After every United Nations-led political process has failed to end the division or bring Libya to elections, could the initiative put forward by Massad Boulos, the US president's adviser on African and Middle Eastern affairs, become a realistic way out of Libya's chronically tangled crisis? And is it a genuinely different path from the one the UN mission has pursued?
Boulos insists his initiative is "entirely complementary" to the UN’s efforts. Some of its opponents, however, see it as a separate track from the international mission's - a mission that has, in fact, failed with every initiative it has tried, from Skhirat to Geneva, to end Libya's political division. For that reason, some regard the American initiative Boulos champions as the "most realistic" proposal on offer.
The initiative rests on unifying the government and the sovereign institutions, so as to stabilize the oil sector and encourage foreign investment, while opening channels of cooperation between the military and security leaderships of eastern and western Libya.
That cooperation has already produced tangible results on the ground: a unified national budget for the first time since 2013, and joint military exercises in Sirte, supervised by US Africa Command, that brought eastern and western forces together in joint operations rooms. The elements of consensus and success appear to be in place, and working.
The initiative also enjoys popular acceptance, particularly in the east, thanks to confidence in the candidate backed by the General Command of the Libyan National Army. It could therefore be the proposal most likely to break the deadlock and revive a political process that has been clinically dead for more than a decade - all the more so because the two parties to it are real and influential actors in Libyan politics.
Even so, the Boulos initiative - titled "Reunifying Libya" - may meet rejection from political Islam and its supporters, despite being the largest realistic proposal that field conditions actually allow to succeed.
The attempts to undermine it come wrapped in unrealistic slogans and questions: Is the initiative a genuine settlement, or a new carve-up of influence and resources? Such claims raise obstacle after obstacle to its adoption - even though the initiative's own details answer them.
It seeks to unify divided sovereign bodies: the army, the government, the oil sector, and the central bank. It is not, as its opponents claim, a scheme to create "parallel bodies" that hand influence to their leaders while doing nothing for the country.
Most of those opponents are supporters of political Islam, or men with a stake in keeping Libya divided so their pockets can keep filling with looted Libyan money through a system of opportunistic corruption.
The earlier agreements - Skhirat and its updated Geneva version - became dead letters thanks to a Muslim Brotherhood and quasi-international effort to recycle and entrench the political-Islam groups after they lost at the ballot box in Libya.
Both Skhirat and Geneva proved hard to implement and were breached on more than one provision. Take the so-called High Council of State: it came to include only one component - the political-Islam alliance - rather than those who had made up the General National Congress when it first convened in July 2012.
That was a plain violation of the text of the Skhirat Agreement, and a stretching of the council's advisory role into the exercise of legislative power.
Clinging to a dead agreement like Skhirat, and refreshing it through the Geneva Agreement, is among the chief reasons efforts to resolve the Libyan crisis have failed. Foreign and regional intervention has compounded the problem, as has the UN mission's failure to offer any roadmap - a mission that has instead kept moving the venues for dialogue from one place to the next.
The solution still lies in a Libyan-Libyan dialogue held on Libyan soil, not abroad, within national principles that respect democratic choice and the country's geography. That is the logical option, and the one welcomed by Libyans whose interest lies in reunifying the country and restoring it to the map as a functioning state.
The best and most workable political solution may be for the two sides to meet halfway, with "neither victor nor vanquished." Sirte could serve as an alternative capital to unite Libyans: it sits at the midpoint of the coast, between west, east, and south. That makes it the best site for the capital - provided new institutions and ministries are built to international standards, so that centralized thinking and corruption can be rooted out.
Tripoli, the current capital, has been taken hostage by militias of every ideological and organizational stripe and is no longer fit to unite anyone. It is held by militias - some serving the agenda of the "Guide," alongside self-interested ones that use the capital to extort the ministries and the government - and by foreign mercenaries besides, a state of affairs that has bred chaos and put weapons beyond the reach of the state.
A meeting in Sirte to take up the eminently realistic "Boulos initiative" may open a path to a solution and to consensus among Libyans - in place of the dialogue of the deaf that some prefer, and the retreat into false illusions, such as the claim that the initiative aims to divide influence and redraw the balance of power. These are ready-made pretexts for rejection, and they have nothing to do with political realism.
