Gaddafi is dead. As are the West's secret and horrible deals with him

As much as I was a supporter of the protests in Libya, almost right away I started worrying about the lack of any well-articulated game plan from Obama.  Verbal jujitsus like "kinetic military action" made me worry even more.  

A critical question was always about the day after.

It is now the day after, and boy has Libya gotten off to a messy start!

The video below shows in quite some graphic detail how the "mad dog" was handled after his capture.  Andrew Sullivan writes about this lynching of Gaddafi, while linking to this video:

We now have solid video evidence that some resistance fighter tried to sodomize him with a stick or a knife in the moments after his capture. One recalls what was done to Mussolini and, indeed, how the execution of Saddam Hussein turned, at the last minute, into a Shiite revenge fantasy. It's an ugly, ugly thing - when dictators lose power. And not a great omen for a genuinely new start for Libya.

Gaddafi's torturous end perhaps was even better than what he and his regime did to many others.  But, in a civil society, even the cruel maniac is given a proper trial before sentenced to death--a proper one, unlike the show trial after Romanians threw out the Caeusescus.

Now, Obama and Sarkozy will have to wait and watch from the sidelines the consequences of their hasty involvement in a civil war in a country where two generations had experienced only a life under a dictator. 

If only Obama had come out strongly against Gaddafi from the first days of the protests--there was a chance that Gaddafi might have fled the country.  But, his dilly-dallying emboldened the delusional dictator.

David Riff writes that Western governments are perhaps relieved that Gaddafi is not alive; here is why:

Qaddafi was, quite simply, a man who knew too much. Taken alive, he would have almost certainly have been handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had indicted him -- along with his son, Saif al-Islam, and brother-in-law and military intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi (whereabouts unknown) -- for crimes against humanity in late June. Imagine the stir he would have made in The Hague. There, along with any number of fantasies and false accusations, he would almost certainly have revealed the extent of his intimate relations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the details of his government's collaboration with Western intelligence services in counterterrorism, with the European Union in limiting migration from Libyan shores, and in the granting of major contracts to big Western oil and construction firms.
He would have had much to tell, for this cooperation was extensive. In the war against the jihadis -- a war to which Qaddafi regularly claimed to be as committed to prosecuting as Washington, Paris, or London -- links between Libyan intelligence and the CIA were particularly strong, as an archive of secret documents unearthed by Human Rights Watch researchers has revealed. If anything, the CIA's British counterpart, MI6, was even more involved with the Qaddafi family.

Oh what a tangled web we weave!

even if Qaddafi was not targeted and, as Omran al-Oweib, the electrical engineer-turned-rebel leader who commanded the forces that finally caught up with Qaddafi in a tunnel just outside Sirte, continues to insist, really was killed in a crossfire, leaders like Sarkozy, Blair, Brown, and the Bush State Department must surely be sleeping better these last few nights. Whether they deserve to is another question entirely.

The difference between Obama and Louis XIV is ...

So, what could go wrong with the US getting into the middle of a civil war in a country, right?

Obama has been working off an awful script right from the first day of protests in Libya.  As he did with Egypt, Obama chose caution and didn't want to express support for those opposing tyranny.  That was a major goof--as the leader of the free world, Obama ought to have publicly stated his support for the rebels.  Such a stand early on would have been pressure enough on Gaddafi to have fled to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.

At least Obama's sidekick, Joe Biden, didn't assert that Gaddafi is no dictator, as he did in the case of Egypt's Mubarak.  Hey, we have to count our blessings!

And then when the Libyan protests started getting bloody, Obama continued to exercise caution, when many of us--yes, including me--thought he and the West ought to have enforced a no-fly zone.

All this passivity made Gaddafi one bold and confident guy and he upped the ante.

And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Obama goes way above and beyond the idea of a no-fly zone and starts firing missiles into Libya.  Why such unilateral moves without talking to us people, or Congress?

