fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

‘The Libyans Defeated Everyone’

Shockingly, liberal democracy does not come easy to people of the Middle East
Libya Photo Collection
In this Friday, March 4, 2011 picture, a Libyan rebel who is part of the forces against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi holds a sword as he rides in a car to the frontline near Ras Lanuf, west of the town of Brega, eastern Libya. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer, File)

The New Yorker‘s Jon Lee Anderson visits post-Qaddafi Libya, and finds that the country has gone to hell. Excerpt:

Other officials were more blunt about the limits of the intervention. The senior Administration official believed that three failures had led to the fiasco in Libya: “The lack of a single national-security apparatus, replaced by militias; a real terrorist problem, which was small but has gotten much worse; and a proliferation of arms. How does the world respond to all this? The U.N. gets a mandate, goes there, and finds out there’s no one to work with—the ministries are Potemkin. The I.M.F. goes in, says what’s wrong, and doesn’t do much about it. The World Bank hardly does anything. Vast numbers of people came to Libya to look for contracts, but nobody got any money, so they went away.NATO tried to design a national-defense system, but the Libyans failed to engage with them. The French were going to train three thousand police. Instead, they trained thirty. Then some cadets were sent to Jordan for training, but the Jordanians kicked them out after they burned down a sports facility, because they were angry about a flight delay.” In November, the official noted, three hundred Libyan soldiers being trained in the U.K. were expelled after half a dozen of them ran amok in an English village, sexually assaulting several women and raping a man. “The Libyans defeated everyone,” he said. “It didn’t matter whether you were Gandhi or Stalin. It didn’t matter how hard we tried, they defeated us all.”

Sounds like the entire Middle East, doesn’t it?

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now