QADHAFI'S LIBYA: THE LIMITS OF OPTIMISM.

Anderson, Frank

On April 5, 1999, the Libyan government handed over for trial by a Scottish court in the Netherlands two Libyans accused of carrying out the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988. The U.S. and British governments expressed significant caution about the likelihood and pace of any improvements in relations with Libya following the turnover. On the day the suspects were delivered for trial, the U.S. Department of the Treasury issued a fact sheet reminding the American business community of the still-extant range of U.S. laws and regulations that impose criminal penalties on Americans for just about any business transactions involving Libya. Libyan officials also made public comments about their lack of interest in a speedy improvement of relations with the United States. Nevertheless, as this article is written, at the end of April 1999, Libya appears to be on the verge of breaking quickly out of the isolation imposed on the country over the past seven years.

The Italian foreign minister visited Libya the day after the turn-over to discuss substantial improvements in relations. A few days later, the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank announced its intent to double its 5-percent stake in Banca Di Roma. Arab, African and European airlines began establishing scheduled flights to and from Libya in the first few days after the turnover. Although the managing director of the Italian energy conglomerate ENI discounted the likely impact that suspension of U.N. sanctions would have on ENI's already extensive activities in Libya, other international oil executives, including those from American firms, expressed serious interest and optimism when the Libyan oil minister and the head of the Libyan National Oil Company spoke of Libya's interest in foreign oil companies' investment in Libya. The International Monetary Fund, on the basis of anticipated increased oil exports, announced its expectation that Libya would run a budgetary surplus beginning in the year 2000.

Diplomatically, the Libyans are being enthusiastically welcomed back into the fold by other Arabs. The Saudis, who played a major role in arranging the scheme under which the suspects were handed over for trial, certainly harbor suspicions of the Libyans, but they are determined to concentrate the world's (especially the Arab world's) limited appetite for sanctions regimes on the Iraqis. The new king of Jordan, within two weeks of the turn-over, included Libya in the Arab countries he is visiting personally at the outset of his reign. Palestinian Authority chief Yasser Arafat made an unexpected visit to Tripoli that coincided with King Abdullah's and got an uncharacteristic endorsement from Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi for deferral of a unilateral declaration of Palestinian independence.

As April ended, even the United States was beginning to send signals of willingness to explore improvements in relations with Libya that were markedly more positive than the American messages immediately after the turn-over. On April 27, Washington announced its intention to remove food and medicine sales from its sanctions regimes on Libya, Iran and Sudan. On the twenty-ninth, the U.S. Department of State's spokesman announced a plan for American and British officials to meet, at a yet-to-be-determined time, with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Anan to discuss plans for review and ultimate cancellation of U.S. and U.K. sanctions. Significantly, he announced that Libyan officials would be welcome to attend these talks.

There were, of course, less positive indicators, as well. Qadhafi's speech at the turn-over was marked by his traditional anti-American tone and characterization of himself and Libya as the victims rather than the perpetrators of terrorism. The director of the Russian missile company Defense Systems, on April 24, announced Russian plans to sell its most advanced surface-to-air missile system, the S-300, to Libya. He said that "now that the U.N. sanctions against Tripoli are gone, Libya will be first on our list." On April 27, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic called on Qadhafi to mediate the Kosovo conflict, reminding the world of the Libyan leader's tendency to form friendships with international pariahs.

On balance, however, there is an atmosphere of cautious but unexpected and growing optimism for improved relations with Libya. It is a good time to pose questions about the kinds of improvements that can reasonably be expected. Has there been a fundamental change in the situation that brought about the impasse between Libya and the United States? Or have the significant attractions of serious economic opportunity and weariness with maintaining sanctions, which are unpopular almost everywhere outside the United States and Britain, generated some unrealistically positive expectations?

