Page 335 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

332 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

feel the weight of this baleful nationalism. The only uncertainty was where the
first blow would be struck.

On i September 1969 the government of King Idris of Libya was overturned
by a group of young army officers. The monarchy was abolished and Libya was
declared an Islamic socialist republic, with the Koran and the sharia as the basis
of its constitution. Power was concentrated in the hands of a Revolutionary
Command Council headed by a thirty-year-old colonel, Muammar Qaddafi.
Although the Western powers, and especially the United States and Britain,
were taken by surprise by the military coup d’etat, they were not on the whole
disconcerted by it. The general view in Washington and London was that the
reign of King Idris had been feeble and corrupt, and there was a lingering belief
in both capitals (a legacy from the early days of Nasser’s regime in Egypt) in the
cleansing and therapeutic powers of revolutions conducted by ardent young
officers of austere habits, stern demeanour and patent rectitude. If change
meant progress, so the accepted theory went, then arbitrary change meant even
greater progress. Colonel Qaddafi’s ascetic ways, his conspicuous piety and his
relentless vigour greatly impressed the British and American governments, so
that when he peremptorily demanded the immediate removal of their military
and air bases from Libya they hastened to accommodate him. They also felt

obliged, when a number of emigre Libyans organized an expedition to release
some political prisoners from a fortress in Tripoli with the object of overthrow­
ing the revolutionary regime, to inform Qaddafi in advance of the intended

attack and to intervene themselves to frustrate it. The British Foreign Office,
running true to the form it has increasingly shown of late years, also tried to
ingratiate itself with him by counselling British nurses in a hospital in Ben­
ghazi, when Libyan soldiers went on an anti-European rampage through the
town, to submit to rape rather than provoke the Libyans’ ill-will.
Oil was the only natural attribute that gave Libya any significance in the
world, and Qaddafi was resolved to use it to make his mark upon history. The
timid deference shown him by Britain and the United States convinced him
that he could conduct an economic jihad against the West without inviting
severe retaliation. He had a number of overlapping aims in view: to increase
Libya’s oil revenues by ignoring existing agreements with the oil companies, to
acquire, as soon as possible, control over the companies’ operations so as to be
able to manipulate oil supplies for political and financial purposes; to demon­
strate to the Arab world, by his audacity and success, that revolution and t e
Libyan brand of Arab socialism were the wave of the future; and to emp oj
Libya’s oil reserves and its revenues to promote the Palestinian cause an
encompass the destruction of Israel. There were several factors working to is
advantage, in addition to the radical policy adopted by OPEC in 1968 an
prevailing mood in the other Arab states. One was the growing depen ence
Western Europe upon Libyan oil, particularly since the closure o t e