Trump Officials Meet With Libyan Politician Aligned With Opposition ‘Strongman’ In Potential Policy Shifthttps://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/11/trump-officials-meet-libyan-politician-aligned-opposition-strongman-potential-policy-shift/161479/?oref=d-riverTrump administration officials have had multiple meetings with a Libyan politician aligned with the opposition general fighting the U.S.-backed government in Tripoli, hinting that the administration may be rethinking its Libya policy. Officially, the United States supports the UN-negotiated Government of National Accord, or GNA, in Libya. Those forces have been battling back advances by Khalifa Hifter’s Libyan National Army, or LNA, backed by Russia and the United Arab Emirates. Earlier this month, the State Department issued a joint statement with the GNA calling on Hifter’s forces to halt their months-long offensive on Tripoli.
President Trump threw U.S. support for the GNA into question in April when he called Hifter — a dual Libyan-American citizen and a former CIA asset — in the early days of the offensive and appeared to endorse his campaign against the capital. The White House said in a statement at the time that Trump “recognised Field Marshal Hifter’s significant role in fighting terrorism and securing Libya’s oil resources, and the two discussed a shared vision for Libya’s transition to a stable, democratic political system.”
In two meetings with National Security Council officials in Washington this fall, Aref al Nayed, an Islamic scholar and former ambassador to the UAE, has pitched himself as a transitional political leader for Libya after Hifter, the military commander, “liberates” Tripoli, according to documents provided by Nayed and multiple sources with knowledge of the meetings.
Nayed also said that he has had “several” meetings with State Department officials over the past few months. A State Department official declined to comment on the meetings specifically, but said in a statement to Defense One, “The United States is engaged in broad outreach with a variety of Libyan stakeholders to promote progress toward an equitable economic and political solution to the conflict in Libya.”
The series of quiet meetings with NSC officials is “unusual,” the former senior U.S. official said. The former official likened Nayed’s pitch to the case of Ahmed Chalabi, the exiled Iraqi politician whose later-debunked claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction helped propel the Bush administration into invading Iraq in 2003. Like Chalabi, the former official said, Nayef and his team “are very western, very connected, they’re businesspeople.
He has all kinds of credibility as a person — it’s just that he doesn’t have the backing of people on the ground who would vote for him, so he’s looking for the West to make him into a leader.”... “I think there’s an understanding that Hifter is trying to set himself up as the next Ghaddafi,” said Joshua Meservey, a policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation who specializes in Africa and the Middle East. “He clearly sees the solution to Libya’s problems being a military strongman. He happens to be one, so that works out great for him.”
