by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
City Journal\u00a0<\/em>(Autumn 2006)<\/p>\n L<\/span>ibya?<\/p>\n Most are rightly taken aback at the thought. But I was also intrigued when an educational cruise line invited me to lecture this past April on the classical antiquities of Libya \u2014 or, more properly, \u201cThe Socialist People\u2019s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya the Great,\u201d which since 1986 has been Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi\u2019s name for his ancestral country.<\/p>\n As petroleum engineers will point out endlessly in the lobby of the Corinthian, Tripoli\u2019s only Western hotel, Libya is both huge and tiny. Slightly larger than Alaska, it is likewise relatively empty of people and almost unexplored. Oilmen like both. We forget that, for all its notoriety, Libya, given the dearth of water and the nearness of the desert to within 50 miles of the coastline, has fewer than 6 million residents \u2014 one of the smallest populations of any Arab nation.<\/p>\n The Roman ruins at Leptis Magna and Sabratha are among the most impressive in the Mediterranean. And they are relatively untouched and unseen, since Qaddafi expelled most Europeans soon after his 1969 socialist revolution. An earlier bloody North African officer who staged a coup, Septimus Severus, was born in AD 146 at Leptis. His largesse to his native city \u2014 an enormous basilica, triumphal arches, a vast harbor and lighthouse\u2014together with the booming commerce of the imperial eastern Mediterranean during Rome\u2019s first attempt at globalization, made these North African coastal settlements among the most vast and opulent of the empire. The dry climate and sparse nomadic population have for centuries ensured the preservation of Libya\u2019s \u201ccities in the sand\u201d long after the Vandals looted them. They remain haunting today in their grandeur, more like recent ghost towns than ancient ruins.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also impossible not to have a perverse curiosity about the proverbially lunatic present-day Libya. It is not just its 35-year history of sponsoring African revolutionaries, terrorist operatives in Europe, and hit squads sent after Libyan dissidents. There are stranger, North Korea\u2013like tales. Many there still remember the Colonel\u2019s 1977 fiat that all Libyans, even Tripoli\u2019s 1 million urban residents, were to raise chickens; or his call to gather up all of Jamahiriya\u2019s Western musical instruments and burn them\u00a0en masse<\/i>; or his offer of $5,000 to any Libyan who would marry a sub-Saharan black African to further Qaddafi\u2019s own reputation as the great African unifier.<\/p>\n But even more bizarre were the reports that after 2003, Qaddafi had quite abruptly liberalized his police state. By the time of my visit in spring 2006, he was finishing his byzantine negotiations with the American State Department, which would get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, reopen embassies in both capitals, and allow Libyans and Americans to visit each country freely. Qaddafi had even appointed an American-educated economist as his new prime minister, and he was eager for the planned renewed relations with the United States to evolve into real friendship \u2014 hence the limited number of visas now accorded to the new generation of American visitors.<\/p>\n I<\/span>\u00a0had a few reservations, of course, about visiting Qaddafi\u2019s Libya, having criticized Arab autocracies frequently in print, both here and abroad, and having read long ago the Colonel\u2019s bizarre\u00a0Green Book<\/i>\u00a0and its plans of making Libyans into new \u201cpartners\u201d of his authoritarian socialist state, rather than \u201cslaves\u201d to Western-style capitalist democracy. That pamphlet \u2014 a mishmash of Nasserite, socialist, Islamic, Bedouin, and authoritarian pop philosophizing \u2014 was Libya\u2019s\u00a0Robert\u2019s Rules of Order<\/i>\u00a0for a large cadre of aging revolutionary committees and increasingly worried security services.<\/p>\n Nor is it quite as easy to enter and travel inside Libya as its new generation of reformers envisions. Moreover, there was only an American interest section at the Corinthian hotel, no embassy, so travelers until recently were more or less on their own. And I had my own complications: because of a long-planned speaking tour in the American South, I would have to fly late and alone into Tripoli to meet the cruise ship from Italy \u2014 hopefully still docked at Leptis \u2014 and then trust that the visa that allowed me to enter only by air would also permit departure by sea to Carthage in Tunisia. Then there was a minor health problem of intermittent abdominal aching and nausea that had persisted for over a year, despite a physician\u2019s diagnosis of \u201cbad food\u201d or perhaps yet another kidney stone. Still, I figured I would stop the morning sit-ups and the Libyan holiday would be fine.