Despite all my posts on this topic, I continue to be shocked and awed by his presidential audacity.  As Mickey Edwards notes (ht)

Obama has made not one but two disturbing choices. The first was to decide that he, not Congress, would make the call to intervene, despite clear language in the Constitution designating the president as the commander but the Congress as the only branch entitled to decide whether to engage militarily. Obama donned the crown even more brazenly than either of the two George Bushes. The first asked Congress to authorize the first Gulf War and the second asked Congress to authorize the use of military force -- meaning that both the first Gulf War and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan proceeded with congressional authorization. Obama, in sending American ships and planes to Libya, simply claimed the right to act on his own. And then did so.
The "I'm King" scenario is bad enough, but Obama also has a second story available if we're not ready to buy that one. In this tale, Obama acted not as a king, but under the authority granted to him by the United Nations Security Council. But while the Founders had their disagreements, none ever envisioned that the question of whether or not to send Americans on a military mission would be left up to other nations. Obama assumed authority for the Libyan adventure on two false premises, not one.

Oh well ... now that we are bombing, we can only hope and wish for success without any major screw-ups.

Wait, it turns out that NATO accidentally bombed the rebels it was supposed to assist!  Andrew Cockburn writes that air power alone cannot do any damn thing, and cites many examples from the inaugural bombing raid in 1911 onwards:

None of these salutary qualifications appear to have had much effect on air power enthusiasts in the current administration, particularly those veterans of the Clinton years who cherish warm, if inaccurate, memories of the Kosovo campaign. So the hard lessons will have to be learned all over again: Jet fighters flying at 15,000 feet — standard altitude in these conditions — have great difficulty spotting targets such as tanks, especially when they make some effort to hide or camouflage themselves. Additionally, in the last week, forces loyal to Kadafi have reportedly taken to moving in pickups identical to those used by the rebels, rendering the task of airborne targeteers even more difficult. For even minimal success, U.S. personnel acting as ground spotters are indispensable, and they, of course, will require further troops to protect them and train local allies — a role now reportedly being delegated to the CIA.

So, what next?

US President Barack Obama has secretly authorised covert assistance to rebels seeking to overthrow Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi

Surely nothing can go wrong, can it?  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh!

Maybe I should stop paying attention to all these, and instead turn my attention to fluff, like this one about the princess-to-be, Kate Middleton:

Obama flexing his muscles at the wrong time in Libya

At least the one reader (you know who you are!) who has engaged me on discussions regarding America's response to the protests in Libya, well, that reader will probably be shocked and surprised that I am not in favor of American involvement at this point.

If it were on grounds of idealism and principles, and that ought to be the reason any time, then we would have expressed our outrage from the very beginning of the protests.  We would have then applied pressure on Gaddafi right from that first day, and there is a fair chance that most of the Arab countries would have backed up that kind of pressure from the US and Western European countries.

But, we didn't.

Instead, we watched the President waffle through weakly, as if even he had even lost his oratorical gifts.  Secretary Clinton tried some weak version of diplomacy; but then who really cares any more for what diplomats have to say in the aftermath of the WikiLeaks cables, eh!  Those leaks made it very clear--they confirmed--that we say one thing in the public and lots of different things in private and the two sets don't necessarily converge.

So, Mad Dog Gaddafi figured that the rebels weren't going to get any support--psychological and material--from America and the West.  Gaddafi went on the offensive, and he now pretty much has regained control over the country.

And now the President is acting all tough, and issuing ultimatums.  What the hell is matter with this guy?

So, if he is acting strictly as a response to the horrific developments over the last couple of days, then the President has a tough question to answer: how will he then respond to the murderous assaults on protesters in Bahrain, or the merciless killings of protesters in Yemen?  And what about the horrors that Robert Mugabe has inflicted upon his his country and people over a couple of decades?  The President is now beginning to tread on dangerous military missions if his leadership will be in response to imagery and not clear principles.

Will he then use the same logic of gathering up the international community to impose whatever variations of a no-fly-zone are in Yemen and Bahrain?  Wait, we already have a base in Bahrain; so, we just open the doors and let our forces go and straighten out the Bahraini/Saudi forces?

So, now that we have the UN resolution, now what?

