation after the Soviet Union's collapse . . . and internal economic problems that led to domestic unrest by Islamists and forces within the military," said Ray Takeyh, a Libya expert at the National Defense University.
Whether by coincidence or fear that Libya might be targeted, Gaddafi's envoys approached Britain on the eve of the Iraq war to discuss a deal, U.S. officials said.
"The invasion of Iraq sent a strong message to governments around the world that if the United States feels threatened by weapons of mass destruction, we are prepared to act against regimes not prepared to change their behavior," said a senior State Department official who requested anonymity.
In a strange reversal of status, Libya is now being touted by the United States and Britain as the new example of how to succeed in ridding a nation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles. It provides the model, they said, for how to move forward with Iran, North Korea, Syria and potentially others.
"Leaders who abandon the pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them will find an open path to better relations with the United States and other free nations," President Bush said in his surprise announcement. "When leaders make the wise and responsible choice, when they renounce terror and weapons of mass destruction, as Colonel Gaddafi has now done, they serve the interest of their own people, and they add to the security of all nations."
Reflecting the dramatic shift, Gaddafi, in a statement carried by the official Jana news agency, said Libya's "wise decision" showed his country "plays an international role in building a world free of weapons of mass destruction and all sorts of terrorism." Another senior official in Libya went as far as to demand that all countries in the Middle East and Africa eliminate equipment, products and programs involved in producing weapons of mass destruction.
Although the United States has exerted the most pressure and imposed the most punitive actions against Libya, Britain took the lead in the initial negotiations. The two nations divided the roles of good cop and bad cop, U.S. and British officials said. All the negotiations were in London and involved a Libyan diplomat in Europe and Libyan intelligence agents.
Despite Libya's long history of prevarication and procrastination, Tripoli has provided so much access to facilities and so much specific data on its programs that Bush and Blair agreed they had confidence that Gaddafi was sincere.
"The Libyans were quite open. They provided access to facilities. They provided substantial documentation about their programs. And we were able to take samples and photographs and other evidence," said a senior administration official in a White House briefing after Bush's announcement.
A British official added: "Libya's admission of its activities is of clear political significance and encourages confidence."
For all the Bush administration's focus on deadly arms, however, the United States may have missed an opportunity to act earlier because of its preoccupation with Afghanistan and then Iraq, said U.S. officials familiar with earlier overtures.
"Within months after September 11th, we had the Libyans, the Syrians and the Iranians all coming to us saying, 'What can we do [to better relations]?' We didn't really engage any of them, because we decided to do Iraq. We really squandered two years of capital that will make it harder to apply this model to the hard cases like Iran and Syria," said Flynt Leverett, a former Bush administration National Security Council staff member now at the Brookings Institution.
The Clinton administration tried a similar strategy -- offering Libya's needy government a diplomatic carrot if it agreed to accept responsibility for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, end its support of terrorism and surrender weapons of mass destruction. Gaddafi did turn over the two intelligence agents, after lengthy negotiations, for a trial under Scottish law at The Hague, where one Libyan was convicted and one acquitted in 2001.
The United States first imposed sanctions on Libya in 1986 in response to terrorist attacks in Rome and Vienna. "Gaddafi deserves to be treated as a pariah in the world community," President Ronald Reagan said at the time. After evidence proved Libya's link to the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, the United Nations also imposed broad sanctions in 1992, which were lifted after Tripoli accepted responsibility for the midair bombing and began to pay compensation to victims' families. Washington, however, has yet to lift sanctions.
In the late 1990s, Gaddafi stopped support of at least some terrorist groups and, in 1999, deported the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, who had a residence in Libya since 1987, U.S. officials said. Abu Nidal died in Baghdad a few months before the Iraq war.
Gaddafi, once one of the region's most fervent hard-liners, has simultaneously begun to distance himself from the ideologies that originally defined his unusual government, outlined in his famous "The Green Book."
"It's not a dramatic turnaround. It's part of a trend that has been underway for 10 years -- of reforms and trying to reintegrate with Europe, mainly for business reasons," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Gaddafi has turned away from radical Arab nationalism of the 1970s and 1980s toward programs geared toward economic development that require Western investment and markets, which means coming into line with international norms," he added.
Ironically, Libya may not have had large quantities of weapons of mass destruction by the time the deal was struck with the United States and Britain.
"Libya's program did not have a sophisticated enough infrastructure for a very viable program, and they haven't had it for years," Takeyh said.
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