<\/p>\n A<\/span>fter receiving my visa from a Canadian go-between \u2014 by spring of this year, our government still had not allowed any Libyan consular officials inside the United States \u2014 I landed in Tripoli in mid-April, met my government-supplied travel minders, and began asking rapid-fire questions about Libya, ancient and modern. Muammar Qaddafi\u2019s portrait, splashed over a background of his trademark green, still looms everywhere, albeit now surrounded with Coke and Sony billboards. The Colonel is also often superimposed on a verdant map of Africa to remind Libyans that his geriatric revolutionary socialist movement still exudes Pan-African zeal.<\/p>\n When I arrived, Lionel Richie had just finished a rock concert at Qaddafi\u2019s former residence, commemorating the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan\u2019s \u201ccrime\u201d of bombing Tripoli. Between songs, Richie offered prayers for Qaddafi\u2019s deceased \u201cdaughter,\u201d killed by the American bombs (most think that Qaddafi adopted her posthumously). Most Libyans I talked with, though, seemed indifferent to the celebration, griping instead about all the money going \u201csouth\u201d to Third World con artists in sub-Saharan Africa still masquerading as sixties-style Communists and national liberationists. They were much more interested in the world to the north, asking whether George Bush would reply seriously to Qaddafi\u2019s bold peace feelers and follow the Europeans back into Libya.<\/p>\n As my minders drove me the next few days back and forth through the drab city, I was struck that a nation that could export 1.6 million barrels of oil a day (bringing in over $40 billion in annual income at recent prices) could not yet asphalt all the dusty back ways of Tripoli\u2019s suburbs or fix the gargantuan potholes on the main thoroughfares. But read the\u00a0Green Book<\/i>, and then the general poverty of the country seems the logical manifestation of Qaddafi\u2019s zealous vows to eliminate most private property, end a market economy and its \u201cparasitical\u201d middle class, shrink the professional elite, and ensure cradle-to-grave subsidies for everyone else \u2014 all the while supporting \u201cliberation\u201d movements from South Africa to Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he first few days went well. The intrigue of Leptis Magna is not just that it spreads almost endlessly through dunes and grass-covered hills, with the pristine Mediterranean shore at its back, but that most of its remains, like Colonel Qaddafi\u2019s oil, still lie under the sand. Skeletons of old Italian cart rails and rusted tools are scattered around the site, the detritus of Mussolini\u2019s once-grand schemes to showcase his Roman forebears\u2019 first civilizing mission to tame North Africa. Western archaeologists, nursed on the dated excavation reports of the 1960s, have pined to return for four decades. For the classical scholar, Leptis of the magnificent mosaics is like a mine in the mother lode, shut down when its richest vein was scarcely tapped.<\/p>\n Libyans seem to talk nonstop. It\u2019s as if they have been jolted from a long sleep and are belatedly discovering, thanks to their newfound Internet, satellite television, and cell phones \u2014 many carry two to ensure that they are never out of service from competing companies \u2014 that there is indeed a wide world outside of dreary Tripoli and beyond the monotonous harangues of government socialists on the state-owned TV and radio stations.<\/p>\n They talked about their new gadgetry, and much else, with infectious optimism. As one hopeful Libyan travel entrepreneur with friends in the government explained, there might be some irony after all to Libya\u2019s long, self-imposed insularity. Yes, he conceded, foreign investment declined. Oilmen left. Petroleum production nose-dived from more than 3 million barrels to never more than 2 million. But there was a silver lining: Did all that not have the effect of saving Libya\u2019s precious resource to await the return of the present sky-high prices? Yes, Libya had banked a sort of strategic oil reserve that now was to be tapped at its most opportune moment. Yes, it was Libya\u2019s grand strategy to deny Westerners its petroleum treasure for years, until they finally came around to pay what it was really worth!<\/p>\n While my travel entrepreneur had offered that analysis in deference to, or in fear of, the Colonel, I was not sure that it did not make a certain sort of post facto sense. And at caf\u00e9s and the government port offices \u2014 it turned out that, due to restrictions on my visa, I was not allowed to leave Libyan soil to board even the docked cruise ship and had to return to hotels in Tripoli each evening \u2014 Libyans gushed on that geologists may have just scratched the surface of their country\u2019s known oil and gas reserves. The petroleum alone under the desert was already pegged at 40 billion barrels \u2014 with 60 percent of the country still uncharted. To add to their euphoria, I did some quick math. At a theoretical $70 a barrel, the likely climb back to more than 3 million barrels a day could mean an extra $35 billion a year in windfall Libyan petro-profits.