Last Thursday, deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi was killed in his home town of Sirte, as the last stronghold of his ancien regime fell to rebel forces. Libya’s interim leader, chairman of the National Transitional Council Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, wasted little time in declaring “liberation” (and sharia law), setting off widespread celebrations throughout the country, and marking the end of an eight-month NATO-led civil war. Yet the mysterious circumstances surrounding Qaddafi’s death—video footage suggests he was executed after being captured—may represent a harbinger of things to come. Many analysts argue that only now does the “hard part” begin—the transition to a viable democracy—as Libyan factions jockey for political and military influence to fill the power vacuum left by the end of Qaddafi’s 42-year-long rule.
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS(BUT NOW COMES THE HARD PART)
Benjamin R. Barber
Huffington Post, October 21, 2011
His death was violent and ugly, but what the people he ruled over for 42 years with a violent hand wished for. And what he wanted. Muammar Gaddafi died in his home town holding a silver pistol, killed by some combination of a NATO strike that intercepted his caravan and furious fighters from Misrata who became executioners for an angry country. He said he would not flee as Ben Ali had in Tunisia, but would “live and die” in Libya. The Libyan freedom fighters granted him his wish. Sic semper tyrannis.
Muammar Gaddafi was the last surviving ruler of the nationalist revolutions of the ‘50s and ‘60s, a self-proclaimed revolutionary founder on the model of Nasser rather than Mubarak, Castro rather than Assad. He talked direct democracy and people’s revolution, but governed as an autocrat. He died as he had lived, by the gun.
He was as capricious as any modern autocrat, and so was his demise. For NATO too had intervened with a capriciousness of its own, choosing to become the insurgents’ air force though its mandate was the protection of civilians, and content to ignore 3000 unarmed civilian deaths in Syria where intervention had costs; and apparently happy to sustain a Salafist monarchy in Saudi Arabia where the despots have more gravitas, and the oil flows freely—and where another deposed tyrant, Tunisia’s Ben Ali, lives in the shadows.
The Gods, as always, are laughing: at our selective hypocrisies and at Gaddafi’s brute hubris. Five years ago during the period of reconciliation Gaddafi had almost begged Hilary Clinton (or Bill) to come to Libya. He much preferred America to neo-colonial Europe and had entrusted his fate to the Americans when he yielded his weapons of mass destruction in 2003 and agreed to pay reparations for Lockerbie. He even joined President Bush in the war on al Qaeda, imprisoning Abdel Hakim Belhaj who had been arrested by the U.S. in Bangkok but rendered over to Gaddafi (it was the same Belhaj, freed from prison before the uprising by Saif Gaddafi, who commanded the militia that took Tripoli during the summer). But for giving up his rogue status, Gaddafi got not Hillary but only Condi Rice and Tony Blair and lesser American figures like Senator Arlen Spector. Yet here now, on the very day before he died, was Hillary Clinton in Tripoli! Congratulating not him, but the rebels who had deposed him. Sic semper tyrannis.
And it was Secretary Clinton who wrote Gaddafi’s epitaph in Tripoli: “Now comes the hard part.” Too true, Gaddafi is gone, but it was enmity to Gaddafi alone that united the fractious, tribalized insurgents. Divided Libya has never before succeeded in forging a unified nation, let alone a democracy. Both Gaddafi and the monarch he overthrew tried, but monarchs and tyrants rarely forge civic unions among the people they abuse.
We know from the vicissitudes of the Arab Spring elsewhere that revolution and democracy are two different species. The first can be won in a hurry, if at great cost, with the fleeing of a dictator (like Ben Ali in Tunisia) or the arrest of a dictator (like Mubarak in Egypt), or the killing of the tyrant (Gaddafi ‘s fate). But democracy is another matter altogether, and requires long and patient labor in building civil society, forging a sense of citizenship, broadening education and inculcating habits of tolerance and respect for law that are generally not present in peoples who have lived so long under dictatorship.…
Those who think the writing of a constitution and the holding of elections is all it takes to forge democracy—like so many Western heralds of the Arab Spring—have not read history. Those who think revolution and democracy are the same thing have forgotten the lessons of 1789 in Paris and 1917 in Russia and 1979 in Tehran. Revolutions more often breed anarchy, rivalry and in time renewed tyranny—Napoleon or Stalin or the rule of the Mullahs—than democracy. Even in the United States it took eighty years and a bloody civil war to transform the slave republic into a free republic.
