The Colonels' Standoff: Gunfight at the Wheelus Corral

cpip

Gone Fishin'
Daniel "Chappie" James, Jr., first black American to reach the rank of four-star general, was wing commander at Wheelus AFB in Libya during the coup.

In early 1970, as the base was preparing for handover to the new Libyan government, then-Colonel James had an encounter with Col. Muammar Qaddafi himself.

In a face-to-face encounter during the base’s final days, James noted that Qaddafi was wearing a sidearm in a holster strapped to his leg. As the two men talked, moreover, the Libyan leader moved his hand onto the grip of the weapon. James later recalled, “I had my .45 in my belt. I told him to move his hand away. If he had pulled that gun, he never would have cleared his holster.”

Qaddafi withdrew his hand and the confrontation ended without violence.

So: let us assume that young (not even 30!) Qaddafi's bravado gets the best of him and he does indeed pull his pistol.

Nearly anything that happens next is a bad result: if James was correct that he's faster on the draw, then he's just shot down the leader of the government of his host country. If Qaddafi not only draws but fires, then it's an attack on the United States. If he manages to kill James, it's even worse, and James has become a martyr to rally behind.

On the other hand -- Nixon is in the middle of Vietnamization, and the Cambodian incursion hasn't happened yet. How would the American public react? How would American allies in NATO?

For that matter, if Qaddafi is alive and James is not, will the Soviets still be as enthusiastic supporters of someone who now looks even more problematic than Castro? If Qaddafi is dead, will they find a more amenable successor to work with?
 
@cpip,

This is a great idea for a POD and the layers of things that could happen as a result are likewise awesomely complex. Also Chappie's a favorite lesser-known figure for me (and some others apparently -- he just popped up on the Hipster Presidents list IIRC if his health had held and he'd pursued a political career.) I'd like to go into greater detail but first I need to do two things:

1) Here's a good shot of Wheelus-era Chappie from Wikipedia, could put it next to a coup-era Gaddafi head shot up top:
upload_2016-9-15_13-26-31.png



2) FUCK YEAH CHAPPIE CAP HIS ASS

All righty. Got that out of my system.
 
There are a variety of possibilities, the one @Sean Pdineen pointed out is definitely one, and so is a preview of post-2011 chaos where you have fracture among political or military leaders on regional and/or ethnic lines and what amounts to a Tripoli-vs-Benghazi civil war. That could pose problems, besides the chaos, if Algeria backed one side and Egypt the other. Whatever reaction this provokes, from the US and/or Gaddafi's partisans, Nasser is going to lose his shit to such a degree that it might even hasten the fatal heart attack of that autumn. And given that things were already getting dicey between the Palestinians and King Hussein's regime, who knows how far the ripples go.
 
As for how Nixon and the US might react, two unfortunately more lengthy things:

1) That autumn of course came Black September in Jordan, the Dawson's Field hijackings and then what amounted to civil war between Fatah/PFLP/etc. and the Jordanian Army. Just post-Cambodia intervention, Europe stripped almost bare of good-quality officers/NCOs and supplies, and so on. Nevertheless the US mobilized the Sixth Fleet in force, parked a Marine Amphibious Unit off Haifa in Israel (so close in that their helicopters could easily have reached Amman), and materially affected my favorite late uncle's life. He was XO of the airborne-qualified cavalry troop (part of 3/8th Cav attached to 8th ID) assigned to the 1st Brigade combat team of 8th Infantry Division in West Germany, what was then an airborne-qualified brigade that was Europe and the Med's American fire brigade force. Still in fairly decent shape, and easily one of the two (at most, if not the most) shipshape formations the US Army had in Europe at the time. His troop went first with some C-130s loaded with medical supplies to Turkey. If the Dawson's Field hijackers blew up the planes with passengers there, we assumed the Jordanian troops surrounding them would charge right in, and within an hour or two's flying time his unit would jump in to help secure the airfield for landing the C-130s so the medics could do what they could. Then they were shipped back to the FRG, and twice alerted again. Once was to airland in Amman with their heavier equipment (usually they used jeeps on jump missions, armor closer to base in West Germany) and do what amounted to a paleo-thunder run to the US Embassy with the brigade's paratroopers to secure it and any other endangered Americans in the capital. Then, and this was when the US really spooled up, after the civil war got going properly and Syria intervened in the north, they were actually loaded, engines running, waiting for the green light at the end of the runway (reports say the first planes of the 82nd in North Carolina had taken off already to head for Amman and were turned back) to be dropped into a mountain defile north of Amman to support the Jordanian 40th Armoured Bde there and "hold Jordan for Hussein." Nixon was not shy about throwing force around throughout his presidency. "Vietnam Syndrome" may have been a real thing for legislators, ordinary citizens, and the commentariat, but Dick and Henry (Kissinger) rarely saw a problem they couldn't bomb if they felt like it.

