Benghazi is the first thing most readers will turn to in a book on contemporary Libya. If Fox News is your source for disinformation, you will leave disappointed from The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Author Frederic Wehrey was called to testify before Congress and declared the GOP investigation a fishing expedition with neither a worm nor a catch. Proponents of Barack Obama’s foreign policy will already be disappointed. As Wehrey makes clear, American strategy in Libya was based on little understanding and less information. It became a country that exceeded every worst-case scenario.
A military officer attached for several years to the U.S. embassy in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, Wehrey admires the ambassador who died during the storming of the American consulate in Benghazi, J. Christopher Stevens. In Wehrey’s estimation Stevens was an asset to the Foreign Service, intellectually curious and lacking the chauvinism that has often characterized his profession. His previous experience in the Middle East taught him that understanding could be reached and bridges could be built. The intense and berserker hatred of Libyan extremists and the factions that divided the militants against each other must have been as incomprehensible to him as it was in Washington.
The Burning Shores condenses Libyan history neatly enough in a few pages. Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, once “the mad dog of the Middle East,” had reinvented himself, with the help of American PR and gullible Western intellectuals, as a philosopher king and ally of the West. He was always a brutal and erratic dictator, yet the turmoil that ensued as his regime was swept aside in the Arab Spring tempts nostalgia for his reign.
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The factions that emerged in Qaddafi’s wake were numerous but can roughly be divided along regional lines, tribal boundaries and more-or-less secularists versus Islamists of varying loyalties. Foreign powers from Qatar and the Saudis to Britain and the Russians intervened and played favorites. Libya unraveled into bloody civil war and the death of the U.S. ambassador was the least of its citizens’ problems.
In addition to internal carnage, and the threat of becoming a base for Al Qaeda and ISIS, Libya became the conduit for a torrent of refugees fleeing violence and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Conditions were so bad in their home countries that, according to Wehrey, 50% were content to stay in Libya rather than run the risk of pushing on to Europe.
Wehrey doesn’t spell it out but the implication can be drawn: Once again, U.S. and European governments erred through their encounters with people who spoke the right catch phrases—a Western educated elite, often exiles with tenuous roots in their homeland, who, intentionally or not, painted an unrealistic picture. The euphoria over toppling Qaddafi was short lived. As a Libyan friend told Wehrey, “Now we’ve got thousands of Qaddafis rather than only one.”
