Libya's Pre-1996 History Revisited: Part 11

A Wall Street Journal editorial recently proposed that the Democratic Obama-Clinton Administration consider the option of some kind of “humanitarian military intervention” in Libya in 2011 in response to the recent deadly attacks on demonstrators inside Libya by the current Libyan regime’s security forces. Yet most people in the United States know very little about the hidden history of Libya. Guy Arnold’s 1996 book, The Maverick State: Gaddafi and the New World Order, for example, observed:

“Military confrontation between the United States and Libya was to occur in August 1981 when US Navy planes operating from carriers of the US Sixth Fleet on naval exercises in the Mediterranean flew deliberately close to the Libyan coast and then shot down two Libyan jets which had challenged the US presence in the Gulf of Sidra. The air fight took place about 60 miles off the coast of Libya but whereas Libya claims the normal twelve-mile coastal limit it makes an exception of the Gulf of Sidra where it has drawn a baseline across the mouth of the Gulf of Sidra and extended its limit twelve miles to the north of this…

“…In March 1982…President Reagan decided to ban the import of Libyan oil and prevent certain listed items from being exported to Libya…

“Perhaps, above all, it was the extension of Libyan activities into Latin America, even more than Gaddafi’s hard line on the United States’ ally Israel, which infuriated Washington. He focused his support upon Nicaragua and El Salvador although also making arms, funds and training available to leftist groups throughout the region. In 1981, according to the State Department, Gaddafi provided $100 m to Nicaragua; from May 1982 several deliveries of Libyan arms were made to the Sandinistas and the Salvadoran guerrillas…As Gaddafi said in his speech of 1 September 1983 (the fourteenth anniversary of his coup), `When we ally ourselves with revolution in Latin America, and particularly Central America, we are defending ourselves…’…

“…Between 1975 and 1983 Libyan forces were expanded from 22,000 in the former year to 85,000 in the latter…By 1983, of $28bn worth of arms purchases about $20bn had come from the USSR or East Europe…

“…During the year [1985]…the Nation of Islam, headed by Louis Farrakhan…received a $5m loan from Gaddafi for use in providing economic assistance to American blacks…

“…The President [Reagan]…went on to impose sanctions on virtually all economic activities between the United States and Libya, the measures to take effect no later than 1 February [1986]…A second executive order blocked Libyan government property in the United States. The sum total of the US measures amounted to some of the most comprehensive sanctions ever mounted by the Washington administration…

“…In March 1986…reports suggested that Gaddafi had secretly given $400m to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua…”