The two major issues over which the United States and Libya are in dispute are easy to identify and have not changed significantly in the almost 30 years since Qadhafi seized power in 1969. From the U.S. side, the primary issue is the Libyan regime's conduct and support of terrorist operations, including the murder of hundreds of Americans over the years. The second most divisive issue is the two sides' opposing positions on the Arab-Israeli dispute and the existence of Israel. Libya's support of Soviet-bloc positions and activities during the Cold War was always a second order of difficulty for the United States and, in any case, would not be relevant in the future. There have been and would continue to be economic issues arising from the fact that Libya and the United States are on opposite sides of the table on issues like oil prices and the nationalization of American oil-company assets, but these would likely have been manageable, were it not for the two major points of conflict. Should there be an improvement in relations, human rights in Libya would be an early and probably enduring point of difficulty.

The question of whether there will be a significant and lasting improvement in relations with the United States will, in fact, be resolved in the mind of

Libyan leader Qadhafi. Geology and history have combined to give him enormous resources with which to pursue whatever political or economic courses he chooses and a body politic in which an overwhelming number of Libyans are disinclined to interfere with his choices and a minority who might be so inclined are unable to develop the power to do so. There are aspects of the nature of Libyan society, the Libyan state and Qadhafi's personality that make it virtually impossible for any person or political force in Libya to be able significantly to influence Qadhafi's decisions on major matters or to remove him from power, were they unable to accept his positions.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

There is a rich corpus of academic writing on the nature of the relationships between rulers of "distributive states" and their people. States, like many oil producers in the Arab world, that are able to obtain revenues from sources other than taxes, are not required to forge political compacts with the people they govern [see proceedings of the oil-price symposium in this issue].

Libya, at least since the end of World War II and arguably for centuries before, has been governed by state systems that obtained revenues from foreign sources rather than taxes on the Libyan people. The state used those revenues to distribute benefits to the people and to develop and exercise me means to defend the state. In the early years of independence, the Kingdom of Libya received and distributed funds received as aid or rent for military bases, rather than having to extract revenues from Libya's then-impoverished people. In the kingdom's last years and throughout Libya's post-revolutionary history, oil revenues that accrued to the state, not private interests, provided the state's and most of the nation's wealth. So there is no recent history of a political process in which the government had to develop the consent or even the acceptance of the governed in order to finance itself and, therefore, to operate.

Moreover, the Libyan people have long had a truly miserable experience with states of any kind. The last century at least of the Ottoman Empire was marked by such incompetence and corruption that it was a burden rather than a support for all Libyans. Italy's early twentieth-century conquest of Libya was brutal and resulted in the death of fully half of the population. While the Italian colonists in the late 1920s and 1930s benefitted from well and quickly developed infrastructure and social services, there was little, if any, trickle-down to the natives. The "states" in Libya in the early 1940s were the allied and axis armies that fought fiercely and destructively back and forth across the country with little time or resources to devote to alleviating the resulting suffering of the locals.

Following the war and a period of preparation for independence by well-meaning but sparse and under-funded British administrators in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania and French administrators in Fezzan, these three former Ottoman provinces were joined into the newly independent Kingdom of Libya. The new nation's king was chosen for his leadership of the Sanusiyah religious movement that had, from the beginning, provided the only persistent opposition to the Italians and, during the war, against German forces in Cyrenaica, but who had little ability or interest in governing Tripolitania or the Fezzan. The newly installed king, furthermore, reigned over one of the world's poorest nations and had few resources with which to confront his substantial problems. The post-independence Kingdom of Libya was a great improvement over Libya's past governments, but it was marred by corruption and, in the growing tide of anti-Western, pan-Arab nationalism and socialist ideologies that swept the region in the 1950s and 1960s, too closely associated with the capitalist West to be welcome to those Libyans who were inclined toward political involvement.

As a result, and well before the 1969 revolution, Libyan society had developed a pattern of behavior and relationships in which Libyans concentrated on tribal, commercial and family ties rather than state politics. Good Libyan families don't encourage their children to dream of high political office nor inculcate in them a sense of duty to support good government or make significant sacrifices to resist bad government. This is a society that endures much and expects little from its rulers. Even before the 1969 coup, Libya did not have a body politic that would generate sufficient political dynamism to limit the options of a ruler like Qadhafi. Conversely, the political apathy of the Libyan populace was, from the beginning of the revolution, a source of frustration to Qadahfi, who has struggled vainly for three decades to find a way to generate public interest and participation in advancing his Arab-nationalist vision.

