A Victory for Diplomacy: Libya Renounces Weapons of Mass Destruction

From the Winning Without War newsletter, Fall, 2004

September 30, 2004 By Alistair Millar For over thirty years, intelligence officials and other experts warned that Libya was an emerging threat and was developing its capacity to acquire and facilitate the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction. Late last year, however, in a seemingly abrupt reversal of policy, Libya’s head of state Col. Moammar Qaddafi announced his government’s decision to disclose and dismantle its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs and to allow international inspectors unconditional access to monitor and verify compliance.

How did this happen? Why would a dictator willingly give up weapons of mass destruction?

Some officials and commentators claim that the war on Iraq forced Qaddafi’s hand. On the day that the U.S. officially announced that it would start to lift sanctions on Libya and normalize diplomatic relations with Tripoli, Vice President Dick Cheney offered this explanation: "So we went into Iraq, took down the regime. . . . Moammar Qaddafi, in Libya, watched all of this. He’d been . . . actively and aggressively trying to acquire nuclear weapons. He watched what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, and he decided maybe he might want to reconsider what he was all about. Five days after we arrested Saddam Hussein, Colonel Qaddafi went public and said, I give it up, come get it, it’s all yours."

However, the evidence, and further testimony from the president himself, offer a different explanation for Libya’s about-face: Sanctions and diplomacy were the driving force behind Libya’s decision and the war on Iraq had very little to do with it.

Surprising as this sounds, Libya’s decision to cooperate stems from a long-term, ongoing, diplomatic relationship between the Libyan, UK, and U.S. governments that predates the Bush administration and the war on Iraq. In his last State of the Union address President Bush proclaimed that, "Nine months of intense negotiations succeeded with Libya. . . ." While the president explained it more accurately than Mr. Cheney, the process actually started more than a few months ago. Libya had been under economic sanctions for thirty years and, as the Congressional Research Service notes, the country’s desire to come to an agreement with the West on weapons of mass destruction dates back to 1992. The Clinton administration did not take seriously the initial Libyan efforts to join the international community (Libyan officials had approached a former U.S. senator, who was frustrated by the lack of response from U.S. officials) and thus failed to take advantage of opportunities to remove Libya’s weapons programs years ago.

Five years ago, Col. Qaddafi once more initiated discussions on normalizing relations, approaching the British government with an offer that ended in a deal to settle legal disputes over issues that included the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1989. The Libyan leader offered to send two Libyans for trial and then agreed to pay reparations in exchange for the end of sanctions. The UN Security Council responded to pressure from the international community and lifted its embargo in September 2003. Separate U.S. sanctions continued, however, until June 2004 when Qaddafi surrendered his programs for developing unconventional weapons, pledged to support U.S. efforts to work against terrorist groups, and cleared the way for the U.S. to start lifting sanctions.

Two months before Libya concluded this deal, American and British officials, acting on intelligence reports, diverted a German ship heading for Libya. Upon inspection of the vessel, equipment for processing nuclear weapons-grade material was discovered and seized. It is likely that this seizure had the effect of speeding up Libya’s decision to dismantle its programs. The interdiction was an important factor, but it should not be overstated. It did not create the necessary and sufficient conditions for reaching a successful agreement with Qaddafi. It would be impossible to imagine the favorable outcome of the episode with Libya (which has even now further outpaced the U.S. on fulfilling nonproliferation commitments by ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty) if the U.S. had not been engaged in active negotiation and years of dialogue with Libya and many multilateral organizations.

A policy of simply labeling states as rogue nations, and thereby refusing to engage those nations in diplomatic efforts, denies those nations avenues for peaceful dismantlement of weapons programs and resolution of disputes. Effective intelligence gathering from reliable sources and measures to act on that intelligence worked in the case of Libya, but only as part of an ongoing process of dialogue, which enabled a desired outcome and improved security without resort to war.