The Colonel's Republic

On September 1, 1969, a 27-year-old army signals officer named Muammar Gaddafi led a bloodless coup against the elderly King Idris of Libya, who was conveniently abroad for medical treatment. Libya in 1969 was a newly oil-rich kingdom barely a decade out of Italian colonial rule, with no tradition of political institutions and a population of only two million scattered across a territory the size of Alaska. Gaddafi did not fill this vacuum with a conventional government — he abolished it. His 'Jamahiriya,' meaning 'state of the masses,' replaced formal institutions with a labyrinth of people's committees, revolutionary councils, and the Green Book ideology that he claimed transcended both capitalism and communism.

In practice, Gaddafi's Libya ran on oil money, tribal patronage, and fear. He expelled the American and British military bases, nationalized the oil industry, and used the windfall to fund revolutionary movements from the IRA to the PLO to assorted African liberation movements — earning Libya a place on every Western terrorism list. His regime sponsored the 1988 Lockerbie bombing over Scotland, killing 270 people, and the 1986 Berlin disco bombing that preceded a US airstrike on Tripoli. Domestically, critics vanished; in 1996, his security services massacred an estimated 1,270 political prisoners in Abu Salim prison in a single afternoon.

The transformation came after 9/11. Gaddafi, calculating that Saddam Hussein's fate awaited states that defied the West, reached out through back channels and surrendered his nuclear and chemical weapons programs in 2003. His reward was rehabilitation — Tony Blair's famous 'Deal in the Desert,' visits from Western leaders, oil contracts for BP and others, and his son Saif cultivated as a potential reformist successor. By 2010, Gaddafi was pitching his tent in the gardens of European palaces and lecturing the UN General Assembly for 90 minutes. The 42-year experiment in one-man rule seemed, improbably, to have achieved a kind of stability.

What nobody noticed — or nobody chose to notice — was that Gaddafi had spent 42 years systematically destroying every institution, every professional corps, every autonomous organization that might have constituted a functioning state beneath him. The army was deliberately kept weak so it could not threaten him. There were no political parties, no independent judiciary, no civil society organizations. The oil wealth that funded everything flowed through personal networks of tribal loyalists rather than government agencies. When the Arab Spring arrived in February 2011, there was nothing beneath Gaddafi to catch Libya when he fell.