That is not to say that there has not been opposition, sometimes violent, to the Qadhafi regime. In the early years after the revolution, Libyan (as opposed to pan-Arab) nationalists within the regime, royalist counter-revolutionaries, civilian Arab-nationalist political figures and traditional religious leaders posed threats to Qadhafi and his closest associates. Since the mid 1970s, Libya's armed forces, universities and religious communities have produced small groups of resisters who repeatedly and with increasing violence sought to alter or remove the regime. In confronting this opposition, Qadhafi's increasingly violent measures to defend and consolidate the revolution and regime have steadily increased his personal power and reduced political limits on his decision making.

In the first months after the September 1969 revolution, the new regime simply imported its government structure (centered on a "Revolutionary Command Council" [RCC] of officers who had participated in the coup) and ideology from the model of Nasser's Egypt. On November 28, 1969, Qadhafi gave his first major speech, in which he announced that Libya was unsuited to representative democracy. Less than two weeks later, on December 10, the new ministers of defense and interior were arrested for having mounted an abortive coup against Qadhafi. These two young officers had participated in the September coup, but their interest in Libyan development and democracy clashed with Qadhafi's determination to mobilize the country's people and resources to serve Nasserist, pan-Arab ideology and programs.

Immediately after this first revolt, Qadhafi and the RCC moved to consolidate their control of the state. On December 11, they promulgated a "Constitutional Declaration" that placed all political power in the Council's hands and declared socialism to be the country's guiding economic philosophy, opening the way for the new state to seize economic power through a series of nationalizations of the country's business enterprises.

In the following year, 1970, the new regime made important Arab-nationalist and socialist moves that rapidly increased its radical credentials and power. The remaining thousands of Italian "colonists" and the few remaining Libyan Jews were expelled, and their property was confiscated. The American and British air bases in the country (whose departure had been agreed upon and begun before the revolution) were evacuated. Ail banks were nationalized, and the nationalization of foreign oil companies began. It was also a year in which a cousin of the departed king and several mid-ranking officers were arrested, accused of plotting a coup against the new regime. Finally it was the year in which Gamal Abdel Nasser, the model for Qadhafi and his co-revolutionaries, died. This spurred Qadhafi to think and act more intently on becoming the leader of the entire Arab nation. It also removed the chance for an older (and, by 1970, mellowing) Nasser to become a source of tempering guidance to Qadhafi.

In 1971 and 1972, the Qadhafi regime moved to deal with the remaining threat of counterrevolution posed by remnants of the Libyan kingdom. A revolutionary court tried more than 200 former officials of the pre-revolutionary government, sentencing the former king and four other former officials to death. (All but one of these capital trials and sentences were in absentia.) Long prison sentences and heavy fines were imposed on other former officials. The Sanusi religious order, which the former king had headed and which was the basis of much of his legitimacy, was disbanded. Official history was modified to downplay the record of the Sanusis in resisting Turkish and Italian colonial rule and the Sanusi role in gaining Libya's independence.

In 1971, Qadhafi and the RCC created the Arab Socialist Union as the country's only legal political party. Ail trade unions were incorporated in the Arab Socialist Union, and strikes were banned. At the same time, Qadhafi moved to limit any threat or obstacle from tribal leaders by creating new regional administrative boundaries that crossed the lines between traditional tribal areas and by wholesale dismissal of traditional, usually tribal, leaders from local administrative posts.

