You can buy a wireless bridge that claims "150Mbps throughput" with a range of 20km for 600 GBP (1000 USD) using a 25dBi antenna. If you could switch the antenna to a higher gain large parabolic dish (old satellite dish?) I'm guessing you could achieve a substantially greater range. If you installed 10 of these and bonded them together could you achieve "1.5Gbps throughput"?

Things I don't know however are:

1: Can you actually get 150Mbps over 20km, or is it 150Mbps over 1km and 5Mbps over 20km?

2: Can you bond these links together to achieve higher bandwidth?

3: Who would accept the connection at the Crete end?

4: What would you connect to in Libya?

5: Is 1.5Gbps anything like enough bandwidth?

I realize this are far from simple questions to answer, but is there somebody on slashdot with experience of fixed microwave links, somebody else with experience of running an ISP and somebody else with experience with backbone connectivity?

Given that the Libyan air force has been having huge problems hitting ammunition dumps, hitting a small (say 2m diameter) dish mounted on the side of a small building near the top of a mountain is going to be virtually impossible without very clever missiles, and once it's installed you don't need anybody there looking after it. To make it even harder, if the equipment was relatively cheap you could install 10-20 links so that losing one wouldn't have much impact (and the missiles would cost a lot more than the equipment).

As to satellite phones, if you're lucky you'll be able to connect a few hundred people. Reconnecting the existing internet infrastructure would provide telecommunications to orders of magnitude more people at much lower cost.