El Dorado Canyon

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Joseph Stanik. El Dorado Canyon

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For my father, Joseph Stanik,

and in memory of my mother,

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During the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War the relationship between Qaddafi and Sadat took an unexpected turn. Qaddafi was furious that his FAR partners—Sadat and Asad—had excluded him from their prewar planning and had devised a stunning, two-pronged attack on Israel. He was further outraged that Sadat agreed to a cease-fire while Egyptian troops were still fighting on the east bank of the Suez Canal. He went so far as to call the Egyptian president a coward. In the years following the war their relationship deteriorated into a series of accusations and counter-accusations that effectively ended any possibility of a merger. In July 1977 mutual suspicion between the two leaders and Egyptian charges of Libyan subversion led to a series of violent border clashes in which the Egyptian military prevailed over Qaddafi’s armed forces. The final break between the two countries came when Sadat launched his peace initiative in late 1977, an effort that culminated in the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of March 1979. Tripoli severed diplomatic relations with Cairo, and Qaddafi played a leading role in rallying the radical Arab states—Algeria, Libya, South Yemen, and Syria—and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in vehement opposition to Sadat’s separate peace with Israel.45

Convinced of the righteousness of his causes, Qaddafi employed a number of unconventional tactics to achieve his foreign policy objectives. In particular he used petroleum as a political weapon, he targeted moderate Arab and African governments for subversion, and he supported and sponsored international terrorism. Qaddafi realized that his country’s vast petroleum resources could finance huge internal development projects and the purchase of sophisticated weaponry. In 1970 and 1971 he demanded and won large increases in the price that foreign oil companies paid for Libyan crude oil, raising the per barrel price from $2.23 to $3.45. Within two years the government had acquired a controlling interest in all oil companies operating in Libya, and by early 1974 the level of control had risen to approximately 60 percent. During the October 1973 Arab-Israeli War Qaddafi joined other Arab oil producers in imposing an embargo against the countries that supported Israel, an embargo that chiefly was aimed at the United States.46

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