Qadhafi, however, found himself unable to bring about the fundamental changes he sought in Libyan society through the political and state mechanisms he had imported from Nasser's Egypt. He embarked, in April 1973, on a "popular revolution" that was supposed to destroy the old government bureaucracy and give the people themselves the power to hire and fire public officials at all levels and to direct government and economic activity. He called on the Libyan people to form "popular committees" in their villages, neighborhoods, schools and work places and to take over and run government offices, universities and businesses. Thousands of these committees were formed and did take over (or at least purge the incumbents from) most public organizations. It was still the case, however, that too few Libyans involved themselves in the "Popular Revolution" to develop the mobilization of which Qadhafi dreamed. The popular revolution, moreover, also brought forth the first clear indication of differences within the RCC, which attempted in October 1973 to promulgate a popular-committee law, which would have restricted the committees to "non-vital" sectors of the economy and made their powers advisory. Qadhafi refused to sign the law, objecting to these limitations on the committees.

The years 1973 and 1974 were marked by the regime's gaining control, through nationalization of oil production and by Libya's emergence as an important member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). U.S. analysts credit Libyan militancy in OPEC as partially responsible for OPEC measures to raise oil prices, impose embargoes and gain control of production. The rapid growth in oil revenues between 1970 and 1974, in any case, provided the regime with the means to pursue an arms-procurement program and aggressive foreign-policy ventures. In August and December of 1973, Libyan-based Palestinian terrorists carried out massacres in the Athens and Rome airports.

The increase in oil revenues also created another point of dispute within the RCC as factions developed over the choice of using these funds for development programs in Libya or using them in a more revolutionary way internally and to finance Arab nationalist causes outside the country. Disputes within the RCC coincided with growing unrest throughout the country in late 1974 and early 1975. Confronted with anti-government demonstrations on university campuses, the regime sought to use compulsory military service as a means to reduce student unrest, a decision that, not surprisingly, led to more student dissent. In March 1975, there were major student demonstrations against the regime in Benghazi and, in April, widespread arrests of students throughout the country.

In August 1975, the RCC was ripped apart by a major coup attempt led by two of its members. This split came over money. After the dramatic growth in oil revenues in 1973 and 1974, a drop in demand for Libyan oil resulted in a cash crunch. RCC member and Minister of Planning Umar Muhayshi refused to yield up development funds to finance the regime's international and Arab-nationalist activities. The ensuing dispute climaxed when Muhayshi and another RCC member made an unsuccessful attempt to seize power. The coup leaders managed to escape to Tunisia, but 22 army officers accused of involvement in the attempt were eventually executed in 1977. These were the first capital punishments actually carried out in post-revolutionary Libya. The wider aftermath of this event was dramatic.

Dirk Vandewalle, a respected Libya scholar, later wrote, From this point onward, Libya's revolution turned ideological, and collegial decision making yielded inexorably to one-man rule. Throughout the remainder of the year, civilian and military professionals and technical personnel were removed from the country's planning institutes and ministries. Most of those who argued for long-term social investment, prudent investment policies, curtailment of spending on military outlays, and greater efficiency were sidelined. Within a few years others, including the country's comptroller, Muhammad Mugharyif, were replaced by individuals more sympathetic to the regime's political aspirations. The coup also marked the end of professional and technical criteria for military recruitment and was the beginning of a steady but noticeable influx of members of Qadhafi's tribe -- and later his family -- into sensitive security and army positions.

In the almost quarter century since August 1975, Qadhafi has presided over a series of increasingly bizarre attempts to create a political structure that would somehow generate a society in Libya that would share his vision and to form political institutions through which he could mobilize the society to carry it out. None of these attempts succeeded. He remains today unable to mobilize his people. His repeated failures, however, have been accompanied by an increasing concentration of power in his own hands and increasingly Draconian security measures to ensure that his alienated populace cannot limit his actions or threaten his power.

Qadhafi, throughout his rule, has attempted to formulate a political theory of direct democracy under which a people could somehow manage its affairs without a state or representative institutions. He began publishing his ideas just after the coup attempt in 1975 in a series of confusing essays which were later compiled and published as a multi-volume Green Book beginning in 1976. Qadhafi wrote that some sort of political mechanism must be developed to preserve individual sovereignty while generating a "collective state of mind" that would mobilize the society for action in its collective interest. His writings concentrate on the concepts of "individual sovereignty," "direct democracy" and "popular authority." Yet in all significant matters, a "revolutionary authority" (always in Qadhafi's hands) is required to provide overreaching supervision of the people's works.