The hope may be that the resolution's passage, and the current preparations to enforce it, would be enough to make Qaddafi crumble. But, as the saying goes, hope is not a strategy. At this point, if the fighting continues, Obama, the Europeans, and—presumably—the Arab League forces will have no choice but to respond, and not just to shoot down planes but to attack (from the air) Qaddafi's airfields, weapons, and maybe troops on the ground.
At that point, we would be intervening in an Arab civil war. This would be done in a putatively humanitarian mission, under the authority of a U.N. resolution, with (perhaps merely in support of) other Arab countries in the region—but it's still intervening in an Arab civil war, and this is the sort of thing that makes senior U.S. military officers nervous.
How will it go? In a tactical sense, probably pretty well. U.S., European, and even Arab air forces are very capable of pummeling Qaddafi's army and air force if they want to do so.
Where will it end? That's a different question. Will Libya bog down in a protracted civil war or into mutually hostile regions? Will Qaddafi hang on to power? If he crumbles, who will take over, and what will that person or family or tribe or faction do—and with what resources or institutions to mobilize the population, inspire their allegiance, and rebuild?

Couldn't we have played our cards at the very beginning when there was a fair chance that Gaddafi might have fled, perhaps to Venezuela?

I know I am stupid, but it appears that I have some presidential company here.

Finally, a request to Obama, Clinton and all you administration people: stop saying "all options are on the table."  I would like to impose restrictions on what options can and should remain on the table, and when those options can be exercised.

The best caricature, yet, of Gaddafi versus Obama

Gaddafi says Libyans love him. Evita singing "you must love me"

So, the maniacal Gawdawful Gaddafi asserts in an interview with the BBC that Libyans love him.  Boy, this guy is even better than Baghdad Bob.

Gaddafi: "They are not against us. No-one is against us. Against us for what? Because I'm not a president. They love me. All my people are with me, they love me all. They will die to protect me, my people."
Christiane Amanpour: "If you say they do love you, then why are they capturing Benghazi and saying they're against you?"
Gaddafi: "It's al-Qaeda. It's not my people. They came from outside."

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, says Gaddafi is "delusional:"

 Ms Rice said the fact he was laughing at questions while "slaughtering his own people" showed that he was disconnected from reality.

Watching him say that his people love him reminded me of the evil genius Evita's song:

More videos: The Libyan "mad dog" Gaddafi and "Singing in the Rain"

Yes, democracy seems to be coming to the Middle East--what can be more evidence than hilarious remixing like this of Gaddafi's rambling rants and "Hey Baby" :)



Or, how about this one that plays on the crazy video of Gaddafi and his umbrella when he confirmed to this people he hadn't fled the country, and was in Libya:



Of course, it was not too long before the Rihanna umbrella theme took off to make fun of this crazy dictator:



Ok, enough with this, I say ... it is "time to muzzle the mad dog of Libya"!

The international community also has a responsibility to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches the Libyan population. Corridors should be opened from Tunisia and Egypt down which such aid can be funnelled. The UN should be ready to protect the oil installations if Col Gaddafi starts to destroy them.
Col Gaddafi’s misrule is surely coming to an end thanks to the bravery of the Libyans. While the wider world cannot do their fighting for them, it must do what it can to stem the dictator’s capacity for mayhem in what are hopefully his last days.

For now, let's get under Rihanna's umbrella!

People taking the high ground in Libya, while Obama wusses out

The mad "our man in North Africa" Gaddafi continues to make things worse for his own people.  Firing on people, even children, hiring thugs from other countries in order to shoot and kill Libyans .... how much more insane can this guy get?

