Libya’s Glorious Dawn: A Model or a Warning for the Arab Spring

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

In his article, “Libya’s Glorious Dawn”, posted on the ezine http://www.theamericanmuslim.org on August 23, 2011,  Dr. Hassan Zillur Rahim welcomed the liberation of Libya from a dictator who envisaged himself as another Che Guevara obsessed with a dream to impose his utopia on Libya and the world.  He writes:

  “The transformation of Muslim Middle East, though still incomplete, is the signature event of the twenty-first century.  Its effect will define the course of history in ways that are beyond the comprehension of even the most astute observers. But a few signposts can be discerned:

1. Dictatorship in all its forms and manifestations, even the ones under the guise of democracy, is doomed. People who cowered in fear have discovered freedom from fear, a discovery that has gone viral around the world.  Today’s invincible autocrat is tomorrow’s cowering prisoner. ‘A man can be destroyed’, wrote Hemingway, ‘but not defeated’. The architects of the Arab revolution have proven this with their blood.

2. People in power can no longer use religion for political ends, at least not with the ease they were able to in the past.  It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims killed since the Second World War have died at the hands of other Muslims.  Invoking bogus threats to torture dissidents and perpetuate dynastic power will no longer work.  A significant corollary of this is that more and more Muslims, particularly in the Middle East, will demand the separation of mosque and state.

3. Israel will be forced to confront reality and coexist with Palestinians in a two-state solution.  The Muslim Middle East will go through yet more convulsions - tribal and sectarian conflicts will probably raise their ugly heads - before the democratic rule of law, transparency, accountability, and enlightened governance take hold.  When that happens, and it surely will, Israel will have to recognize that it is a part of the Middle East and not an outpost of ‘Western Civilization’ transplanted in the middle of an alien and backward region.  Likewise, extremist organizations from both sides will be marginalized as the benefits of good governance and the moral high ground become evident. In September, Palestinians will seek statehood at the United Nations. The United States will dutifully cast its veto to ‘protect’ Israel.  Such myopic policies will be much harder to justify in the transformed political landscape of the Middle East.  In the coming months, the United States will recognize, as it has never recognized before, that ‘business as usual’ in the Middle East will be too detrimental to its interests to be sustainable.”

    Many African leaders, including many millions of their Sufi followers, may agree with this rosy scenario, but with hopes that the transfer of power in Libya could still serve to complete Qaddafi’s populist dream of a Free Africa, to which Qaddafi and his billions were committed, including an African Economic Union and an African bank.  The $30,000,000,000 that now will be handed over to the provisional government of Libya was dedicated to establish this bank.

    The plans of Qaddafi that most concerned NATO and its Arab and American allies, however, were his long term commitment to privatize all Libyan oil and gas in inalienable voting shares of stock equally to every citizen of Libya.  Such a revolutionary free-market cure for both the worst forms of Arabism and capitalism could unite disparate groups in support of any government that changed the direction of economic development from concentrating to broadening economic and political power.  This, of course, could also be construed as a threat to those who want merely to preserve the existing order of society through manipulation of the Arab Spring.

    Consider the following from Philip Pank, “Gaddafi Offers Oil and Power to People”, Sunday Times, February 21, 2009, and “Libya delays Gaddafi oil plan: Politicians shelve plan aimed at distributing oil revenues directly to people”, Al Jazeera, March 3, 2009, analyzed at the time in an one of my articles in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org as follows. 

“On February 21, 2011, five days after the Arab Spring broke out in Libya, Qaddafi launched a new program to privatize all Libyan oil to every citizen of Libya, initially providing $21,000 to every Libyan from a total of $32,000,000,000 in the Year 2011, so that the health, education, transport, and some other ministries could be abolished and individual Libyans could use the profits of their own investments, including from oil ownership, to obtain the relevant services. This, he said, is the best way to eliminate corruption, including the theft of Libyan oil by foreign oil companies, and to decentralize governmental power.

    “The question arises why the insurgent government in the former Ottoman and Italian protectorate of Cyrenaica does not support the oil privatization planned for both the eastern protectorate and the western protectorate of Tripolitania, which together now make up the State of Libya.

    “This had been discussed before, but on February 21st, Qaddafi announced that this new plan must be implemented immediately. The only question was how to accomplish this with a minimum of disruption.  On March 1st, the General Public Congress voted to support the devolution of economic power in principle but to delay implementation until preparatory measures could be completed.  In his message on February 21st, inaugurating the five-day annual round of meetings by Libya’s Basic Peoples Congresses and in celebration of the Fortieth Year of the Libyan Revolution, Colonal Qaddafi explained, ‘This is your historic opportunity to take your oil wealth, power, and full freedom’.”

    This could provide a model for Iraq, Bahrain, and a number of other countries with multiple identities, and even for alliances or confederations such as in the two new nations in the former artificial State of the Sudan and in an Abrahamic Federation of the Holy Land.  The sky is the limit and there are no limits to the new dawn.