Posted on 10/23/2011 12:51:25 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Muammer Gaddafi ended up hiding in a sewage drain, a bit like the “rats” he said he would hunt down in Benghazi, alley by alley or “Zenga Zenga”, in what became a demented slogan for a doomed counter-revolution. There was a savage symmetry to his death.
But if there is a theme to Gaddafi’s life, it is one of solipsism and failure. Cunning and ruthless, he held on to power for 42 years. That was remarkable. Beyond that, he achieved nothing.
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This nugatory outcome was backlit by his buffoonery and bombast. The Brother Leader bestowed upon himself baroque titles – latterly King of Kings (of Africa) – changing them several times a day as though he were acting in a political repertory theatre. In a sense he was, supporting a bewildering range of “liberation” movements across four continents.
His early ambitions were unexceptionable for the times. He caught the last big anti-colonial wave in Africa and the Middle East, and before he began masquerading as a Third World messiah he was a mere pan-Arab nationalist. That was mainstream but, being Gaddafi, he started reaching for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s mantle when the Egyptian leader, tragic idol of the Arab masses, was barely cold in his grave.
That was an early sign of Gaddafi’s preternatural ability to polarise – and then unite almost everyone against him. So it was this year, when the UN Security Council decision against him was preceded by a damning vote in the otherwise supine Arab League, and two Gulf states, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, took the field against him. Even Lebanon, with a government under the thumb of Hizbollah, the Iran-aligned Shia Islamist movement, cast a Security Council vote against him. The Shia harboured a deep grudge against Gaddafi for the kidnapping and eventual death in 1979 of Musa al-Sadr, their leading imam, who tried to stop his meddling in the Lebanese civil war.
By this time he had long turned his back on the Arabs as unworthy of him. Yet if all his schemes of Arab union came to nothing, so did his even grander ideas of African union. His malignant interventions in Chad and Niger, Liberia or Sierra Leone, were sweetened by the bankrolling of local leaders. But few of them pretended to buy his Green Book philosophy, three volumes of drivel he believed superseded Marx and Mammon, solving the contradictions of capitalism and communism with a Third Universal Theory. Burkina Faso followed briefly in his wake, not much for a putative empire builder.
His crimes are well-known: from blowing up airliners to bombing Berlin discos; from his arming of the Irish Republican Army to his patronage of Abu Nidal and Carlos the Jackal. His brutalisation of his own people and evisceration of institutional life under his Jamahiriya (a Gaddafi neologism conflating the Arabic words for people and republic) was also known before being put on such bloody display over months of civil war.
But the full extent of his meddling was staggering, as he squandered billions of petrodollars on foreign adventures while Libyans struggled to rise out of poverty.
Yes, he gave Semtex to the IRA. But one day in Tripoli in 1978, a Sinn Féin leader emerged from an audience with Gaddafi to find the supreme commander of the Ulster Defence Association, then the main loyalist paramilitary group, in his anteroom. The Irish republican leader told a Basque nationalist lawyer shortly afterwards that he could never trust the Libyan again.
In Spain at that time, Gaddafi was investing in at least three distinct factions, including the wing of the Socialist party led by Enrique Tierno Galvan, the courtly professor who became mayor of Madrid; an Andalusian nationalist party whose leader had spun him stories about recreating the Arab glories of medieval al-Andalus; and the far right newspaper El Imparcial that was at the heart of a 1978 coup plot, and whose publisher and editor had purportedly converted to Islam.
Whatever their ideology, Gaddafi had them all pay court to him, and with each suitcase of dollars came kilos of Green Books. All he achieved was to turn Libya into a synonym for a deranged mélange of terror and buffoonery. That is the nightmare from which Libyans can at last awake now he is gone.
Out of the frying pan into the fire.
Hello Shariah Law.
Out with the old and in with the new. The new is an Islamic nightmare for the people. The new is the Shariah. They will be wishing for the good old days...
We’ll see Davy boy. We’ll see. If I was a betting man, I’d bet their “nightmare” is about to begin. Al Qaeda and the Muzzie Bros. are the roosters in that henhouse now.
They don’t know nightmares. The real ones are coming.
Wait until those women who were yelling “Libya is Free” find out how it’s going to feel living under Sharia now. Won’t be able to drive or go out alone or any of the freedoms they enjoyed.
This is your brain on piss poor journalism. It wasn’t a “sewage drain”, David, it was a storm runoff culvert. But you just parrot the BS fed to you.
The night mare is just beginning.
Well, he ended up with ~$200B and some great chicks. Could'a been worse.
The same Libyan people, by the way, who back then seemed perfectly fine with all the disco and airline bombings. The same folks who feted the Lockerbie bomber back as a hero a few months ago.
Its interesting that they finally decided they'd had enough of Qaddafi after the poor slob started cozying up with the west.
And what about the nightmare of Obama for USA and for the world. There were no need to quick out at the same time Ben Ali, Mubarak, Ghadafi , Saleh, Hasad....Obama is a way worse nightmare....meanwhile Iran is going on with is agenda....
Tell me now where is the real nightmare
We could scare he of many spellings. We don’t and won’t scare who takes over.
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