Libya

May 28, 2012
For the 42 years before the revolutionary Arab spring, Muammar Qaddafi “was Libya.” Now, less than a year after his death, Pargeter (The New Frontiers of Jihad) traces Qaddafi’s rise from Bedouin goat herder’s son to self-styled Brother Leader of the Libyan people, and his subsequent slip into international pariah status. In this timely reflection on one of recent history’s most outlandish demagogues, Pargeter follows Qaddafi as he seized power through a 1969 military coup, rebelling against the Western-backed king and his paternalistic system. She then shows how Qaddafi grew increasingly out of touch with the people as the incoherent, quasi-socialist ideology he imposed plunged them into poverty and isolated them from the rest of the world. Dissent was silenced by paramilitary “revolutionary committees,” and prisons and graves quickly began to fill with accused enemies of the regime. As she traces Qaddafi’s failures in the Arab world and the sanctions and reprobation he faced after the Lockerbie plane bombing in 1988, Pargeter sets the scene for the U.N. no-fly zone and NATO intervention that supported the rebels who toppled the regime in 2011. Her informed analysis contextualizes the long-fermenting stew of oppression and anger that was to finally erupt in civil war, and addresses the challenges the National Transitional Council faces as it struggles to rebuild a nation.

June 1, 2012
A thorough but wooden examination of the making of Muammar Qaddafi. Unlike Lindsey Hilsum in her on-the-ground journalistic account, Sandstorm (2012), Pargeter (The Muslim Brotherhood, 2010, etc.) maintains an academic distance with her workmanlike prose. The author takes a more historical approach, portraying the coup by the young Bedouin soldier in 1969 as the last in an unhappy series of power grabs over the sparsely populated, disunited, tribe-riddled Libya. Under the imperious Italians, the Libyans were treated merely as "shadows in their own land"; the country achieved independence in December 1951 only by the maneuverings of the victorious powers of World War II. "At the time of independence," writes the author, "Libya was ranked the poorest nation in the world." When the group of fervently nationalist officers finally seized power from the ineffectual King Idris in 1969, Qaddafi took the lead, insisting on a purity of purpose--despite the fact that he had no worldly experience or education to speak of, shocking other Arab leaders with his fulsome political naivety. What Pargeter calls the "shambolic atmosphere" around him grew to nightmarish proportions once Libya struck oil. It resulted in a bloated public sector, bureaucratic chaos based on his "hopelessly simplistic" utopian Green Book (which Pargeter has actually read and helpfully dissects), the formation of "curious alliances" (e.g., with terrorist organizations and the worst dictators of Africa once the Arab League shunned him), rampant nepotism, a whimsical Islamist doctrine, and the elimination of opposition parties, among other dictatorial prerogatives. Ultimately, readers will wonder why the populace waited so long to get rid of him. Pargeter's cliche-ridden prose detracts from, but does not completely overwhelm, her account of the brutal Qadaffi regime.

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