<\/p>\n Libyans have surprisingly little anger over these four squandered decades. Instead, they kept voicing the same themes \u2014 including that the past opportune \u201cconservation\u201d soon would bring dividends to the magnificent ruins at Sabratha and Leptis as well. \u201cIsn\u2019t it true, Dr. Hanson,\u201d they often queried, \u201cthat our antiquities are the best in the Mediterranean? Because few have seen them, they are mysterious and not so damaged from tourism \u2014 and now just waiting for you in the West to work with us to rediscover them. The sand at Leptis is like the sand of the desert: both have been keeping our ruins and oil safe until now.\u201d<\/p>\n T<\/span>he tiny world of classics, of course, eagerly awaits the reopening of Leptis Magna. But more important, there are rumors of Italian and Maltese tourist pavilions and more Corinthian-like seaside hotels to come \u2014 the Mediterranean coastline outside of Tripoli is as beautiful as it is pristine. Over lunches, the Libyan tourist officials traded guesses on the numbers of European cruise ships that would soon queue up outside Libya\u2019s soon-to-be-built tourist docks. They would unload myriads of shoppers laden with euros and eager for Berber folk arts and crafts \u2014 culture\u2019s counterpart to the proposed enormous liquefied natural gas plants that would supply Europe\u2019s energy appetite across the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n But always framing these conversations were two more melancholy themes that led to sudden embarrassing silences \u2014 the United States\u2019 new Middle East \u201cdemocratization\u201d policy and Libya\u2019s recent history. Would the United States warm to Libya\u2019s bold opening without impossible preconditions? Were not Libya\u2019s oil, antiquities, and goodwill enough to make everyone forget the unfortunate shared past \u2014 the last sentiments always in more hushed tones, given the fear of ubiquitous government informers in and outside our small circle.<\/p>\n When I went over the old litany \u2014 the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Libya\u2019s vast weapons-of-mass-destruction program, the efforts to cause havoc in Chad, the trumped-up capital convictions of Bulgarian nurses falsely charged with deliberately injecting Libyan children with HIV, the recent plan to assassinate Saudi crown prince Abdullah after he traded slurs with Qaddafi at an Arab League summit in 2003, and on and on \u2014 Libyans looked away as if the rude stranger had ruined a long-planned reunion celebration.<\/p>\n A<\/span>t night, I stayed at either a shabby government-run hotel or the overbooked Corinthian \u2014 the oasis in Tripoli, home to American consular officials, oilmen, and deal makers of every stripe. It is a Star Wars bar of opulent sheikhs and savvy Texans, although its immaculate marble, first-rate service \u2014 the nation\u2019s only ATM stands in the lobby \u2014 and excellent food are more reminiscent of something out of the Gulf or Las Vegas.<\/p>\n A constant topic among foreigners is the mystery over Qaddafi\u2019s opening of the country in 2004 and his pledge to give up his WMD arsenal. American liberal pundits ridicule the administration\u2019s claim that Saddam Hussein\u2019s capture, and especially the end of his sons Uday and Qusay, prompted the Colonel\u2019s desire to avoid the same fate for his family \u2014 proof, as it were, of the success of the Bush Middle East policy. But perhaps it is true \u2014 at least that is what Qaddafi supposedly told Italian prime minister Berlusconi in a phone conversation: \u201cI will do whatever the Americans want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n Libyans, of course, prefer to put a diplomatic spin on the conversion without assigning causation: \u201cYou Americans,\u201d they told me, \u201cshould call it a windfall: you went to the wrong palace to find your WMD by force but, by our goodwill, found it here nonetheless \u2014 and in peace.\u201d I smiled and added that rumors abound in Tripoli of Americans pondering a multimillion-dollar incinerator to dispose of the deadly stockpiles.<\/p>\n B<\/span>ut there were other reasons for change as well. At least three of Qaddafi\u2019s eight children are European-educated and reportedly have persuaded their father to emulate what they have seen and enjoyed abroad. His father\u2019s most trusted child, 33-year-old Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, heads a charity foundation and talks often about reform and the need for more Western expertise. In vague terms, he even hints that political liberalization will follow the strengthening of the economy.