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In 1969, Muammar Kaddafi took office in a bloodless military coup against the royal Sanuci ruling family. Then Captain of the Military, Kaddafi's motto was "Libya from the Libyans and for the Libyans." He affirmed that the time of tribes intermingling in politics was over and henceforth the voice was given to popular participation.
Coming from the small and weak tribe of Kdadfa, and inheriting a political system where Sanuci's tribal allegiance was rampant, Col Kaddafi had to unlock those locks. He had a genius idea of dismantling the existing tribal power system and replacing it with a core of close military officers originating from tribes that allied themselves with the Kdadfa. Think of this as a game where your chances of winning are greater if you deceive your adversary by claiming that you will change the rules of the game. From the outside, Libya was seen as being ruled by a military dictator. But in reality, that same dictator feared those who helped him get into the office. Therefore, for more than 42 years, he played tribes against each other by rewarding those who supported him and sanctioning those who opposed him. He basically played the same game but slightly changed some roles. To sanction those officers who tried to topple him in different military coup attempts, he not only purged them from the military, but he also sanctioned their tribes, mostly the Warfallah, the largest Libyan tribe.2
But when Kaddafi's reign ended, so did the game. Three years later, Libya is exactly where Seif had predicted it would be. The United States and her allies chose to accompany the revolutionaries in their struggle to topple Kaddafi, assuming that after his end everything would be fine and all Libyans would go about their original occupations. But this action told Libyans and the rest of the region one of two things: either we do not care or we do not understand and remember our recent history in the region.
Like Saddam Hussein's regime and other regimes in the region, Libya was sometimes ruled by an iron fist and sometimes by a generous hand. Therefore, the relationship between the ruled and their rulers doesn't follow the same...