Libyan Reform

Diederik Vandewalle writing for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace relates Libya's decision to give up WMD to the rise of a technocratic class within the bureaucracy which has also promoted economic privatization. It's worth adding here that a scholarly article I read on Libya a few months ago made it sound very much like one of the Gulf states: Its economy is almost totally dependent on oil, and the government is "structured" by patronage and relationships among an extended ruling family. It also has a much smaller population than the more classic revolutionary dictatorships such as Syria and Ba'athist Iraq.