In 2012, Colonel Muammar Gadaffi celebrated his 70th birthday with a great military parade and a fireworks display on the Tripoli waterfront. Only two of his peers stood at his side on the reviewing stand: Fidel Castro (aged 85) of Cuba and Saddam Hussein (aged 75) of Iraq. His other anti-imperialist friends had died or been overthrown. Gadaffi knew that he was himself a dying man; his physician had diagnosed the onset of Creutzfeldt Jakob disease.
Despite its oil, Gadaffi's police-state was a wreck after 40 years of economic mismanagement. Neighbouring Tunisia, a fraction of Libya's size, had meanwhile become the first of the "lions"-African and Arab states following in the steps of the Asian tigers. But Gadaffi had something that his neighbours had not. After years of effort, Libya had built a handful of missile-launched nuclear warheads and weaponised nerve gas and biotoxins.
In 2012, the day after the birthday parade, the Libyans used the old trick of staging manoeuvres as a cover for the invasion of Tunisia. Radio Tripoli called for an immediate Tunisian capitulation-otherwise "special weapons" would be used. Tunisian acquiescence would bring about the merger of the two states. Although Tunisian forces were unprepared, they managed to hold their ground 100 kilometres or so behind the border. Washington and Paris had immediately declared their readiness to provide full military support-an offer snapped up by Tunis. Forty-eight hours after the Libyans entered Tunisia, the conflict became international.
Libya took the first step in changing the nature of the war. Gadaffi unleashed a barrage of 18 Scud missiles against Tunis and Bizerte. Many of these antiquated devices broke up in flight and crashed harmlessly into the neighbouring waters. However, five chemical and three biological warheads scored bull-eyes and dispersed their deadly cargo in heavily populated central Tunis: 50,000 inhabitants were killed by nerve gas. Within days, several hundred thousand more were in the terminal throes of lethal anthrax.
The western allies' military intervention was at once thrown into high gear. Within minutes of the Libyan Scud strike, swarms of precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles destroyed the bulk of Libya's communication networks, together with most of its air-defence and logistics infrastructure. The allies succeeded in doing what the Gulf war coalition had failed to do in 1991, despite their overwhelming airpower: to detect and destroy mobile Scud launchers. Within 24 hours, Libya was shorn of most of its means of waging war.
A US marine brigade and a French combat helicopter regiment were deployed alongside their Tunisian allies in the next few days. Each allied infantry soldier was equipped with a gloveback computer screen allowing him (or her) to visualise any chosen aspect of the battle, providing instant "battlefield awareness." Hand-held keyboards enabled soldiers to call in support, exchange information or keep in touch with battlefield "crawlies"-miniature robots operating behind Libyan lines, providing data or wreaking electronic havoc. Head-up displays mounted on goggles no more obtrusive than ordinary spectacles made it possible to "see" in the infra-red and ultra-violet parts of the spectrum.
This select force, operating against ten times its number, reached and breached the Libyan border within hours of its deployment. However, as it approached the outskirts of Tripoli, Gadaffi played his last card: either the foreign forces withdrew, or Libyan nuclear weapons would be detonated. Relayed by the Libyan leader himself during an interview on CNN, the threat could not be disregarded. Gadaffi was helped by the elements. A major thunderstorm, preceded by a sandstorm, struck in the Tripoli area. Smothered by sand and soaked by rain, the allied forces were temporarily pinned down.
Allied forces were ordered to stop their advance, while Gadaffi was put on notice that any use of weapons of mass destruction against the allies would be punished in kind, and disproportionately so. Had Gadaffi been a healthy and sane dictator, he would have avoided putting allied determination to the test. As an already condemned man, he decided otherwise. His remaining mobile missile launchers were fired at the main US and French staging point. Four Scuds and six cruise missiles were intercepted by US missile defences. Two warheads, however, got through. The bombs caused less damage than the previous chemical and biological attacks on Tunisia, because the allied forces were well spread out in the desert: immediate casualties were in the low thousands. But the allies did not wait to count the bodies. Retaliation was massive. Within minutes, two Trident missiles were launched by the submarine USS Tennessee, and the French shot ten nuclear cruise missiles from their Corsica-based Rafale fighter-bombers. The combined warheads erased Tripoli and Benghazi from the face of the earth and destroyed Libya's hitherto untouched petroleum industry. Along with its dictator, Libya ceased to exist as a nation.
