In 1975, Muammar Gaddafi told the Italian journalist Mirella Bianco: "When the people takes power it becomes its own government; and at that moment it is I who will find myself in opposition." Now, with British and French combat jets targeting the Libyan regime's murderous campaign to regain rebel-held cities, part of that statement appears prophetic: 42 years after Col Gaddafi seized power, dusk appears to be upon a man Anwar Sadat, Egypt's late president, once described as "100 per cent sick and possessed by the devil".
Libya's anaemic military won't be hard to defeat. From the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, though, we have learnt that the real test of an intervention isn't the defeat of the regime it targets: it is what comes next. There is good reason to fear that the people's own government of which Col Gaddafi spoke won't be much better than the dystopia that preceded it.
Power in Libya's rebel-held regions now lies with a disordered mosaic of tribal patriarchs and mid-ranking military officers who have abandoned the regime for more primordial allegiances.
Eastern Libya's Zuwaya and Misratah tribal chieftains, who enjoyed great power before Col Gaddafi took over, sense an opportunity to seize control of oil revenues. In the west, the Warfala, under pressure from the regime since an abortive 1993 rebellion, see a chance to settle scores.
For the most part, this leadership seems to have a moral compass that points in much the same direction as that of the regime. Tarek Saad Husain, a Benghazi-based rebel commander, warned the residents of Col Gaddafi's home town: "Either you join us, or we will finish you."
Libya's tribes, moreover, aren't the only ones flying their flags on the streets. Fighters have established an Islamic emirate in Derna, 775 miles from Tripoli, while jihadists trained in Sudan and Afghanistan are said to be fighting alongside tribal rebels.
To make sense of this exceptionally muddy landscape one needs an understanding of Libya's complex political history. Libya has been described as "anti-state": deriving power not through taxation but rents from oil; through the provision of patronage, rather than real institutions; through terror rather than a functional military. The country's armed forces, for example, were only 91,000 strong at their peak in the 1980s – about a third of the number needed, the expert Anthony Cordesman has estimated, to operate its gargantuan equipment stockpiles.
In 1969, when a group of military officers led by Col Gaddafi overthrew King Idris bin Muhammad as-Senussi, they won neither a nation nor a state – and kept it that way.
Libya's Ottoman rulers had left large swaths of the country ungoverned. Italian colonialism brought together Tripolitania in the west, Cyrenaica in the east, and arid central Fezzan, through a ferocious war that ran from 1922 to 1935, and involved the liberal use of poison gas against tribesmen.
Eastern tribes, who played a key role in the struggle against the Italians, won out in the negotiations that led to Libya's independence. King Idris, their figurehead, received the throne as a Christmas Eve gift in 1951.
King Idris was the grandson of Sayyid Muhammad ibn Ali as-Senussi, the founder of a religious order inspired by the fundamentalist Wahhabi order of Saudi Arabia. The Senussi commanded great influence in eastern Libya, where they successfully arbitrated between feuding tribes.
The monarchy soon accumulated unprecedented wealth. In 1953, Britain obtained the rights to station troops in Libya for £3.75 million a year; the United States leased an airbase at $4 million a year. The last nine years of King Idris's rule also saw Libya become the world's fifth-largest oil exporter.
But the boom led to growing income disparities and a surge of migrants into Tripoli. The city doubled in size between 1960 and 1964, creating joblessness and social tensions on a scale the monarchy simply couldn't handle.
King Idris's regime, the scholar Carole Collins has noted, needed "to perform the functions of a national bourgeoisie – to regenerate and reinvest capital, and to develop infrastructure".
Instead, the monarchy, described by the former American diplomat James Akins as "one of the most corrupt in the world", survived by funnelling funds to its clients among the eastern tribes.
Following the coup, Col Gaddafi continued with the system – though his own Qadhafa tribe and its allies became the principal beneficiaries of the patronage system, instead of their eastern rivals.