<\/p>\n There is also real Libyan disgust over the billions squandered on revolutionary \u2014 mostly terrorist \u2014 movements the world over, especially the largesse given to the African insurrectionists. As one minor Libyan official put it to me, \u201cThey all cut deals with you in the West \u2014 the African National Congress, the IRA, Sandinistas, Liberians, and the Palestinians. Now you think these former killers are okay again, but not us \u2014 who had less blood on our hands. So why should we not deal, too?\u201d I passed over the probable falsity of that claim and instead reminded him of rumors that al-Qaeda-backed terrorists see Qaddafi\u2019s quasi-secular socialism as heresy and have been trying in earnest to assassinate him \u2014 groups with such typical bumper-sticker nomenclature as the Islamic Movement of Martyrs, Libyan Jihad Movement, and Islamic Movement for Change. Apparently the enemy of our enemies is to be our friend, after all.<\/p>\n As the conversation lengthened, Libyan nationalism was more freely voiced as an additional catalyst for change. Did I know that much of Libya\u2019s known oil reserves were in the east, near the poorly demarcated and disputed Egyptian border? Did Americans appreciate that rich Libya is a vast country with few Arabs, while poor Egypt is a narrow ribbon of more than 70 million Arabs? More concerns followed. There are a million Egyptian guest workers in Libya, many of them there illegally. In Egyptian circles, pan-Arabist talk of the old Nasserite notion of a United Arab Republic still abounds, a \u201creunification\u201d perhaps of part of Libya\u2019s eastern tribal zones with an Egypt without oil \u2014 the same sort of nonsense that Libya once proposed to Tunisia. In this context, my Libyan companions voiced a weird sort of nostalgia for the old American Wheelus air force base, vacated in 1970 \u2014 now an eerie, grass-covered area on the coast east of Tripoli that was partly expropriated by the Soviet and then the Libyan air force, and then bombed in the 1986 U.S. raid.<\/p>\n D<\/span>riving over potholes in a small, cramped Nissan full of cigarette smoke, I thought, must explain the increasing fevers and occasional vomiting I was continuing to experience. Was it car sickness or something I ate? Even when much of the abdominal pain suddenly went away, the brief respite gave way to even more sweats and fever. Or maybe the malaise was due to the newly allowed Al Jazeera beaming in all the caf\u00e9s, blaring out the usual monotony of IED explosions from Iraq and finger-shaking lectures from Gaza and Lebanon. Finally, after another three-hour marathon session with port officials, I was allowed onto the ship and had my first dinner with the guests. Then I finished a formal lecture on the Roman economy and culture of the early empire in the lounge \u2014 and quite literally collapsed in a fever in my cabin.<\/p>\n A few hours after the lecture, I woke up, delirious, and called the ship\u2019s doctor, a young Ukrainian. After a quick examination, she guessed a perforated appendix, perhaps already of some hours\u2019 or even a day\u2019s duration. She then explained the bad \u2014 and worse \u2014 options: the ship was embarking the next morning on a 30-hour cruise to Tunisia. If I did have a ruptured appendix, surgery would be impossible at sea. I could risk the voyage or, as she advised, try a Libyan hospital, although no Westerner to her knowledge \u2014 and she knew of Russians who had worked in Tripoli \u2014 had recently experienced surgery in the state-run hospitals. Prior to departure, I had done some research on Libya and remembered coming across an old\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0piece that referred in passing to Libya\u2019s hospitals as \u201cdirty death traps.\u201d And I remembered the stories of the Bulgarian nurses and their clinic\u2019s contaminated needles, as well as an offhand remark by one of my newfound Libyan friends that he had just returned\u00a0from Tunis<\/i>\u00a0for \u201cminor\u201d surgery.<\/p>\n By midnight, the fever had climbed higher, and there was really little choice. The Libyan minders arrived, worried that I had food poisoning or some other bad experience that might sour our once-happy plans for national conciliation. After a brief consultation, they notified the proper port authorities. I was allowed off the boat, driven in a taxi to the nearest Red Crescent clinic, and rushed in. The on-call intern had good and bad news: the pain and swelling probably indicated a textbook case of a perforated appendix, so the diagnosis was not a problem. But there were a few hitches. I had to be operated on immediately at the clinic \u2014 no time for the hospital \u2014 and that would require a mandatory government blood test and finding a surgeon at 2 am.