Geoff Porter challenges the Bush administration gospel that the threat of pre-emption moved Libya: In 1999, Libya extradited two men implicated in the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, a decade earlier. The same year, it agreed to pay compensation for the victims of the bombing of a French airliner, UTA Flight 772, whose destruction over Niger was traced back to Libya. Discussions between the United States and Libya about its weapons of mass destruction programs also began that year. These discussions finally bore fruit last fall with Colonel Qaddafi's decision to renounce these weapons. It is true that this announcement came after Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed, but is a mistake to link these two events. Why? For one, history argues against it: Colonel Qaddafi did not respond to direct military strikes ordered by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, even when they cost the life of his adopted daughter. It would be misleading to suggest that this time around he was brought to heel by the mere specter of military action. Instead, Colonel Qaddafi's decision to abandon his weapons programs was motivated by domestic concerns. For 35 years Colonel Qaddafi has used oil to buy allegiance from Libyans. In exchange for their turning a blind eye to the lack of representative government and human rights abuses, Colonel Qaddafi is openhanded in distributing Libya's oil proceeds, sometimes as direct gifts to influential people and tribal leaders, but also in the form of state-financed health care, huge urban development projects and universal free education. But two decades of American and United Nations sanctions diminished Libyan oil revenues. The country's oil fields were declining, exploration was all but halted, and Libya was forbidden to import new oil extraction technology. At the same time, Libya's population was booming. In 1982 there were slightly fewer than three million people in Libya. By 2002, there were more than five million. In some cities, the annual growth rate topped an astronomical (and problematic) 7 percent. The mixture of population growth and declining oil revenues endangered Colonel Qaddafi's ability to hold on to power.