Gaddafi is gone, but the hard journey to democracy has scarcely begun. It will require in Libya that 140 tribes be reconciled, that the 300-year-old quarrel of East and West, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, be put aside. It will mean getting to the bottom of who among the rebels killed their own Commander Younis in Benghazi at the end of July; and finally getting the splintering militias to turn over their arms to a national police force; and assuring that victory over the tyrant does not become a blood feud against his clansmen.
So, sic semper tyrannis for sure, that is the powerful lesson of Muammar Gaddafi’s failed reign and violent death. But “death always to tyrants” is never the same thing as “life now for democracy.” This is “the hard part” for which a successful revolution is no guarantee, though the people of Libya richly deserve the promised democracy for which they have bravely shed so much of their blood.
KHADAFY, KHA-PUT
Amir Taheri
NY Post, October 21, 2011
‘We found him hiding in a hole,” says Muhammad al-Bibi, the man who led the detail that captured Col. Moammar Khadafy. “He raised his hands as a sign of surrender and shouted: ‘Don’t shoot!’”
Thus, the man who ruled Libya with an iron fist for 41 years became the second Arab despot, after Saddam Hussein, to be found hiding in a hole in his hometown. Found during the final battle for Sirte, his native town, the colonel was killed there and his corpse taken to Misrata, a city he’d turned into a pile of rubble last summer.
Al-Bibi, hailed as the slayer of the dragon, was wearing a Yankee cap and brandishing a gun seized from Khadafy’s mercenaries only a week ago. “Now I hope I can go back to my life,” he told reporters. And this is what most Libyans hope for. The way things turned out in Misrata was not what Khadafy had hoped for. Right to the very bitter end, he remained a prisoner of his illusions.
For four decades, he had heard people, men and women, shouting themselves hoarse with promises of dying for him. For four decades, he had distributed vast sums of money, generated by Libya’s huge oil exports, among a few hundred thousand “Fedaees” or “self-sacrificers,” individuals who were supposed to fight for him to the end.
When high on hubris and the “stimulant” drugs he took, the colonel claimed to have “an army of Omar Mukhtars” under his command, named after a bandit who became a local hero by fighting Italian colonialists in 1912. Yet the first city to rise against Khadafy was Tobruk—Omar Mukhtar’s birthplace. Then Benghazi rose, followed by Braiga.… Tens of thousands of Omar Mukhtars did enter the battlefield. But they were fighting not for but against him.
There was also no sign of the colonel’s foreign “friends”—politicians, academics, journalists and businessmen from dozens of countries across the globe who had enjoyed his largesse for years. As the final battle for Sirte reached its denouement, the only foreign voice in his support was that of France’s neo-fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. “I have full admiration for Colonel Khadafy,” Le Pen ranted. “He is fighting for dignity on behalf of us all.…”
[Khadafy] saw himself as leader of what he termed “the Arab Awakening” and proposed unification, under his leadership, with half-a-dozen Arab countries. All politely declined. Then he projected himself as the man who would create “the United States of Africa” and started bankrolling despots in sub-Saharan Africa. Dreaming of himself as “the guide of global revolution,” he financed terrorist groups in Africa, Asia and Europe.…
That Khadafy wasted Libya’s chances of progress for four decades may be stating the obvious. Far graver is the possibility that he may leave behind the wreck of a nation, unable to come together for a fresh start and a new direction.
In the end, it may be that overthrowing Khadafy was the easiest part of the challenge that Libyans set for themselves when they rose against the colonel almost nine months ago.
OBAMA’S LIBYAN DISASTER
Bruce Thornton
FrontPage, October 24, 2011
Anyone who believes that NATO’s overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi is a “success” for President Obama’s foreign policy should listen to the speech of Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council, at the “liberation day” celebrations in Benghazi: “We are an Islamic country,” the de facto president of Libya proclaimed to the crowds shouting “Allahu Akbar.” “We take the Islamic religion as the core of our new government. The constitution will be based on our Islamic religion [and will restore polygamy—Ed.].”
Despite these troubling portents for Libya’s future, the brutal end of Muammar Gaddafi is being spun as a “vindication” of President Obama’s foreign policy philosophy, as The New York Times has it. In an obvious swipe at the trigger-happy, unilateralist “cowboy” George Bush, the Times praises Obama’s “carefully calibrated response” that “relies on collective, rather than unilateral action” and “on surgical strikes rather than massive troop deployments.” The president himself crowed, “We’ve demonstrated what collective action can achieve in the 21st century.”