Yet, ordinary Libyans haven't lost it all (ht)


Christopher Hitchens is unhappy with President Obama's responses, or the lack of any, to the revolutions on the "Arab Street"

For weeks, the administration dithered over Egypt and calibrated its actions to the lowest and slowest common denominators, on the grounds that it was difficult to deal with a rancid old friend and ally who had outlived his usefulness. But then it became the turn of Muammar Qaddafi—an all-round stinking nuisance and moreover a long-term enemy—and the dithering began all over again. Until Wednesday Feb. 23, when the president made a few anodyne remarks that condemned "violence" in general but failed to cite Qaddafi in particular—every important statesman and stateswoman in the world had been heard from, with the exception of Obama. And his silence was hardly worth breaking. Echoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had managed a few words of her own, he stressed only that the need was for a unanimous international opinion, as if in the absence of complete unity nothing could be done, or even attempted. This would hand an automatic veto to any of Qaddafi's remaining allies. It also underscored the impression that the opinion of the United States was no more worth hearing than that of, say, Switzerland.

Perhaps the line about testicular fortitude was not off the mark, after all!  Hitchens concludes thus:

Libya is—in point of population and geography—mainly a coastline. The United States, with or without allies, has unchallengeable power in the air and on the adjacent waters. It can produce great air lifts and sea lifts of humanitarian and medical aid, which will soon be needed anyway along the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, and which would purchase undreamed-of goodwill. It has the chance to make up for its pointless, discredited tardiness with respect to events in Cairo and Tunis. It also has a president who has shown at least the capacity to deliver great speeches on grand themes. Instead, and in the crucial and formative days in which revolutions are decided, we have had to endure the futile squawkings of a cuckoo clock.

Or, as we put in bluntly at casual conversations, "all talk and no shit."

Wait, is Obama slowly backing away from all this for the reason that Jon Stewart has figured out?

The Daily Show - Mess O' The Whole Potamia Region - Libya Uprising
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The emperor has no ... keffiyeh!

I can't wait for Col. Gadawful Gaddafi to flee the country ... like many other dictators, to Saudi Arabia.  And then when the revolution comes to Riyadh, I want these dictators to become nomads in the desert, and left to die without water!

I am simply amazed that the loony maniac was in power this long!  In India, Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution for almost two years as a way not to comply with the court's ruling that invalidated her electoral victory.  But, the pressure from within never really went away, and she was promptly booted out of office when she lifted the emergency rule.  It would have been one hell of a chaos if the anti-democratic government had lasted longer.

Gaddafi was no Fidel Castro to the young me.  At least Castro symbolized something--he consistently out-maneuvered the imperial America.  Of course, growing up resulted in a gradual disillusionment with Castro and now to a complete anti-Castro stance.  But, I could never understand Gaddafi's long tenure, and why the world tolerated him.  Oil is a pretty simplistic explanation.  After all, in the grand scheme of things, Libya's oil reserves and production, as Bogart's Rick said in Casablanca, "don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world" ... Libya is no Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Kuwait.

One hell of a crazy person Gaddafi was/is:

Qaddafi spent much of his career as one of the world's least discriminating sponsors of political unrest in Africa and worldwide. He is believed to have helped underwrite terrorists from the Black September group that conducted the 1972 attacks on the Munich Olympics to the IRA to Colombia's FARC to Carlos the Jackal. While he periodically seemed lucid and was charismatic enough to once inspire Nelson Mandela to name one of his off-spring after him, he has enough blood on his hands to earn him a place in the 20th Century madman hall of fame, admittedly not in the main wing with the really big time murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but in the wannabe annex. 
Of course, even were Qaddafi to fall tomorrow -- which wouldn't be too soon -- he will already have served longer than any Libyan leader in almost half a millennium and his tenure, which began with a  coup in 1969, will rank among the longest worldwide of the post-World War II era. In other words, his departure, when it comes will be long overdue.

BTW, in case you wonder about the two spellings of the name: Gaddafi and Qaddafi:

"Muammar Gaddafi" is the spelling used by TIME magazine, BBC News, the majority of the British press and by the English service of Al-Jazeera.^[99] The Associated Press, CNN, and Fox News use "Moammar Gadhafi". The Edinburgh Middle East Report uses "Mu'ammar Qaddafi" and the U.S. Department of State uses "Mu'ammar Al-Qadhafi". The Xinhua News Agency uses "Muammar Khaddafi" in its English reports.^[100]
In 1986, Gaddafi reportedly responded to a Minnesota school's letter in English using the spelling "Moammar El-Gadhafi".^[101] The title of the homepage of algathafi.org reads "Welcome to the official site of Muammar Al Gathafi"

No Ukrainian nurse can help Libya's Gaddafi. Cheering the protesters

So, it appears that the Arab youth are mad as hell. 

