A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee compared the brutal civil war in Libya to partisan gridlock on Capitol Hill.
“Let me see if I get this right,” Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said during a hearing held Thursday on turmoil in the Mediterranean country. “Libya has a negative current account. They have this crushing debt that they have a growing difficulty in servicing. And they have grinding deadlock between two political factions.”
He paused for a moment, before remarking: “Sounds like Washington, DC.”
“The only difference is we don’t have Democratic and Republican militias,” he noted.
More than 4,000 people have been killed in excessive violence in Libya since the fall of the Gadhafi regime in 2011–change brought about by US and NATO military intervention. Tripoli is still absent a unifying government, and the country’s economy is in shambles. The US military has recently launched airstrikes against Islamic State factions that have begun to take root in Libya as a result of the deteriorating security situation.
“I don’t mean to make light of it,” Sen. Perdue added, expressionless, after making his analogy. “But I think we need to keep that in mind as we try to help these people.”
The committee had just listened to testimony mincing few words about how bad it is in Libya today.
“Libya’s economy is reaching a critical point,” said Caludia Gazzini, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, an independent NGO working on the ground in Libya.
She noted that oil production has dropped drastically from 1.8 million barrels a day in 2011 to 300,000 today, and the treasury is running a three billion dollar monthly deficit.
“There are growing cash shortages, and fuel and medicine are difficult to come by in a country that is heavily dependent on the importation of both, as well as of food,” Gazzini told the panel, adding that smuggling “of ordinary goods but also weapons and people” is “thriving” alongside corruption.
“In short,” she said, “a parallel war economy is taking over as the state heads towards bankruptcy.”
The New York Times published a two-part expose this week on the US government’s failure to secure an effective post-Gadhafi government. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lobbied heavily for the intervention in 2011, maintains the regime change mission was “smart power at its best.”
