kill!”
“Pilot ejected.”
“Okay. Let’s head north. Head north.”
“Let’s go down low, on the deck. Unload, five hundred knots. Let’s get out of here!”
“We’re showing two good chutes in the air here.”
“Roger that. Two Floggers. Two Floggers splashed.”7
THIS FRENETIC DIALOGUE between American airmen was captured by the recording equipment in their fighter aircraft. It describes vividly the air battle that took place between two U.S. Navy F-14 Tomcats and a pair of Libyan MiG-23 Floggers on 4 January 1989 in the noonday sky over the central Mediterranean Sea. The entire engagement—from the moment the Floggers left their base in Libya until the Tomcats shot them down—lasted about seven and a half minutes. The combat occurred just sixteen days before the end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
At the start of the new year 1989, Ronald Reagan and Muammar al-Qaddafi were engaged in a process that had become all too familiar during the previous eight years. Typically it involved the following progression: first an underlying controversy, then an escalating war of words, and finally a demonstration of American military power. On three previous occasions the process had culminated in hostilities. There were important differences between this confrontation and those of 1981 and 1986, however. This time the controversy did not involve an illegal territorial claim, subversion, or terrorism.8 It concerned the likelihood that Libya was developing the capacity to produce chemical weapons. This time the military action did not take place in the Gulf of Sidra or in the skies over Tripoli and Benghazi. It happened north of Tobruk, an historic city in northeast Libya. This time the battle between U.S. and Libyan forces was for the most part unexpected (whereas in 1981 and 1986 the United States had determined when and where it would challenge Qaddafi militarily). This time Qaddafi called the shot by deciding to confront a U.S. naval task force as it steamed through the central Mediterranean several miles from the Libyan shoreline. Nevertheless, the outcome of this clash was the same as the others before it: for the fourth and final time in eight years Ronald Reagan’s military had trounced the armed forces of Muammar al-Qaddafi.
Muammar al-Qaddafi and the Libyan Jamahiriyya
History of Early Libya
Libya, whose name derives from the appellation given a Berber tribe by the ancient Egyptians, did not become an independent and unified state until the middle of the twentieth century. Since antiquity the three regions that comprise modern Libya—Tripolitania in the northwest, Cyrenaica in the east, and Fezzan in the southwest—have maintained relations with different parts of the outside world and developed unique histories and identities due to the harsh deserts that kept them separate. This internal disunity combined with Libya’s history of foreign domination had a profound impact on its modern political development and the ideology of its mercurial leader, Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi.1
Greek settlers founded Cyrene and four other city-states in Cyrenaica between the seventh and fifth centuries B.C. Phoenicians from Carthage established several commercial settlements in Tripolitania by the fifth century B.C. From about 1,000 B.C. Fezzan was loosely governed by the Garamentes tribe, which controlled major caravan routes in the Sahara Desert. The native Berbers, especially those of the hinterland, maintained their autonomy and preserved their distinct culture despite the influence of Greek and Carthaginian settlers and domination by several foreign masters including, by the time of the Arab conquest of the seventh century, the Egyptians, the Persians, the forces of Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Romans, the Vandals, and the Byzantines.
Already well developed, the cultural and historical differences between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica intensified during nearly five hundred years of Roman governorship. The two regions maintained their distinct Carthaginian and Greek cultures and, after the partition of the Roman Empire in 395, Tripolitania was attached to the western empire and Cyrenaica was assigned to the eastern. In the fifth century Rome recognized the mastery of the Vandals (a Germanic tribe) over much of North Africa including Tripolitania. Belasarius, a general serving the Byzantine Empire—the successor to the Eastern Roman Empire—recaptured Tripolitania in 533 but, by the time of the Arab invasion, the once prosperous cities of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were racked by political decay and religious strife and resembled bleak military outposts.2
Ten years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, an Arab general by the name of Amr ibn al-As conquered Cyrenaica. Spirited Berber resistance, however, delayed al-As’s conquest of Tripolitania until 649. Another Arab general, Uqba ibn Nafi, subdued Fezzan in 663. By 715 the Arabs had spread across North Africa and had captured all but the extreme northern portion of the Iberian Peninsula.
Over the next few centuries waves of Arab armies and settlers transmitted Islam, the Arabic language, and Arab culture to the indigenous populations of North Africa. City dwellers and farmers there converted to Islam and adopted Arab culture somewhat readily, but the Berbers of the interior, while professing Islam, remained linguistically and culturally separate from the Arabs. As part of the umma or community of Muslims, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were ruled by the caliph (the successor to the Prophet Muhammad) from Damascus and, later, from Baghdad, and were governed according to sharia, the Islamic legal code.3
From the early tenth to the sixteenth centuries Tripolitania and Cyrenaica suffered widespread intraconfessional violence and political instability. Consequently, the regions were dominated by a series of Islamic dynasties, tribes, and Christian governments, which included the Fatimids of Egypt, the Berber Zurids, the Hilalian Bedouins from Arabia, the Normans from Sicily, the Almohads of Morocco, the Hafsids of Tunis, the Mamluks of Egypt, the Hapsburgs of Spain, and the Knights of St. John of Malta. During this very turbulent period corsairs operating from North African ports harassed commercial shipping in the Mediterranean.4
In the sixteenth century the Ottoman Turks captured the entire North African coast except Morocco, and the sultan, the Ottoman ruler in Constantinople, established regencies in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, the principal city of Tripolitania. In Tripoli the political authority was conferred upon a pasha or regent, who represented the sultan there. In the early seventeenth century Tripoli lapsed into political chaos as coup followed upon coup, and few military dictators survived a year in power. In 1711 Ahmad Qaramanli, a Turkish-Arab cavalry officer, seized power in Tripoli and founded an independent ruling dynasty while acknowledging the Ottoman sultan as his suzerain. Politically savvy and ruthless, Ahmad Pasha recognized piracy as a valuable source of revenue.5 During the reign of one of Ahmad’s successors, Yusuf ibn Ali Qaramanli, Tripoli’s program of state-sponsored piracy led to a naval war with the newly independent United States.
Mr. Jefferson’s War
For centuries the seizure of merchant ships and the imprisonment of their crews by North African corsairs prompted several European countries, and later the United States, to pay tribute or “protection money” to the potentates of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli—the so-called “Barbary states”—to ensure the safe passage of their merchant ships in the Mediterranean. The capture of several American merchantmen by Algerine corsairs spurred Congress to pass the Navy Act of 27 March 1794, which authorized the construction or purchase of six frigates to protect American commerce. Furthermore, in 1799 President John Adams began paying annual tribute to the rulers of the Barbary states. The share allotted to the pasha of Tripoli was eighteen thousand dollars. In exchange for the payment Yusuf Pasha promised that the corsairs based in his country would not harass American shipping.
In