And, Libya's Gaddafi is now at the receiving end of the  raging emotions that have been bottled up for 41 long years.  Yes, it was in 1969, almost 42 years ago, this maniac took over the country! 

But, Gaddafi will clearly not go away without putting up a fight, and he has quickly resorted to dirty tricks:

The mainstay of the unrest is in regional towns and cities, where many people live in poverty.
Foreign journalists operate under restrictions in Libya, so it has been impossible to independently verify much of the information coming out of the country.
But the BBC has confirmed that several websites - including Facebook and al-Jazeera Arabic - have been blocked.
And the airport in Benghazi, the country's second largest city, has been closed, amid reports that protesters have taken it over.
Residents in Benghazi told the BBC that electricity has been cut off, and tanks are posted outside the court building.
Benghazi protesters have told international media they have learnt from Tunisia and Egypt, and are determined to depose Col Gaddafi.
Media outlets loyal to Col Gaddafi had earlier conceded that security forces had killed 14 protesters in Benghazi on Thursday, though other accounts put the death toll much higher.

 The news channel that US cable corporations refuse to carry, Al Jazeera, also has a similar report:

Marchers mourning dead protesters in Libya's second-largest city have reportedly come under fire from security forces, as protests in the oil-exporting North African nation entered their fifth day.
Mohamed el-Berqawy, an engineer in Benghazi, told Al Jazeera that the city was the scene of a "massacre," and that four demonstrators had been killed on Friday.
"Where is the United Nations ... where is (US president Barack) Obama, where is the rest of the world, people are dying on the streets," he said. "We are ready to die for our country."

I hope my intro class students are tuned in--one of the two short stories that I have assigned for their final projects is Hisham Matar's "Naima."  Matar writes in the Guardian:

I appeal to Colonel Gaddafi and his security forces: for the sake of the mothers, for the sake of those who died, for the sake of Libya, please don't shoot and torture your people.

I blogged before that Matar knows well about this dictator and his cronies ...

So, why the Ukrainian nurse in the heading you ask?  Thank WikiLeaks for that

"Naima." Understanding Egypt and dictators through a short story

If you want to read it online, well, it is behind a paywall.

Given the turmoil in Egypt, it is a fascinating coincidence that the January 24th issue of the New Yorker should feature a short story that is so much about Egypt, Cairo, politics, women, ...  I bow in appreciation to these writers who so easily are able to draw even moronic readers like me into the situations they present in their stories.

Like a lot of fiction, this one too might be based on the author's real life experiences--how loosely or closely I know not.  A Google search led me to to a powerful and emotional essay by the author, Hisham Matar, who was born in the pre-Gaddafi Libya,.in which he writes about how his father's political activities made them flee to Egypt after quite a few unsuccessful attempts.  And then to make things worse, the Egyptian government let the Libyans kidnap Matar's father and hold him indefinitely without any contact with the family:

What I want is to know what happened to my father. If he is alive, I wish to speak with him and see him. If he has broken the law, he ought to be tried and given a chance to defend himself. And if he is dead, then I want to know how, where and when it happened. I want a date, a detailed account and the location of his body.

And those awful people still run these countries--Gaddafi in Libya and Mubarak, who "inherited" the power thanks to Sadat's assassination.  It is awful that we have tolerated dictators like Mubarak and Gaddafi and so many others for this long.  Matar's observations on Gaddafi could apply to many other dictators too:

Gaddafi is unique among dictators in that he has few constant beliefs. A position which has afforded him an extraordinary instinct for survival.

Matar notes in that same essay:

living without one's country is a kind of daily death, that exile is, in essence, an endless mourning.

Here is to hoping for a quick end to the millions of such daily death.