In March 1977, Qadhafi announced the organization of a government structure that was to be the embodiment of his political thinking, as recorded in The Green Book. Libya was declared to be a Jamharriyah, a word difficult to translate from Arabic and, even for Arabs, to understand. Its root is the word for "masses" or "crowds," and it is meant to convey that Libya's popular masses hold power in the country. This new governing mechanism initially yielded a two-branch structure. The functions that most correspond to legislation were carried out by the people throughout the country meeting in "congresses." At the most local level these were Basic People's Congresses, which worked upward to Municipal Branch People's Congresses and then to Municipal People's Congresses and, nationally, to the General People's Congress. The executive functions and authority were assigned to People's Committees, which also ran from "Basic" at the most local level to the national General People's Committee, the members of the committees to be chosen for annual terms by the congresses.

These "popular" mechanisms of government, however, had no power over the country's budget, petroleum sector, armed forces, police, intelligence services or foreign policy. Moreover, the People's Congresses and Committees depended on functionaries controlled by Qadhafi for their agendas and funding. In short, Qadhafi's "direct democracy" and "popular authority" were much like the Holy Roman Empire: neither direct, democratic, popular nor an authority. As in every other significant change since 1969, this one also transferred more, not less, power to Qadhafi.

Qadhafi, moreover, created in November 1977 a third governing structure, based on "revolutionary authority," which had power to supervise, whenever necessary, the "popular" mechanism of government. Revolutionary committees were created throughout the country to "defend the revolution and guide the masses as they assume direct power." The members of these revolutionary committees were named and supervised by an Office of Revolutionary Committees, which, in turn, operated under the Direction of the Revolution, composed, of course, of Qadhafi and his closest associates. In revolutionary authority, power and resources flowed down from Qadhafi, not up from the people.

The following period, from roughly 1978 until 1988, has been called by Vandewalle and other Libya scholars the "revolutionary decade." In March 1978, all private property rights were eliminated. Later in the year the regime mounted a campaign to abolish all private trading. In 1980, Qadhafi ordered the murder of Libyan dissidents living outside the country. Private savings accounts were eliminated that year, as was the right for professionals to maintain private practices. In 1982, Qadhafi announced that the country's armed forces would be replaced by a "popular" army. In 1984, he launched a second wave of murders of dissidents living abroad. Throughout this revolutionary period, the regime became increasingly involved in supporting and carrying out terrorist operations around the world.

The revolutionary activity, however frenetic, did not succeed in building a government that worked. Official statistics showing dramatic improvements in the living standards of the Libyan people were constantly and credibly called into question by anecdotes from Libyans and foreign visitors who described debased infrastructure, chaotic schools and filthy hospitals. Corruption, according to European businessmen with extensive experience both before and after the 1969 coup, was a significantly more important factor in the 1980s and later than before Qadhafi assumed power. Many thousands of educated technocrats and the commerical class fled the country. Violent challenges from the universities, religious communities and the army continued and grew. The participants and defenders of the regime were increasingly concentrated among members of Qadhafi's family and tribe and those of a handful of the remaining veterans of the 1969 coup group. Throughout the period, the broad base of the Libyan populace endured or avoided involvement in the revolution and Qadhafi's government.

It may well have been the Libyan people's striking apathy and lack of support for Qadhafi following U.S. air attacks on the country in 1986 that caused him to see the political failure of these revolutionary developments and seek a new direction. When the United States found firm evidence of the Libyan regime's having ordered the bombing of a Berlin nightclub in which a number of American servicemen were killed, the U.S. Air Force and Navy attacked a wide range of military, intelligence and security targets in both Tripoli and Bengahzi. Despite the regime highlighting the raids' damage to civilian areas and claims of heavy civilian losses, including the death of an infant girl who Qadhafi said was his adopted daughter, it was unable to generate more than token popular reaction to the raids. Vandewalle cites contemporary press reports that there were more anti-American demonstrations in Khartoum and Tunis than in Tripoli, "where foreign journalists outnumbered the Tripolitanians" at the protests.