<\/p>\n T<\/span>he clinic was what one sees everywhere in the medical practice of the Third World. In the chaos, there seem no formal demarcations between patients and hordes of relatives, janitors, and doctors at work, or waiting and operating rooms. So I still insisted that the recurring pain was just another kidney stone \u2014 I have passed a half-dozen in the last 30 years and had one cut out \u2014 or at least a year-old problem relieved, as in the past, by antibiotics. But on arrival, the bleary-eyed surgeon smiled at this pathetic denial and matter-of-factly announced his verdict: immediate surgery \u2014 the sooner the better, to ensure that the spread of peritonitis remained \u201clocalized.\u201d<\/p>\n A Pakistani nurse sterilized a few surgical instruments, and soon a young Syrian anesthesiologist arrived. They took me to a tiny sparse room with a table and a light. The doctor assured me that he would not only do a good job but would also \u201cclean up\u201d the mess, with as many bags of saline and as much suctioning as necessary. He laughed at my final stab at alternative antibiotic treatment, and murmured something like, \u201cYou probably want to live tomorrow, so we\u2019d better start right now.\u201d<\/p>\n I tried to use the bathroom, but the toilet was backed up, without paper, and the floor watery. I had a few memories in delirium of leaving a final phone message for my family back in California that things were not going well in Tripoli. When the nurse readied my mask, she said in English, \u201cPut your trust in Allah.\u201d For some reason \u2014 I am not a church attendee \u2014 I whispered back, \u201cI prefer the redemptive power of Jesus Christ.\u201d The last images I remember were of an illuminated minaret out the window and Qaddafi in sunglasses glaring down from the wall \u2014 and a strange sense of well-being that complete strangers, with little resources at their disposal, were eager to save my life at 4 am in an Islamic clinic.<\/p>\n L<\/span>ibya poses a special damned-if-you-do\/damned-if-you-don\u2019t challenge for the Bush administration, especially in autumn 2006, after the Hamas election victory on the West Bank and the ongoing mayhem in Iraq, Afghanistan, and southern Lebanon, when neoconservative idealism is fading before the return of more hard-nosed realism in foreign policy. I heard the arguments of both sides in a later meeting with State Department and National Security Agency officials following my return.<\/p>\n Skeptics can\u2019t really believe that Reagan\u2019s \u201cmad dog,\u201d who once called on Arabs to \u201cdestroy\u201d the United States and its Arab surrogates, could ever be sincere, much less relied upon. But more important, how can the United States cut a deal that serves to legitimize a dictator and his gulag, when Americans are dying in the Hindu Kush and the Sunni Triangle to foster and protect democracies?<\/p>\n And what about cutting the ground out from under Libyan exiles, idealists, and reformers\u2014such as the outspoken Mohamed and Fathi El-Jahmi \u2014 long the targets of Qaddafi\u2019s operatives? Isn\u2019t this the Libya that tried at one time or another to overthrow or undermine the governments of Egypt, Chad, Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia? And aren\u2019t journalists still locked up \u2014 or killed, as in the case of Daif al-Ghazai? And aren\u2019t the infamous\u00a0zina<\/i>\u00a0laws, which lock up indefinitely women accused of supposed moral laxity, still in effect, proving that in the Middle East a secular police state can be just as repressive as an Islamist patriarchy? I gathered also that the present goodwill of the Libyan people toward the United States rested in part on our constant opposition to Qaddafi \u2014 confirmation of sorts of Bernard Lewis\u2019s dictum that when a Middle Eastern autocracy hates us, we are popular, and when not, we are hated.<\/p>\n I<\/span>n response, the counterargument went that Libya has oil and natural gas, not just for America but to be put on the global market to help bring supply and demand back into a reasonable equilibrium. So far, our principled distance from Libya has only facilitated Chinese, Russian, and now European entrance into the country, all of whom demand little of Libya in terms of democratization but take away a lot in business and oil. And who knows exactly the true nature of Libyan dissidents? Aren\u2019t some of them radical Islamists, who want electoral victory merely to legitimize their anti-Western hatred? That possibility later hit home for me in an informal Washington, D.C., meeting, when one Libyan democratic \u201creformer\u201d insisted in our conversation on using \u201cZionist entity\u201d for Israel as he unleashed a repugnant torrent of anti-Semitic nonsense.