By JEAN-PIERRE SÉRÉNI
The few people Colonel Muammar Gaddafi did business with regarded him as unpredictable, inconsistent and temperamental. President Ronald Reagan described him in 1986 as the “mad dog of the Middle East”, sent the Sixth Fleet to bomb his country and imposed a strict oil embargo. Gaddafi was a pariah, yet 20 years later, he had put Libya back among the world’s top crude oil exporters, thanks mostly to US oil giants.
Clearly he must have behaved more rationally in his dealings with the oil sector than in other domestic and foreign policy initiatives, perhaps because he was less involved. International oil companies also learned how to operate – and make a lot of money – in Libya’s unstable, even hostile, business environment.
Libya became independent in 1951, as the product of a union between waning British imperialism and a Saharan Muslim order, the Senussi, whose leader became Libya’s king. Libya had long been known as the “empty kingdom” and was destitute, since its only export was scrap iron collected from Second World War battlefields.
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