Such a reading of the Libyan adventure must rely on ignoring numerous unpleasant facts. Despite the implication that Obama assembled this coalition and thus deserves credit for it, in fact he was dragged into Libya by France and England. The last thing Obama wanted, having demonized the war in Iraq as a “quagmire” leading to “reckless escalation,” was to get Americans involved in yet another conflict involving Middle East Muslims. But the intervention was attractive to the Europeans as a way of gaining some geo-political clout to go along with their pretensions that they are one of the essential “poles” in a “multipolar” world, as French president Jacques Chirac once claimed. And don’t forget that before the conflict, E.U. countries got 10% of their imported oil from Libya. The conflict in nearby Libya, with its population of six million, long Mediterranean coastline, and mostly flat terrain perfect for establishing dominance over airspace, was tailor-made for such prestige-building on the cheap. Gaddafi’s bluster about exterminating the “rats” in rebel-held Benghazi merely provided the moral camouflage for the Europeans.
Moreover, an American president devoted to “multilateralism” and eager to “lead from behind” was amenable to facilitating the charade that this was a NATO operation, even though given European military weakness, America had to provide the intelligence-gathering aircraft, Predator drones, aerial refueling tankers, and precision-guided bombs that were necessary for destroying Gaddafi’s anti-aircraft batteries so that the Europeans could bomb with impunity. Even still, it took eight months and 20,000 sorties for NATO forces enjoying air superiority and high-tech weaponry to defeat a tin-pot dictator and his hired army. As for the vaunted Security Council resolution, which was passed ostensibly to prevent a “genocidal” slaughter, it was quickly revealed to be a sham when it became obvious that NATO was attempting to kill Gaddafi and bring about regime-change. So much for the moral purity of “collective action” sporting the Security Council seal of approval.
More importantly, what American interests was Obama serving by getting involved in Europe’s exercise in geopolitical public relations? Gaddafi was a vicious, blood-stained dictator, and there’s no doubt the world’s a better place without him. But since he had abandoned his WMD programs in 2003, he had behaved himself as far as our interests were concerned. We have the photos of Gaddafi smiling with Condoleezza Rice and President Obama himself to prove it. The talk about punishing the architect of the Lockerbie bombing that killed 189 Americans was a specious pretext, since we’d known for years Gaddafi was responsible. Indeed, Libya had admitted as much and paid $2.16 billion to the families of the American victims of the bombing. In 2008 another $1.5 billion was put into a fund to compensate victims of other Libyan terrorist attacks. These payments were the price for the removal of Libya from the list of states supporting terrorism, the lifting of trade sanctions, and the restoration of diplomatic relations with the U.S. Given that diplomatic rapprochement, it’s hard to see what had changed so drastically in Gaddafi’s behavior that justified American involvement in getting rid of someone we had previously admitted back into our good graces. After all, there are numerous oppressive dictators––Bashar al-Assad in nearby Syria comes to mind, not to mention the thuggish mullahs in Iran––that this administration has resigned itself to coexisting with. And unlike the defanged Gaddafi, they’re patently hostile to us and actively working against our interests.
Our precipitate abandonment of Gaddafi has already put at risk our national security. The collapse of Gaddafi’s regime engineered by NATO has set loose thousands of weapons, some of which are very likely headed to the black markets supplying terrorists. In February, rebels were documented plundering assault rifles, machine guns, mines, grenades, antitank missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades from arms depots. According to government officials in Chad and Algeria, some of these weapons have already reached the North African al Qaeda affiliate Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Particularly worrisome are the SAM-7 surface-to-air missiles, 20,000 of which were stockpiled by the Gaddafi regime. These weapons have in the past brought down commercial airliners, including an Air Rhodesia plane, an Angolan Airways 737, a Sudan Airways plane, and the plane carrying the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda, which led to the Rwandan genocide. And don’t forget the remnants of Libya’s WMD program, including 10 tons of mustard gas and dumps of raw nuclear fuel, that we are depending on the NTC to secure, on the assumption that it will in fact be able to restore order over the numerous heavily armed tribal factions, and account for the missing weapons and secure the remainder before they end up in the hands of terrorists.
