Libya's teetering government is urging the United States to give the country a chance even as it sinks into chaos. The rebels who toppled Muammar Gadhafi three years ago hired the lobbying group of Patton Boggs and the Harbour Group public relations firm in 2011 to help convince the Barack Obama administration to recognize their interim transitional council as Libya's legitimate government. Today, many of the same lobbyists - the contract with Harbour ended last year - must persuade US officials that Libya is not a lost cause.

The lobby campaign has been a tough sell on Capitol Hill, which put up roadblocks to US foreign aid to Libya following the Sept. 11, 2012, attack against the US consulate in Benghazi in which Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died. Congressional appropriators have written restrictions into annual spending bills prohibiting aid unless the State Department reports that the government is cooperating with the United States in its “efforts to investigate and bring to justice those responsible” for the attacks. Similar language has been inserted in the House’s State Department and foreign operations spending bill for FY2015, but not in the Senate version.

Republican lawmakers in particular have latched on to the Benghazi assault, and the Libyan government's perceived shortcomings, in ramping up their attacks against former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the putative Democratic front-runner for president in 2016. The potential impact of US domestic politics on the bilateral relationship became clear this spring when the Department of Homeland Security announced plans to lift Reagan-era restrictions on visas for Libyans to come to the United States to engage in flight training, aviation maintenance or nuclear-related studies as part of its so-called normalization with Libya following the Gadhafi government’s abandonment of its weapons of mass destruction program during the George W. Bush administration.

“Recent events — such as the 2012 attack on our U.S. Consulate in Benghazi — do not indicate a nation where things have been ‘normalized,’" said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, in an Aug. 11 statement in tandem with leaders of the House Judiciary Committee. “Rather they seem to be ingredients of a failed state in the making." Chaffetz, who chairs the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, made his remarks shortly after the White House Office of Management and Budget approved a final regulation lifting the prohibition. In a June 15 nighttime raid, US Special Forces had captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, the suspected ringleader of the Benghazi attack. The arrest, however, does not appear to have placated Libya's congressional critics, as it predates the statement from Chaffetz and others.