United Nations officials faced extraordinary challenges as they prepared Libya for independence. About 90 percent of the population was illiterate and the country’s economy was extremely weak. In 1950 per capita income was about fifty dollars per year, and the largest source of revenue was the sale of scrap metal salvaged from World War II battlefields. Politically the Libyans could not agree on the structure of their new government. The Cyrenaicans favored a loose federation, while the Tripolitanians advocated a strong central government. Nevertheless, the Libyan Constituent Assembly, which met for the first time in November 1950, agreed unanimously that Libya would be established as a democratic, federal, and sovereign state; that the government would be a constitutional monarchy; that Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan would be provinces in the new kingdom; and that Idris would be the new nation’s first head of state. The proposed national government, in addition to the monarchy, would consist of a cabinet and a bicameral legislature, and each province would have a governor appointed by the king, a cabinet, and a legislature. In October 1951 the assembly approved the constitution and, on 24 December 1951, King Idris I proclaimed the independence of the United Kingdom of Libya.18
Independent Libya
Newly independent Libya was friendly toward the West and identified with the bloc of conservative Arab states. In the mid-1950s Libya signed treaties with Britain and the United States, whereby the two Western powers provided Libya with economic and military aid in return for military base rights. The United States continued to operate Wheelus Air Base, located just outside Tripoli. The U.S. airfield, built during World War II, was ideally situated near desert bombing ranges and strategically positioned on the southern flank of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Over the next two decades Sixth Fleet ships made frequent port visits to Tripoli. In 1957 Libya accepted the terms of the Eisenhower Doctrine, a U.S. economic and military aid program designed to counter Soviet influence in the Middle East and North Africa. Through the program Libya acquired a substantial increase in American economic assistance and additional military equipment.19
In the 1950s and 1960s Libya supported Arab causes but played a minor role in the Arab-Israeli conflict and the turbulent arena of inter-Arab politics. The radical Arab nationalism espoused by Egypt’s Gamal Abdul Nasser threatened conservative monarchs like Idris and galvanized millions of young Arabs who shared Nasser’s vision of Arab unity, nonalignment, and social justice.
Despite the infusion of economic and technical assistance from the United States, Great Britain, and the United Nations, Libya remained a very poor and underdeveloped country throughout the 1950s. This situation changed unexpectedly and dramatically in June 1959 when the American oil company Esso discovered a major oil field in Cyrenaica. Commercial development followed and, with foreign companies paying royalties of 50 percent to the Libyan government, the country experienced unprecedented affluence. The government financed several major public works projects, expanded educational and health services throughout the country, and supported the development of low-cost housing, small businesses, and industries. Within a decade the Libyan per capita income had increased to about fifteen hundred dollars per year.20
The oil boom of the 1960s created social and economic problems that the weak national government was neither able nor willing to address. Tripolitanians resented the priority Idris gave to Cyrenaican affairs, while the growing urban middle class felt excluded from the political process and younger Libyans objected to his pro-Western foreign policy and his affiliation with conservative Arab leaders. Furthermore, many Libyans were outraged by widespread government inefficiency and corruption and protested the inequitable distribution of oil revenues, which enriched prominent families over poorer elements of the population. The group most dissatisfied with Idris, however, was the junior officer corps of the armed forces. They were inspired by Nasser’s message of Arab nationalism and were determined to restore Arab honor in the wake of the devastating Arab defeat in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War. As the disaffection of the population intensified, the king became increasingly estranged from the Libyan people and spent most of his time secluded in his palace in Darnah.
The Libyan Revolution
On 1 September 1969, while Idris was out of the country for rest and medical treatment, a group of junior army officers calling themselves the Free Unionist Officers boldly took control of the Libyan government and overthrew the monarchy. The bloodless coup was enthusiastically supported throughout the country, especially by young city dwellers. The Free Officers, who modeled their coup after Nasser’s 1952 takeover of Egypt, named a twelve-member directorate, the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), to serve as the supreme governing authority.21 The RCC proclaimed that “Libya is deemed a free, sovereign republic under the name of the Libyan Arab Republic—ascending with God’s help to exalted heights, proceeding in the path of freedom, unity, and social justice, guaranteeing the right of equality to its citizens, and opening before them the doors of honorable work.”22
The Nixon administration heeded the advice of State Department officers who had served in Libya and five days after the coup recognized the new government. The administration believed that the Free Officers might provide a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence in the Arab world. In the years immediately following the revolution the decision seemed vindicated by the volume of anti-Soviet and anticommunist statements issued by the RCC. For example, the new government frequently referred to the Soviet Union as an atheistic society, and it condemned Soviet involvement in the 1971 war between India and Pakistan because the conflict signaled “Soviet imperialist designs in the area.”23
Within weeks the RCC transformed Libya from a conservative monarchy into a revolutionary republic devoted to Islamic principles and dedicated to Arab nationalism. The new government embarked on a campaign to cleanse the country of corruption; it initiated important social, economic, and political reforms; it rejected colonialism and foreign values; it declared its neutrality in the struggle between the Western and Eastern blocs while denouncing both communism and imperialism; it sought the immediate evacuation of the American and British bases; and it affirmed Libya’s dedication to Arab unity and the liberation of Palestine. The young officers immediately issued decrees that banned the sale and consumption of alcohol beverages, they closed nightclubs, and they ordered all public signs to be written in Arabic.
It soon became apparent to international observers that the most influential member of the RCC—and the de facto leader of the new republic—was a twenty-seven-year-old army captain by the name of Muammar al-Qaddafi, a deeply pious and ascetic Signal Corps officer whose revolutionary views on Arab nationalism were patterned after those of his hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser. Shortly after the coup the RCC named an eight-member cabinet to govern the country, appointed Qaddafi commander in chief of the Libyan Armed Forces, and promoted him to the rank of colonel. Qaddafi attained widespread support and popularity by pledging to end foreign political, economic, and cultural domination of the country and by extending the benefits of prosperity to all Libyans through a considerable expansion of free social services. He believed that as long as he maintained a high standard of living for the Libyan people he could purchase support and legitimacy for the regime.24 Qaddafi was certainly a revolutionary, but there was no denying the pragmatism that enhanced his chances for survival.
Muammar al-Qaddafi
Muammar al-Qaddafi was born in 1942 to a Bedouin family in Sirtica, the barren territory that separates Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. His family belonged to a tribe of Berber-Arab livestock herders, al-Qaddafa. As a youth Qaddafi was profoundly influenced by stories of Italian atrocities committed against his country during the colonial period, the devastation wrought by World War II, the shocking Arab defeat in Palestine in 1948–49, and events in Nasser’s Egypt of the 1950s. It was during his early adolescence that he began listening to Nasser’s fiery speeches on the “Voice of the Arabs” radio program and started formulating his political ideology. Qaddafi attended a Quranic elementary school in Surt and began secondary school in Sabha in Fezzan. While at Sabha he surrounded himself with similar-minded classmates who wanted to “liberate” Libya by overthrowing their king. He formed a “central committee”