In return for their loyalty, tribal leaders received benefits such as key jobs and contracts in projects like the £7.5 billion man-made river that sucks water from underground aquifers to feed Libya's cities and farms.
Gaddafi's manifesto, The Green Book, applauded the tribe as a form of "natural social protection". The state, by contrast, was an "artificial political, economic and sometimes military system which has no link to human values".
Luis Martinez, in his book The Libyan Paradox, pointed to the pre-modern regime-building practices of revolutionary Libya. Khuwaylidi al-Hamidi, the chief of police, married his son, Khalid, to Gaddafi's flamboyant daughter, Aisha Gaddafi, and one of his daughters to the ruler's son, Saadi.
The army became the stage on which tribal tensions were played out – just as they had been before the coup.
In 1993, for example, Abdel Salam Jalloud – Libya's long-standing second-in-command and a trusted lieutenant who had, in 1970, been dispatched to offer China £75 million for a nuclear weapon – attempted to seize power.
Mr Jalloud's Magariha tribe backed him, along with the Warfalla and al-Zintan – much the same coalition that is fighting Col Gaddafi today. Intense fighting was seen in the Bani Walid area, 80 miles south-east of Tripoli. But the air force, packed with recruits from Col Gaddafi's Qadhafa, held fast and the regime won.
Eight plotters were executed in January 1997. Later that year, new laws institutionalised collective punishment of tribes through the denial of entitlements as the punishment for rebellion.
Even as Col Gaddafi moved to suppress tribal tensions, though, a new threat was emerging. In the 1980s, he had encouraged thousands of Libyans to join the jihad in Afghanistan, as part of his desire to emerge as a leader of the Islamic world. But when they returned to Libya, they served a different god.
In 1984, Libyan authorities hanged two students alleged to have been members of Islamist groups on the campus of the al-Fateh university in Tripoli; nine more were executed at Benghazi in 1987.
Fighting between the al-Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and regime forces in Benghazi claimed dozens of lives in 1995. In 1996, there was further fighting around Derna and Benghazi. Britain, according to David Shayler, a former MI5 officer, funded the LIFG, to punish Col Gaddafi's support of terrorists in the west. Even though the LIFG was eventually crushed, and, following the events of 9/11, internationally proscribed, the jihadists had gained political legitimacy. In May 2009, thousands attended the funeral of Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, a high-ranking al-Qaeda member who died in a Tripoli prison.
Libyan Islamists have, worryingly, been winning battles for the first time this year. Last month, jihadists led by rebel military officer Adnan al-Nawisri seized hundreds of weapons and vehicles from depots in Derna and proclaimed what they are calling the Islamic Emirate of Barqa, the ancient name for western Libya.
Abdelkarim al-Hasadi, who fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, appears to have de facto control of the Derna Emirate. Men like al-Hasadi are certain to get what support al-Qaeda can muster. Osama bin Laden's inner circle includes Muhammad Hassan Qayid, known also as Abu Yahya al-Libi, the younger brother of the LIFG leader Abdul Wahhab Qayid Idris.
For decades, the social conditions for an Islamist insurgency did not exist in Libya. In a 1999 interview, LIFG spokesperson Omar Rashed lamented that Libya's people had not "passed beyond the stage of sentiments to the stage of action".
Paradoxically, the neoliberal economic policies ushered in by Shokri Ghanem, the prime minister, and Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the ruler's son, may have helped just that to happen, by weakening the patronage networks on which the regime was built.
Libya's tribal patriarchs may wish only for a redistribution of the spoils of power, not a revolution.
But many young people see the regime's pro-western policies as the root of their problems and want more fundamental changes.
If the Libyan war drags on, warring tribal factions will seek support where they can find it – and the jihadists will be happy to oblige them.
"War is the father of all things," wrote the Greek poet and philosopher Heraclitus, "the king of all: some it has shown as gods, some as men; some it has made slaves, some free." His lesson is simple: we must beware the consequences not just of defeat, but also of victory.
AW: Sammelstrang: Libyen
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