In 1987, in the face of continued failure to mobilize his people, Qadhafi began measures to undo much of the "revolutionary decade." In February, he allowed (more likely, ordered) open criticism of the economic damages wrought by the past ten years of upheaval and appeared to open the way for economic and political liberalization. An economic reform program was then announced in March of that year. In September, Qadhafi's speech at the anniversary of the 1969 coup included a call for the reintroduction or a private sector in the economy. In November, the General People's Congress was allowed to air severe criticism of the revolutionary committees. Early in 1988, a Ministry of Mass Mobilization was created to bring the revolutionary committees under control, and the power of "revolutionary courts" was curtailed. By June 1988, the regime attempted to promise the people some protection by adopting a "Great Green Charter on Human Rights." Over the next several years, the regime continued to announce measures that appeared part of a program of economic and even political liberalization.

As in the past, however, all significant organs of economic or military/security power remained firmly under Qadhafi's control. Probably the most revealing "legislative action" in 1988 was the adoption in August of a People's Congress resolution that "any statement or opinion expressed by the leader of the revolution -- i.e., Qadhafi -- should have the full weight and authority of law."

QADHAFI'S PERSONALITY

The inescapable conclusion from this history is that Qadhafi and Qadhafi alone determines all significant policies of the Libyan government. So to understand what those policies are likely to be, we have to examine Qadhafi's personality, rather than the institutions of his country.

Examination or at least discussion of the personality of the leader of the revolution is a common pastime for senior officials throughout the Arab world. It is certainly the case that the leaders of other Arab countries are unanimous (at least in the expressions to western visitors) in their view that Qadhafi does not have a well integrated personality. The late King Khalid bin Abd al-Aziz of Saudi Arabia, for example, insisted, early in his reign in the mid-1970s, on personally visiting the Libyan leader. When American officials asked their Saudi counterparts the reason for this visit, their response was, "We asked him too. He told us, `I wanted to see if he is crazy. He is.'"

Asking whether Qadhafi is crazy gives the question of his personality medical rather than political relevance and risks inappropriately trivializing the examination. It is, however, worthwhile seeing if the available record provides enough information and analysis to shed light on his likely future positions and actions.

Muammar Qadhafi was born in the Libyan desert near the town of Surt in 1942. His father was a man of at least respectable status in a tribe, the Qadhadhfah, which, while nationally not well-regarded, was locally dominant. Muammar apparently showed sufficient promise as a boy that an affluent uncle decided to finance his education at a school in the southern town of Sabha. Qadhafi's early school experience in town was not happy. His schoolmates, mostly children of trading townspeople, apparently ostracized and persecuted the young nomad, probably causing much of Qadhafi's antagonism for the urban commercial class and his determination to achieve and hold a position consistent with the positive self image he would have developed as the son of tribal leader in the desert. The effect of such a negative social experience for a child whose family had given him an extremely positive self-image can be to generate a strong desire for personal power.

Qadhafi's years at school in the 1950s were also a period in which a young Arab was exposed to the very effective media of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The "Voice of the Arabs" would have given Qadhafi an ideological framework for his resentment of the urban commercial class. It would have added Israel, the Western World (especially the United States and Britain) and its "Arab agents" to the list of enemies he developed at school. Most important, however, Nasser himself and his rise to power would have given Qadhafi a model and a road map to leadership through revolutionary activity in the military.

It was at secondary school that Qadhafi formed a cell of revolutionaries whom he later directed into the military, which he had identified as the route to power.

On his way up, Qadhafi made one more stop that seems to have solidified and personalized his hatred for the West. He attended an army training course in England in the early 1960s, a time when the British Army was not an institution marked by a sensitivity for the feelings of other cultures. It is likely that Qadhafi's experiences there included significant interactions with British instructors and fellow students who probably had an undisguised negative view of him. Later, as a young officer back in Libya, Qadhafi also was infuriated by the experience of being refused entry, by an enlisted American guard, to the U.S. Air Force base that was then located just outside Tripoli.

