138. Intelligence Memorandum Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency1
SUBJECT
- Libya’s Qadhafi: Seeking Significance Through Confrontation
The emergence of the martyrdom theme in Qadhafi’s recent speeches is not mere rhetorical posturing. It reflects a dangerous state of mind for the erratic Libyan revolutionary, who is prone to aggressive action when under stress.
Qadhafi’s rhetoric in association with the call for merger for Libya and Syria reflects a qualitatively different and ominous turn. Characterizing the resolution for merger as “the resolution of death,” he exhorted his people to be prepared to die through confrontation rather than submit. He then went on to identify the target of his aggression: “The forces of exploitation inside the Arab world are but a link in the chain [Page 336] of the forces of world exploitation—a chain which ends in Washington.” With characteristic flair, Qadhafi indicated that if he could not persuade his people collectively to go down fighting, he would himself become a Fedayeen and join the PLO. (S NF)
The call for union with Syria and confrontation with the Arab right and the US must be viewed in the context of the past year, which by all accounts was a year of failure for the fiery revolutionary who has hoped to assume the mantle of his idol Nasser. But domestically, Qadhafi’s People’s Revolution has fallen far short of his goals and he is faced with growing dissidence within Libya. External events affecting Qadhafi include: being pushed out of the limelight by the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the failure of Libya’s intervention in Uganda, and the break with Fatah. (S NF)
Most painful for the intensely religious Qadhafi was the shift of attention to Ayatollah Khomeini, who generated a revolutionary fervor in Iran that Qadhafi had never approached in his own efforts to create an Islamic republic. The hurt was compounded when Khomeini rejected out of hand Qadhafi’s offer of support. (S NF)
It is not an accident that Qadhafi’s rhetoric has a haunting resemblance to Khomeini’s—especially in the quest for martyrdom and the need to confront the United States, the embodiment of imperialist exploitation. (S NF)
And just as Khomeini unified his people by identifying the outside enemy as the source of Iran’s troubles and successfully involving Iran in a confrontation with the US, so too an outside enemy would at once satisfy Qadhafi’s psychological and political needs. (S NF)
Thus, the combination of Qadhafi’s frustration and the model provided by Khomeini in Iran could well lead Qadhafi to provoke a confrontation in order to gain significance, rationalizing the cost of a likely military defeat in terms of the Muslim value of martyrdom. This is the dangerous portent in Qadhafi’s call for death rather than submission. In Qadhafi’s psychological calculus, it is better to be involved in a losing confrontation than face failure as a revolutionary leader and the humiliation of being ignored. (S NF)
- Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Middle East, Subject File, Box 61, Libya: 9–10/80. Secret; [handling restriction not declassified]. Prepared in the National Foreign Assessment Center.↩