The Death of Qaddafi and the Lies That Followed
On Qaddafi, Obama, and the Lies Power Teaches Us to Love
Written in black ink across ruled pages.
On the 20th of October, in 2011, Muammar al-Qaddafi was killed. That same day, I started my junior year of high school. I had not known much about Qaddafi while he was alive. By the time he reached me, he was already a corpse, flung through the streets of his own country and delivered to the world as spectacle before he could ever become, to me, a man.
He had been born near Sirte, in the rural desert region of Qasr Abu Hadi, and had come of age there during the years when revolution was beginning to move through the Arab world. History is seldom taught while it is still in motion, and so my teachers never mentioned Qaddafi in any serious way. There was, however, one English teacher, a white man in his fifties, who kept a poster of Qaddafi on the wall for almost the entire year following his death, despite the principal’s repeated efforts to have it taken down.
In March 2011, as Qaddafi’s forces closed on Benghazi, the city where uprisings had broken open and the eastern stronghold from which the rebellion was now organizing itself, he vowed to cleanse Libya house by house, promised no mercy and no pity to those who resisted, and spoke of searching homes as government troops reentered the city. Benghazi was the political heart of the revolt. By the time Obama faced the question of intervention, Qaddafi had already made himself legible as the sort of ruler America could name as an urgent threat.
Qaddafi had spent decades making Libya brittle. He weakened the army because he feared it. He forbade live-ammunition training, disrupted coherent command, and shuffled officers so arbitrarily that the military could not become a force independent of him. In place of a real national army, he trusted elite brigades, personal networks, and security units bound not to Libya but to his own survival. Dissent was answered with surveillance, prison, and disappearance, a country haunted by places like Abu Salim, where more than 1,200 prisoners were killed in 1996, a country in which, when the uprising finally came in 2011, security forces met demonstrators with live ammunition.
And yet, by the time the noose tightened around him, there were many who had begun to speak of Qaddafi as though he were becoming, at last, a leader for Africa itself, a man who might rally the continent against the old humiliations and the newer vassalage of Western power. This belief did not come from nowhere. In his later years he had thrown himself into pan-African theater and pan-African finance alike, pressing the African Union into being, courting African heads of state with oil wealth, paying more than Libya’s formal share into the Union, and even allowing himself to be adorned with the title King of Kings.
He said, “My vision is to wake up the African leaders to unify our continent,” and for many that language, whatever else it concealed, carried the force of long-denied dignity.
But I could not believe that his intentions were pure. He was too shrewd a man, too practiced in domination, to confuse investment with love or spectacle with solidarity. What many took for devotion to Africa looked to me more like the old instinct of rulers who, having exhausted one stage, go searching for a larger one.
Later, I came to understand that America had cast Qaddafi in two roles at once. In Obama’s telling, he was a moral emergency, a tyrant pressing toward civilians. According to Obama, Qaddafi was the kind of man whose survival would stain the conscience of the world. In Clinton’s, and most nakedly at the end, he became an errand completed, a problem solved, a corpse light enough to be carried by a joke.
“We came, we saw, he died” was not simply cruelty. It was the whole intervention speaking in its most honest voice: righteousness on the way in, laughter on the way out. Obama would later say that the failure lay in not planning for the day after. But there is a deeper failure than that. It is the habit of making a symbol of a man and then making an afterthought of the country that must go on living once he is dead.
Obama’s language belongs to the opening phase of intervention, when the state must teach the public how to recognize an enemy and why force is necessary. Clinton’s line belongs to the terminal phase, when the enemy has already been converted into an object, and victory is compact enough to fit inside a joke. Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton were among the officials who helped persuade Obama to intervene after the Arab League’s March 12, 2011 call for a no-fly zone made the action appear both regionally legitimate and politically sellable.
Obama’s rhetoric works by moral enlargement. In the March 28, 2011 address at the National Defense University, he does not present Libya first as a contest of interests but as a scene of emergency: a tyrant, civilians at risk, Benghazi on the edge of massacre, the conscience of the world at stake. He also stresses speed and capacity, saying U.S. forces moved with incredible speed and strength and later boasting that it took us 31 days to assemble the response. That is the classic grammar of American intervention: first make the enemy morally unmistakable, then make American force appear reluctant, lawful, rapid, and uniquely competent. The enemy is narrated into urgency. American power is narrated into necessity.
Clinton’s famous line reveals the other end of that process. It is so jarring because it drops the humanitarian register altogether. Obama’s public case is full of civilians, alliances, mandates, and responsibility. Clinton’s line collapses all that into sequence: arrival, perception, elimination. It speaks in the rhythm of accomplished empire. What had been introduced to the public as protection now appears, in retrospect, as efficiency. The joke is not incidental. It shows how quickly humanitarian language can harden into triumphant disposal once the target is dead.
That contrast also maps the timeline of how American intervention usually becomes thinkable. First, a foreign leader is made legible to Americans as a singular moral problem. Obama did exactly that by presenting Qaddafi as the figure. Then, once the enemy is sufficiently stabilized in the public imagination, the machinery can move very fast. In that same speech Obama emphasized not only airstrikes but the larger apparatus behind them: intelligence, logistics, jamming communications, coalition management, and rapid transfer into NATO form. Obama later signed a covert finding authorizing secret U.S. support for rebels. So the sequence is moral emergency, coalition legality, military strike, intelligence support, regime collapse.
