Muammar Gaddafi ruled Libya for four decades — and his end supplies John Kiriakou with one of his most-repeated lessons about American promises.
The Libya model
In February 2003, Kiriakou recounts, Steve Kappes — then the CIA’s associate deputy director for operations — made a secret trip to Libya and told Gaddafi the United States was about to attack Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein; if Gaddafi didn’t want to meet the same fate, he would have to turn over all his weapons of mass destruction. “And that’s exactly what he did.”[1][2]
Then came 2011: Gaddafi — disarmed — was overthrown and “lynched by his own people at the insistence of the United States.” The Iranians watched, Kiriakou says, and drew the only rational conclusion: develop a homegrown weapons industry and never trust the deal. The gap between what the United States says and what it does is the whole story.[3]
The serial prediction
Kiriakou has since folded Libya into a second argument, in which Gaddafi’s removal is not an isolated error but the middle term of a pattern he attributes to Benjamin Netanyahu. Prefacing it as “maybe be a little controversial”, he points to video of Netanyahu testifying before Congress in 2002 that Saddam Hussein was an existential threat to Israel and to the United States, and that overthrowing him would bring peace to the Middle East. “And then there wasn’t.”[4]
The same testimony followed, he says, in 2008 or 2009, with the name changed: “If we overthrow Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan government, they’re an existential threat to the United States and to Israel. We’ll have peace in the Middle East.” Kiriakou’s verdict on the outcome is four words long — “And we did that, and it just made everything worse.” A year before he spoke, the same argument was made a third time about the Iranian government.[5]
He states the pattern flatly when he sets out the three claims in sequence — Saddam, Gaddafi, then Iran, each removal promised to bring peace to the Middle East: “Nothing that he tells us is true. Nothing.”[6] His objection is to the price rather than the prediction: “We do all of Israel’s dirty work for it. We kill thousands, tens of thousands of people, and what do we get out of it? Nothing.”[7]
The argument closes back on the Libya model. Having laid out the three overthrows, Kiriakou asks what a leader of Iran can rationally do to protect himself, and answers that the only thing available is to build a nuclear weapon — noting that nobody is having a conversation about North Korea.[7] Gaddafi disarmed and was killed; the lesson he draws is the one he says Tehran drew.
”A terrible policy error”
Kiriakou is unsentimental about the man — “a very bad guy” — but the policy verdict is severe: Washington had a healthy working relationship with Gaddafi, who hated al-Qaeda as much as America did. “Flipping sides at the last minute… to overthrow Gaddafi was a terrible policy error. Look at the place now — it’s literally anarchy.”[8][9] Libya’s aftermath — shifting desert borders, tribal society, gun-running from the first days of the uprising — became a no-man’s-land.[10] He cited the Libya disaster in real time as the reason not to repeat the play against Assad,[11] and notes the speculation that Gaddafi’s gold-dinar project — a threat to the dollar — was part of why Libya was destroyed.[12]
Gaddafi also features in Kiriakou’s standing complaint about the “crazy” reflex: Saddam was crazy, Gaddafi was crazy, bin Laden was crazy, Arafat was crazy — “everybody that we don’t like is crazy. They’re not crazy.”[13][14]