The overthrow of the Libyan monarchy came not unexpectedly. Throughout the 1960s, a number of political incidents had revealed the low level of legitimacy the kingdom enjoyed outside Cyrenaica. They had also revealed the inability of King Idris to institute reform that could break up the highly corrupt patrimonial system that had grown up around him and the royal diwan. For months preceding the actual coup, there had been consistent rumors of plans for a military take-over, forcing the king to shift army units around the country’s territory repeatedly in an ultimately vain attempt to prevent a coordinated effort against his rule.

The king’s hesitancy to rule effectively, the wrenching social dislocations caused by the rapid inflows of oil money, the halting and incomplete transition from a traditional to a more modern society, the rampant corruption and cronyism that followed the rapid inflow of oil revenues, and the kingdom’s conservative positions in inter-Arab politics within a region seething with Arab nationalism in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war: all these had hollowed out the monarchy to such a degree that few careful observers in the region, or beyond, were surprised when the actual coup took place. While the general expectation in the West and much of the Middle East had been that a number of senior military leaders would take over, the coup leaders turned out to be overwhelmingly young officers and captains with no links to the monarchy or to senior military figures. Although the first few days brought the unavoidable confusion over who constituted its leadership, from the first official communiques onward it was clear that Libya’s military rulers were inspired by Arab nationalism and by a resentment of the West’s role in regional politics. They also seemed determined to chart a new political course for Libya within the Arab world and within the world at large.