What is the likely effect on a young man's personality when he is repeatedly faced with conflicting messages about his personality and very nature? The young Qadhafi would have brought a very positive view of himself, his family and his tribe to school, only to find his urban schoolmates and even teachers heaping scorn on him and what he stood for. Analysts consulted for this article report that such an experience can often produce a personality that refers to itself as the victim of others. A boy who went through such a conflict might be troubled by an overwhelming sense of weakness that he might try to cover by adopting an exaggerated posture of strength. Such a boy would have difficulty trusting others and would also be able to justify any response to a real or imagined threat. If the boy were relatively bright and attractive, his pose of strength could very well develop into a charisma that would draw many friends and even followers. His relationship with his associates, however, would be marked by constant suspicion and the need for control.

This analysis creates a picture that fits with the odd but charismatic teenager who, fueled by Nasser's propaganda, drew strength from dreams of future greatness, who was able to draw around himself a circle of fellow conspirators, and who would have directed his followers into a disciplined group that had to submit to his frequently extreme controlling behaviors. The internal conflicts that formed such a personality in Qadhafi would have been aggravated in the 1950s and 1960s as Nasser and the Arab nationalist regimes with which he identified were repeatedly humiliated. Slights by British and American soldiers when he was a proud Arab officer would probably have generated profound hatred for them and all they represented. The terrorist acts of Palestinian fedayeen following Israel's devastating 1967 defeat of the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies, would have appeared to be models of justified responses to threat.

This picture and the established principle that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior do not bode well for the prospects of sustained improvement in relations between Qadhafi and the United States. Qadhafi is not likely to be replaced. Nor is he likely to change his fundamental views of himself or his causes or of the United States as a threat to both.

On the two basic areas of dispute between the United States and Libya, terrorism and Israel, Qadhafi's views and preferences for action are not likely to change. He will continue to support any actions he can against Israel and/or the Arab-Israeli peace process. He will continue to identify the United States and Britain as dangerous opponents and legitimate targets.

The only basis for optimism on this score is that in the post-Cold War world the practice of state-sponsored terrorism is increasingly difficult. One thing that the Pan Am 103 investigation and those that have followed almost every major terrorist event in the late 1980s and 1990s have demonstrated is that the perpetrators of terrorist acts and their supporters do not long remain unidentified. As the century turns, there are few, if any, countries with which Libya could cooperate in training, housing and deploying terrorist squads. As the security situation improves in Lebanon and, over time, even in Afghanistan, there are few if any places in which terrorist sanctuaries could be established outside of some state's control. Finally, it has been shown that the United States does not face serious military or diplomatic difficulty after it responds militarily to terrorist acts. In this environment, Qadhafi might well abandon terrorism as a tool of statecraft for simply operational and pragmatic reasons. It will be inability, not lack of interest, that might turn Qadhafi from his past practices.

Pragmatism might also be a positive factor in the commercial realm, especially in the petroleum sector. The very nature of the Libyan state, discussed above, as a mechanism that must derive revenues from abroad and distribute resources as patronage to its few supporters and buy the acquiescence of its otherwise alienated population, means that Qadhafi must, as he has for much of the history of his regime, leave the Libyan oil industry outside the domain of his revolutionary activity. The regime is likely to welcome, even seek, as much petroleum-related business with American firms as the U.S. government will allow. Otherwise, business opportunities in and with Libya will also be constrained by the regime's spotty record in paying its debts. It will be well for those involved in any future business in Libya to get the money upfront."

Internally, the overall prospects for Libya and its people are not bright, although life will probably get a little better as the economic isolation of the past seven years is reduced. The country will still be ruled by a leader willing to subordinate the well-being of his people to the quest to defeat his personal demons.

Mr. Anderson, a former CIA officer, is now with Foreign Reports, Inc.3