The NATO Intervention in Libya

Perusing this book, at first it seemed it has no apparent connection to Islam. Rather, it seemed as if I were to review the title in recognition of my eight years of engagement with NATO, first as member of the German NATO Delegation (Paris/Brussels, 1979–1983) and later as NATO’s Director of Information (1983–1987). But then I discovered that the book’s, mostly Swedish authors, had dealt with Islam after all, not only incidentally in connection with their discussion of Moammar Gaddafi but also specifically in a chapter on Islamism (pp. 155–163). As expressed in his curious Green Book, the eccentric Libyan leader had used religious rationalisation in the form of well-mixed Islamism, Arabism, Europhobia, and Arab socialism. This was derisively seen by Anthony Cordesman as an undermanned and oversized military organization and the world’s largest military parking lot (p. 157), virtually crying out for Western intervention to stop Gaddafi’s nepotistic and unpredictably capricious forty years of dictatorial rule. The Arab Jamahiriyyah, due to its capricious leader, became indeed an outcast. The German defence minister at the time, Thomas de Maizière, more soberly asked whether these “calls for intervention might have something to do with oil,” warning that “we can’t get rid of all the dictators in the world with international military missions.”