goals.”67
Qaddafi’s involvement with international terrorism defined his country’s relationship with the United States. According to Ronald B. St. John, “What Libya saw as justifiable support for national liberation movements, the United States viewed as blatant interference in the domestic affairs of other states, if not active support for international terrorists.”68 During the early and mid-1980s relations between Washington and Tripoli dramatically worsened and eventually led to a series of violent confrontations.
“Swift and Effective Retribution”
Qaddafi’s Claim over the Gulf of Sidra
In 1970 the Libyan Arab Republic demanded and received a substantially higher price for the crude oil it sold to foreign petroleum companies, becoming the first oil-producing country in the world to do so. Over the next five years Libya’s annual oil earnings jumped from $1.35 billion to $6 billion, and with this huge revenue windfall Colonel Qaddafi procured foreign military equipment—mostly from the Soviet Union—at a rate that soon outpaced his country’s security needs and the ability of his armed forces to operate it efficiently. The CIA ascribed Qaddafi’s extravagant arms purchases to megalomania. According to the agency the Libyan leader believed that his huge arsenal, the country’s considerable oil earnings, and his revolutionary ideology would make him the leader of the Arab struggle against Zionism and Western influence in the region. Between 1970 and 1985 Qaddafi spent more than $20 billion on Soviet-made armaments, making Libya one of the largest customers of Soviet military hardware and technical assistance in the world.1
By the mid-1980s Qaddafi’s country of 3.6 million people possessed one of the best-equipped armed forces in the Middle East. The Libyan military boasted 2,800 tanks (including top-of-the-line, Soviet-built T-72s), 2,300 armored vehicles, 535 combat aircraft (including sophisticated French-built Mirages and high-performance, Soviet-built MiG-23s and MiG-25s), 6 Soviet-built Foxtrot diesel-electric submarines, 65 surface combatants (most of which were capable of firing deadly antiship cruise missiles), and one of the most modern air defense networks in the world. In reality, however, Libya’s military strength was considerably more formidable on paper than in fact. Hundreds of battle tanks and combat aircraft remained packed in their shipping crates, and a general lack of technical expertise and operational know-how hampered the effectiveness of the regular military, which numbered seventy-three thousand men in 1985. The Libyans relied heavily on advisers and technicians from the Soviet bloc for the installation, maintenance, and operation of the modern equipment in their large arsenal. In the early 1980s approximately twenty-five hundred Soviet military advisers served in Libya. Furthermore, it was widely reported that pilots from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea as well as some Palestinian groups flew missions for the Libyan Arab Air Force (LAAF) because the quantity of available operational aircraft exceeded the number of qualified Libyan pilots. The normal ratio, by comparison, was two pilots per aircraft.2
The Nixon administration was concerned about the accumulation of French-and Soviet-made arms on the southern littoral of the Mediterranean and, in 1972, commenced aerial reconnaissance to monitor Libya’s importation of military equipment. U.S. flight operations were conducted well outside Libyan airspace. Nevertheless, on 21 March 1973 two Libyan Mirage fighters attacked a U.S. Air Force RC-130 reconnaissance plane that was operating more than eighty miles off the coast of Libya. Fortunately the unarmed plane was not hit. Not surprisingly, Qaddafi ignored the protest note sent from Washington.
In retaliation for President Nixon’s decision to resupply Israel during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War and in an attempt to make aerial surveillance of his country more difficult, Qaddafi made a fateful announcement on 11 October 1973.3 He said that the entire Gulf of Sidra is “located within the territory of the Libyan Arab Republic . . . extending north offshore to latitude 32 degrees and 30 minutes, constitutes an integral part of the territory of the Libyan Arab Republic[,] and is under its complete sovereignty.”4 By proclaiming the huge gulf to be Libyan internal waters Qaddafi blatantly repudiated several longstanding international conventions. To support Libya’s claim he advanced his own interpretation of international law. First he argued that the Gulf of Sidra was a bay, although its 250-mile-wide opening far exceeded the 24-mile-wide maximum size allowed to enclose internal waters by Article 7 of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone. Second he stated that Libya’s claim over the Gulf of Sidra was historic, but W. Hays Parks, an authority on international law, explained that “such a claim must be long-standing, open, and notorious—with effective and continuous exercise of authority by the claimant—and one to which other states acquiesce.” Qaddafi’s declaration of sovereignty over the Gulf of Sidra dated from 1973, hardly a longstanding claim. Furthermore, by the mid-1980s only two countries—the post-Numayri regime in Sudan and Burkina Faso—had recognized Qaddafi’s claim.5
Principal Libyan military installations, mid-1980s
Libya: A Country Study, ed. Helen C. Metz, 1989
On 11 February 1974 the U.S. Department of State issued a démarche that called Libya’s claim of sovereignty over the Gulf of Sidra “unacceptable as a violation of international law.” The note made a further declaration: “The United States Government views the Libyan action as an attempt to appropriate a large area of the high seas by unilateral action, thereby encroaching upon the long-established principle of freedom of the seas. . . . The United States Government reserves its rights and the rights of its nationals in the area of the Gulf of Sidra affected by the action of the Government of Libya.”6 Similar protests were issued by the Soviet Union and several other nations.7
The United States and other maritime powers enjoyed a long history of operating in the international waters of the Gulf of Sidra and were understandably concerned about Qaddafi’s assertion of sovereignty over the gulf for two important reasons. First, the gulf forms a large indentation—120 miles at its deepest—in the North African coastline and is therefore a convenient location for naval forces to conduct surface and air exercises free of commercial fishing zones and away from the busy shipping lanes and air routes of the central Mediterranean. Acquiescence to Libyan sovereignty would have severely complicated and restricted training opportunities for the U.S. Sixth Fleet and other navies operating in the Mediterranean. Second, if left unchallenged Qaddafi’s claim would have encouraged other nations to advance their own unreasonable claims of extended territorial seas, creating, in the words of Parks, “the danger of international maritime anarchy.” At the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, held from 1973 to 1982, the U.S. delegation fought vigorously to maintain maximum operational mobility for its naval forces worldwide. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea extended territorial sea limits from three to twelve nautical miles but also reaffirmed important sections of the 1958 Convention on the Territorial Sea and Contiguous Zone including the definition of what constitutes a bay. The convention denied any recognition whatsoever of Libya’s claim over the Gulf of Sidra.8 Although the United States did not sign the 1982 convention, it accepted the convention’s twelve-mile limit for denoting territorial waters.9
President Carter’s Libya Policy
On three occasions between 1973 and 1979 the United States challenged Qaddafi’s illegal claim of sovereignty over the Gulf of Sidra by conducting routine naval exercises in the disputed waters. In late 1979 Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, and Adm. Thomas B. Hayward, the chief of naval operations, proposed a large-scale freedom of navigation (FON) exercise designed to assert U.S. rights