<\/p>\n The arguments for normalization go on: Qaddafi is somewhere in his late sixties, no longer 20-something, with succession now up in the air. Ridding the world of his weapons-of-mass-destruction stockpiles is alone worth the risk of reconciliation. If his Westernized offspring can liberalize the economy now, perhaps they might in the future assume a Juan Carlos role, satisfied to be ceremonial godheads in a parliamentary republic. None has blood on his hands. Besides, the United States does not have a superfluity of friends in the Middle East, and the more wildcards in our hand the better, especially when the Libyans and we are shared targets of Islamic terrorists. To paraphrase the arguments of Jeanne Kirkpatrick, sometimes isn\u2019t it enough that a stable Middle East autocracy eradicates terrorism, since, unlike theocracies or Communist states, such secular dictatorships are much more likely in the distant future to evolve into constitutional governments? So the conundrum continues.<\/p>\n I<\/span>n the early dawn I awoke, groggy from the anesthetic but euphoric, since I was somewhat surprised to be alive. I was immediately told that the Colonel \u201cdiscourages\u201d analgesics of any sort and that this abstinence was \u201cgood,\u201d since I would heal quicker and avoid postoperative constipation. No matter \u2014 survival was good enough, especially if the antibiotics would kill off the peritonitis. Back in the United States, a Libyan later laughed that I was lucky that I had tested HIV-negative on the mandatory preoperative test, and left it at that. I gathered that quarantine, not lifesaving surgery, awaits those with a positive result. The final bill for surgery, drugs, and a few days at the clinic was $800, not surprising in a socialist paradise where surgeons make about the same state-mandated wages as those who mop the floors.<\/p>\n These days of recuperation were the most interesting of my Libyan holiday, despite the pain from the surgery and the receding infection. The first guests were career diplomats from the American interest section. They were savvy, both married to Arab nationals, and the epitome of the American foreign service\u2019s best professionalism, insisting that food be served, that IV needles be fresh \u2014 and urging me to make plans to leave as soon as possible. Soon we talked of politics, and with characteristic sobriety they cautioned neither pessimism nor euphoria, but \u201cexploration.\u201d I liked them but did not envy their task in the next month of laying the foundations for an embassy\u00a0ex nihilo<\/i>.<\/p>\n Dr. Hafez al-Hafez, a Libyan-American exile and medical consultant for the American interest section, also visited regularly. He had only recently been reinvited into Libya as a neurosurgeon. Dr. Hafez immediately made sure that the peritonitis was in remission and that the right antibiotics were being dripped in, and then he held up my gangrenous appendix in a jar of alcohol. He smiled that I had had a close call but admonished that the healed-over abscesses and pustules hanging from what was left from the carcass proved that it was a chronic problem of some duration. Then, like all Libyans, he talked politics.<\/p>\n If there is a future for Libya, it will require moderate and educated elites, such as Dr. Hafez, whom the government is cautiously inviting back in and whom it needs desperately to jump-start the economy and reestablish the beginnings of a stable, humane culture. The doctor, in carefully chosen words, echoed the now-familiar themes: that the past is past; that Libya is Libyan, not pan-Arabist; reasonable rather than Islamic fundamentalist; and ready for sincere reengagement. He feels that he poses no danger to the Qaddafi regime, since their short-term aims are now one and the same in reestablishing contact with the West, and since he is a Libyan nationalist and an American go-between, not a zealot of any sort.<\/p>\n I also corresponded with a few Libyan government officials and, once back home, a few other exiles, and their similar optimism rests on the somewhat shaky proposition that if Libya\u2019s vast petroleum and tourist potential is tapped, the resulting bounty will take on a life of its own, convincing even the revolutionary generation of 1969 that the Gulf model is preferable to the nightmare of Iran or Syria. Always in the background looms the untenable option of al-Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood, which all want to avoid.<\/p>\n L<\/span>ibya was a key part of the world\u2019s first globalization, when Rome spread its culture to the shores of North Africa. By its own volition, it appears ready to reenter at least the global commercial system and renounce its past roguery. No one knows quite why Qaddafi changed or whether the about-face is sincere, much less whether it bodes well for the United States in the long term \u2014 or even if we can embrace it in the short term without cynical hypocrisy on our part.