Obama, like most good presidents, delivered to the republic an ethical alibi, the language by which violence can join conscience. Clinton gave away the imperial unconscious. She connected the ease with which a nation that speaks of protection can still savor liquidation. Put differently: Obama explains why America must act; Clinton reveals what action feels like once America has won. And between those two tones lies the whole arc of modern intervention. First the enemy is made visible to the public, then the state’s diplomatic, military, and intelligence capacities descend with astonishing speed, and finally the ruined country beneath the fallen man is told to call that sequence liberation.
By my senior year, I had already begun, in the adolescent way, to think of myself as political. I was reading as much as I could about the Middle East, about empire, about the newer language of American intervention, about the long quarrel between Arab nationalism and Western power. The region began to appear to me as a landscape of revolutions. Some of these revolutions failed. Some were victorious but only long enough for the energy to calcify into the very systems they had once sworn to overthrow.
I had also grown up reading about revolt much closer to home, Nat Turner, Malcolm X, the Panthers, the long American tradition of men and women who had decided that submission was a form of death. And yet I had not understood, not really, that power was not divided as neatly as I had hoped between heroes and villains, between the liberator and the tyrant, between the Black man who rose within America and the Arab strongman who stood against it.
It was possible, I was beginning to see, for one to speak the language of freedom while administering force, and for another to speak the language of anti-imperial dignity while reducing his own nation to the size of his appetites. That was the year politics ceased to be, for me, a pageant of positions and became instead a study of the terrible distance between what men say and what power does.
In the fall of 2012, I voted for Barack Obama in my first election. He defeated Mitt Romney, and the country, or at least the part of it I inhabited, received his reelection as a kind of vindication. I did not believe this simply because others did. I wanted to believe it myself. But by then I had already lived long enough inside the spectacle to know that electoral triumph and moral clarity were not the same thing. I had watched a Black president become, for millions, a vessel into which every hope of American redemption was poured, even as the machinery of empire moved beneath him with its old assurance.
I was suspicious of symbols, wary of public joy with a readiness to ask what power is doing precisely when it is being praised for what it appears to mean. Obama’s victory was real, and so was the feeling it produced; but so, too, was Libya, and the strange distance between the language of democratic promise at home and the language of humanitarian force abroad. Because I saw that distance, I could not give myself over completely to political romance.
The fever returns whenever a leader is loved too easily, whenever a nation mistakes representation for transformation, whenever the triumph of an image is taken for the redemption of a people. What I learned in that season has remained with me because it was never only about Obama, or Romney, or even that election. It was about the unsettling discovery that history can offer up a symbol of deliverance while leaving the old instruments of domination almost perfectly intact.
Not long after, the white teacher who had kept Qaddafi’s image on the wall took it down and replaced it with Obama. I asked him why. He said he had done more studying and no longer believed Qaddafi was any sort of model to place before students. He spoke of the Libyan regime’s links to the La Belle bombing in West Berlin, of Pan Am 103, of terrorism, repression, and the kind of political theater that leaves real bodies behind it. Then my teacher turned, almost instinctively, toward Obama, as if one image could cleanse the wall of the other. But by then I had begun to understand that history is rarely so eager to purify itself.
I began to wonder, then, whether my teacher had really discovered anything at all, or whether he had surrendered to the moral atmosphere that settles around certain foreign leaders once the West has decided their history is over. Qaddafi had done brutal things; of that there could be no serious doubt. But it seemed to me that my teacher’s new certainty had less to do with Libya than with permission. I was young, but not so young that I could not feel the speed with which history gets simplified once the victim has been killed. And I began to suspect that what my teacher called research might have been something closer to absorption, the passive taking in of a story already arranged for him by a culture that prefers its enemies dead.
Before Qaddafi’s fall, Libya was a dictatorship, but it was also a state that still held together. After 2011, the measurable story is not one of democratic repair but of prolonged fracture. Libya’s GDP per capita had shrunk dramatically between 2010 and 2022 and was already about half its 2010 level by 2021. Gross National Income per capita fell sharply across the same period. Electricity access declined. Oil production collapsed with the war and never fully recovered to its earlier level. More than a decade after the overthrow, large numbers of people remained internally displaced.
None of this absolves Qaddafi. It means only that the Libya left behind by his destruction has, in hard statistical terms, been poorer, dimmer, and less whole than the Libya the intervention claimed it would save.
Somewhere in all of this, amid the speeches and the footage and the classroom arguments, I realized that the danger was no longer only Libya’s, or Obama’s, or Qaddafi’s.
It was mine.
I had spent so much time trying to understand the lies nations tell when they are preparing to act, and the lies strongmen tell when they are preparing to survive, that I had nearly failed to notice what all this knowledge was doing to my own heart. I returned again and again to the image of Qaddafi dragged through Sirte, and to the image of Obama lifted by a country desperate to believe in its own redemption, and what unsettled me was that I had begun to live inside the bitterness that linked them.
I saw then that my real danger was the hatred such spectacles can plant in a person who watches too closely and grieves without relief. For if Qaddafi had mistaken himself for Libya, and America had mistaken force for mercy, I could, in my own smaller way, mistake bitterness for clarity.