How Libya Blew Billions and Its Best Chance at Democracy

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It’s hard for the West to understand the full scope of the disaster that’s befallen Libya. It’s happened, in part, because no one in or outside Libya bothered to figure out what the country might really look like after the dictator was gone. “Even after Afghanistan and Iraq, no one seems to have thought seriously about what would happen afterward,”? says al-Ghwell, the World Bank economist. Al-Ghwell, one of the world’s leading experts on the development of North African economies, says Libya is well along the road to becoming something new: the world’s first failed petro state. “You can imagine Somali rebels and pirates with money to burn,”? he says, when asked why the collapse of Libya should bother anyone besides the Libyans.

Unlike many political leaders, Ali Zeidan, Libya’s former prime minister, is willing to discuss on the record his fear of radical Islamist cells that are often referred to by Libyans as Al Qaeda. While some of those cells do have direct links to Al Qaeda, others are linked to Ansar al-Sharia and to other salafist factions that share a willingness to die for their radical Islamist ideology. Some of these cells function as the spearhead for larger Islamist militias. “You can’t come to a compromise with them,”? Zeidan says over coffee in a hotel in a small town outside Munich, where he now makes his home. “They don’t accept the civil state, the state of law, in principle. They want Islamic government. Or fanatic government.”? In the vacuum left by the collapse of the state, the fanatics are extending their grip. “The problem is that there is nobody against them, no intelligence service, no army, no nothing,”? he says. “So 300 fanatics can have a lot of power.”?

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