2) Speaking of, three years later during the Yom Kippur War Libya itself became an issue. Indeed, for the first three or so days of the conflict when the Nixon White House mistakenly thought Israel would mop the floor with the Arabs again, most of the real discussion and contingency planning that went on centered on Libya. There were around two thousand American oil-company workers in Libya at the time, and Qaddafi had threatened to nationalize the oil fields, forcing them to remain at their posts and effectively taking them hostage. There were fears too that, especially if it went badly for the Egyptians and Syrians, angry Libyan mobs would try to get in on the game and actually seize those Americans. So I quote now from an October 7th meeting of WSAG (Washington Special Actions Group, Nixon/Kissinger's favored body for foreign crisis management), in the 1969-76 Series of Foreign Relations of the United States (vol. XXV, p. 358), and this is Kissinger, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Tom Moorer doing most of the talking:

"Adm. Moorer: [after some classified material redacted from the volume] The 82nd [Airborne] can land here (indicating an area south of Tripoli)... but if we use airborne, we should go into the Tripoli airport. If our objective is to rescue Americans, this has to happen awfully fast, since if the Marines [who would be helicoptered in from the Sixth Fleet in the Med] get bogged down in fighting, this will give the mobs time to go after the Americans ....
"We could drop some Marines right on top of the Americans [in Libya's oil patches] to defend them until the main force gets to them...
Schlesinger: We can get the forces in. The critical issue is that the Libyans have air at Wheelus. The plan calls for hosing down the Libyan air force, and that's a major step. We'd be shooting up an Arab country, with all that would mean.
"Secretary Kissinger: But we won't do that unless American lives are in danger.
Adm. Moorer: Yes, but it would have a major effect in other countries. It would be better if we could take them out with helicopters."


So in this POD, you have a ready-made siege situation a couple of years earlier when Nixon is still very much trying to look unbreakable in Vietnam in order to negotiate from a position of strength, a situation where whatever comes of this confrontation is going to have Libyan troops standing off with the Wheelus airbase personnel, and indeed with their aircraft (and do we know if the base was in any way already shared, so you've got the opposing sides and maybe even their aircraft in the same space already?) plus those Americans still working out in the oil patches who are a second vulnerable population. And you have Soviet machinations trying to back Gaddafi to frustrate the US (Wheelus was the American toehold between lightly-Marxist Algeria and rabidly-Arab Nationalist Egypt, and also the waystation for moving any military presence from Europe into Africa), and regional nationalists, and the US already tied down in Southeast Asia, and the War of Attrition still on between Egypt and Israel, and the pot on a slow boil in Jordan. Oy vey. You picked a good 'un.
 
@Sean Pdineen,

Those are very good questions. Reza Shah Pahlavi is probably keeping his elaborately-crowned head down because he's an American ally but can't afford to anger all the Arabs at one time either within OPEC or militarily (though there's not a whole lot Iraq and the Saudis can do to him at that point, it is nevertheless prior to most of his massive Seventies buildup.) Syria's a very good question too, probably they're a weather vane for Soviet opinion because they're tied much more closely to Moscow than Egypt is (even Egypt under Nasser which was still very much in the Soviet camp when it came to superpower sponsorship) and because pre-Assad Syrian governance was notoriously unstable so you don't want to make the wrong move or there are five other guys in the junta waiting to take your job while you push up desert flowers in an unmarked grave near Homs...
 
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