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure a desire for a Western standard of living, fear of ending up like the Taliban or the Husseins, jealousy of the rich oil-exporting Gulf sheikhdoms, worry over Islamists and former enemies in the Maghrib, weariness with foreign, money-hungry 1960s revolutionaries, the isolation of a crippling trade boycott, and the opportunity for more Machiavellian triangulation on a new world stage all played a role. But for now, the benefits for both sides outweigh the risks. So we should press ahead \u2014 with eyes wide open, in constant consultation with Libyan reformers, and always with the non-negotiable demand that the lives of Libyan dissidents, at home and abroad, are to be sacrosanct.<\/p>\n I lost my bottled, deflated, and black appendix on return, when my physician thought its odd appearance suggested \u2014 if it really was an appendix and not part of the intestine, he wondered out loud \u2014 that it might well be cancerous. It was not, but the pathologist ground it up all the same. As I write this, four months after the surgery, I have just left the emergency room from another bout with abdominal adhesions, but remain very thankful to my friends in Tripoli, who saved my life and shed a great deal of light on a once-shadowy place, on a very memorable Libyan holiday.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 City Journal<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It wasn’t just the politics. by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal\u00a0(Autumn 2006) Libya? Most are rightly taken aback at the thought. But I was also intrigued when an educational cruise line invited me to lecture this past April on the classical antiquities of Libya \u2014 or, more properly, \u201cThe Socialist People\u2019s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[765],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-YC","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7048,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/seven-christians-executed-in-libya\/","url_meta":{"origin":3758,"position":0},"title":"Seven Christians Executed in Libya","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 25, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Raymond Ibrahim \/\/\u00a0RaymondIbrahim.com\u00a0 Libyan authorities came across the slain bodies of seven Christian Copts in the region of Garutha, less than 20 miles west of Benghazi, on Monday afternoon. According to Libyan authorities, \u201cThe slain were killed by gunshots all over their bodies.\u201d Pictures (reproduced above and below) confirm\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":963,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-libyan-non-model\/","url_meta":{"origin":3758,"position":1},"title":"The Libyan Non-Model","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online It is a good thing that Moammar Qaddafi is gone, even if by barbaric means. So what did we learn from the 2011 misadventure, given that some are advocating much the same sort of action against Syria and Iran? Answer: Not much. 1.\u00a0Small\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":384,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-bright-and-shining-libyan-lie\/","url_meta":{"origin":3758,"position":2},"title":"A Bright and Shining Libyan Lie","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 25, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Almost everything we have been told about\u00a0Libya\u00a0over the last two years is untrue. A free\u00a0Libya\u00a0was supposed to be proof of President Obama's enlightened reset\u00a0Middle East\u00a0policy. When insurgency broke out there,\u00a0the United States\u00a0joined\u00a0France\u00a0and\u00a0Great Britain\u00a0in bombing\u00a0Muammar Gadhafi\u00a0out of power \u2014 and supposedly empowering a democratic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3410,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-libyan-march-madness\/","url_meta":{"origin":3758,"position":3},"title":"Our Libyan March Madness","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 27, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The prognosis for Libya might be better if our president cared more about it than about the NCAA. The Obama administration\u2019s Libyan strategy is a paradox \u2014 resulting from the president\u2019s belatedly announcing that Moammar Qaddafi must go, using military force against him,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Libya"","block_context":{"text":"Libya","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/libya\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3367,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/president-obamas-most-amazing-libyan-achievments\/","url_meta":{"origin":3758,"position":4},"title":"President Obama’s Most Amazing Libyan Achievments","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America: (a)\u00a0War-mongering liberals: Liberals are now chest-thumping about military \u201cprogress\u201d in Libya. 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