Barak Barfi: Libya’s Greatest Advantage? The Modest Expectations of the Libyan People

Barak Barfi is a research fellow with the New America Foundation.

The Libyan people are right to celebrate as their country’s benighted Muammar Qaddafi era comes to a definitive close, but the country’s new leadership should also not forget that its work is just beginning. Building a new political order will be difficult, not least because Libyan political culture is notoriously underdeveloped, with only the barest history of civic engagement.

However, if the leaders of the Transitional National Council prove to be as politically canny as they were physically brave, they’ll soon realize that their national vice is actually a potential virtue.

Qaddafi, for his part, didn’t see it that way, perpetually castigating the Libyan people as a hindrance to his plans. But that was because his aspirations irredeemably revolutionary. Indeed, from the time Qaddafi assumed control of Libya in 1969, he basked in his utopian visions—he even collected them in a three-volume work, dubbed The Green Book, that became mandatory reading for the nation. The national government was to be dissolved and its responsibilities transferred to local municipalities; workers were encouraged to seize factories and businesses from their owners and managers; Qaddafi himself resigned his official government posts and declared that his role would be limited to offering advice to his nation as its “Brother Leader.”...

Qaddafi’s greatest problem was that hardly anyone in the society he wanted to lead could be moved to follow him. Qaddafi intended to use Libya’s oil wealth to buy the country the modernization and power he coveted. But above all, he sought to mobilize his people to action. He wanted to instill them with the revolutionary zeal that he felt so keenly. The Libyan people refused....