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well-positioned Libyans were also products of the Esso-sponsored US fellowships of decades before.
    The older generation of Libyans, those with experiences with Americans dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, perceived the US—at least within trading circles—to stand for quality, style, and forthrightness in business. Just as there was a cadre of US-educated technocrats and monarchy-era traders with fond (if outdated) memories of the US and of American customs, there was a community in the US with deep personal attachments to Libya. Every other year since the late 1970s, more than a thousand people have gathered in Texas for a reunion of America-Libyan expatriates, many former oil workers and teachers, to sing the club anthem, “I will be back again Libya.”
    Not all attempts to capitalize on these past bonds or assumed commonalities were successful. The embassy attempted to reach out, through a couple of social hours, to the US-citizen families of Libyans educated in the states thirty or so years earlier, to explore their numbers and views. Many had married US citizens and returned with them to Libya, with the US spouse typically converting to Islam. In one such meeting, the dynamic quickly turned hostile. Many of these individuals accused the US of abandoning them or of being indifferent to the Libyan condition. Oil hit the flame as a visiting member of the State Department’s intelligence bureau,
INR, with little appreciation of the Libyan context, spent most of the meeting simultaneously arguing against and arousing suspicions that he had been sent by the CIA to press them for information. 10 In another display of how far worldviews had diverged in thirty years, Ministry of Labor officials were publicly aghast (and privately amused) when confronted with a pair of female US officials dressed as if they were headed to a cabaret. One proceeded to give a slide presentation suggesting that Libya emulate a certain model of hotel financing recently applied to Afghanistan. The Libyans were taken aback a second time by the presentation itself and felt any hint of comparison with that chaos-ridden, resource-poor state highly insulting.
    In an effort to amplify the increasing interest by US oil, aircraft and telecom companies senior Libyans tried to exploit the idea, then current in some American commercial circles, that the Americans had already lost the advantage to the European and Asian companies that had returned shortly after the UN sanctions were lifted in 1999. “The Americans are late,” a high-ranking Libyan official told The Export Practitioner in 2004. 11
    Certainly, the Libyan oil industry benefited most immediately from European and Asian assistance. In the Americans’ absence, a number of countries did good business in oil, construction, and general contracting, including Korea (Daewoo); Germany (Belfinger, Berger, Wintershall, Siemens); Sweden (Skanska); Italy (ENI); Spain (REPSOL); France (Total); and Turkey (various construction firms). Yet the trajectory was not always going up. From 2000 to 2004, Libya’s trade with Italy and Germany plummeted, particularly in nonrefined products. Even Italy, which was traditionally Libya’s number-one trading partner, experienced large-scale fluctuations in trade linked to political disputes; Italian exports to Libya held steady throughout the 1990s at just over $1 billion per year. The figure jumped about 20 percent in the years immediately after the lifting of UN sanctions in 1999, but continued to wobble until 2008.
    By the late fall of 2004, Libya’s economic opportunities began to enter the peripheral vision of some American companies outside the oil and gas industry. Particularly interested were those whose hopes of quick riches in Iraq and Afghanistan had been dashed by current events. However, there remained downsides to doing business in Libya, including the continuing stigma of secondary (US-imposed) sanctions as well as the