Most important, there is the issue of who exactly is going to take Gaddafi’s place as the rulers of Libya. The heartland of the rebellion, eastern Libya and the towns of Benghazi and Darnah, is the home of the al Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). Jihadist personnel files captured in Iraq revealed that on a per capita basis, Libyans comprised the largest percentage of foreign insurgents, 85% of whom were suicide bombers. The veterans of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan no doubt have learned there techniques for fashioning IEDs. With the collapse of Gaddafi’s regime, these fighters have now gained access to weapons looted from arms depots, and can use the plundered mortars and artillery shells to make roadside bombs.…
Rather than a foreign policy “success” or proof of the superiority of “collective action,” Obama’s Libyan adventure is one more geopolitical disaster to go along with his failure to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the increasingly active hostility of Pakistan, the compromising of Israel’s security with demands for concessions, and the plans to make a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq by year’s end. Just as in Egypt, we have helped bring down a regime that represented no direct national security threat and served our interests, without any clear knowledge of who will replace them. We have colluded in a transparent fraud, claiming that we were intervening in Libya to stop a massacre, when in fact our obvious aim was the removal of Gaddafi. Worse yet, we have indulged, for the whole world to see, the hypocrisy of plucking the low-hanging fruit like Gaddafi on humanitarian pretexts, all the while we do nothing about the on-going massacres perpetrated by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. And we have cleared the space for the emergence of another Islamist regime in the Middle East. The only lesson we have taught the world is that being America’s enemy is better for a dictator’s long-term survival than being our friend.
GADHAFI AND THE SWINDLE OF DICTATORSHIP
Fouad Ajami
Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2011
Ahmad, a man from Aleppo, on hearing of Moammar Gadhafi’s end, posted a note on Al Jazeera’s blog: Congratulations, he said, to the Libyan people, may the same thing happen in Syria.
The end of despots is always odd—exhilarating to those who suffered their tyrannies, and to those who hold despotism in contempt, and anti-climatic at the same time, the discovery that these tyrants were petty, frightened men after all. We are told that Gadhafi cried, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” when his pursuers caught up with him.
This was from the script of Saddam Hussein, who had strutted on the world stage, visited death and destruction on his people and others beyond, but had come out of a spider hole telling his captors that he was the president of Iraq and that he wanted to negotiate. Dictatorship is a swindle to the bitter end, the bravado of the tyrants mere pretense and bluff.…
The Libyan upstart modeled himself after his legendary idol to the east, the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. And when Nasser died in 1970, Gadhafi anointed himself, and was seen by radical Arabs of his generation, as an inheritor of the revolutionary mantle.…
Oil gave Gadhafi means and a place in the world. He hacked away at the old social order, annulled the rights of private property and constructed a security state of “revolutionary committees” and informers that turned Libya into a big prison.
All the while, he was just the “Brother Leader.” He held no official position, and power was supposedly in the hands of the masses. No deliverance appeared in sight for the Libyan people, they had been reduced to spectators to their own destiny. The tyrant was being rehabilitated, his oil reserves and the national wealth he treated as his own brought him deference in the councils of power. Western intellectuals with a weakness for exotic strongmen made their way to Tripoli.…
[When] the city of Benghazi conquered its fear and rose in rebellion…Gadhafi committed the mistake of his reign. He announced a coming bloodbath for the defiant city. In a stunning surprise, the Arab League gave a warrant for a military operation that would provide protection for the people of Libya.
This hadn’t been a mission that President Obama, the steward of American power, had wanted, but the threat of massive slaughter, and the pressure from France and Britain, settled the matter. This was the luck of the Libyans. America was half-in and “led from behind,” but the dictator’s fate was sealed. In truth, Gadhafi was owed a measure of American retribution. The Pan Am 103 flight his operatives brought down in December 1988 took a toll of 270 lives, of whom 189 were American citizens.…
The fight for right and freedom may not be the animating passion of the moment in Washington. There is little taste at the helm of our government for burdens abroad. This awakening—the Arab Spring—is being second-guessed at every turn. Islamists stalk these rebellions, we are told. The Arabs do not have freedom in their DNA, the “realists” tell us, their revolutions are certain to be hijacked and betrayed.
But this is the Arabs’ 1989—the time when they give freedom a try, and for the first time accept responsibility for their own history. America didn’t make these rebellions, but these rebellions are owed a measure of respect. And Arabs should be given the time to break out of the habits of tyranny and servitude. We needn’t dispatch our forces to all lands of trouble, but our burden of celebrating liberty on foreign shores endures. Good riddance to Gadhafi. He had the end he deserved.
(Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
and co-chairman of Hoover’s Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.)
