Gaddafi: Death of an era, dawn of an era Gaddafi's death is symbolic of the death of an old paradigm that no longer has a place in today's world

Former
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, seen by many as a relic of the past, is a
symbol of what no longer works in Libya, says author [REUTERS]

First accounts are almost never correct, but if the circumstances of
Libyan Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi's death prove to be as
reported, they will provide yet another, final irony in a life replete
with them. The man whose success relied upon a combination of
great-power manipulation and the ability to sustain the fantasy that he
embodied the aspirations of his people succumbed in the end to a
combination of great-power military intervention and the genuine
aspiration of his people for a future free of his vicious domination.

Gaddafi's pminding brings with it a welter of thoughts and
observations. The world of 1969, when he first came to power, was very
different from the world in which he died. It was a far simpler world,
in which it was still possible for a handful of officers, led by one
Captain Gaddafi, embedded in a puny, 6,000-man army, to overthrow a
supposedly entrenched regime in a matter of two hours. The regime of
King Idris was swept aside in part due to its irrelevance in an age of
Pan-Arab nationalist revolution. Now, in our own time, the death of
Gaddafi provides an exclamation point to the end of the succeeding era
of supposed revolutionary renewal, the last vestiges of which are
succumbing to the rising floodwaters of the Arab Spring.

In the valley of the blind, it is said, the one-eyed man is king.
Gaddafi may have had an imperfect grasp, at best, of the revolutionary
doctrines he espoused, but he reflected for a small, impoverished and
isolated people the zeitgeist of 1960s and ‘70s leftist revolution and
romantic pan-Arab socialism of his time. Like all such
"revolutionaries", Gaddafi's avowed populism and devotion to equality
were a sham. Instead, he and his Revolutionary Command Council would act
as the "vehicle of national expression", in order to "raise the
political consciousness of Libyans". He would embody the will of the
Libyan people only after their will had been sufficiently instructed by
their "Brother Leader".

One might have said of Gaddafi, in paraphrase, what Henry Kissinger
once said of Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus: He was too great a man for
such a small nation. Apparently much of the same opionion, Gaddafi
quickly set about using Libya as a secure and easily-dominated platform
from which to pursue far greater ambitions abroad. He shortly began to
bestow the benefit of his world revolutionary leadership - and, more
pointedly, his considerable petrodollar income - upon a smorgasbord of
radical leftist, terrorist and separatist groups around the globe: From
the IRA in Ireland, to the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, to the FARC
in Colombia, to the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines.

Curiously for one so rhetorically devoted to the cause of
Palestinians, Gaddafi's relations with Palestinians themselves were
generally wary and marginal. It cannot have been an accident that his
most sustained relationship with a Palestinian group was with one almost
unimaginably dysfunctional, internally murderous and sociopathic: The
Abu Nidal Group.

Finding his brilliance sadly underappreciated among his fellow Arab
leaders, despite his endless political manoeuvering, Gaddafi soon
devoted the majority of his considerable energies upon the black African
countries to his south, where poverty, political weakness and endemic
religio-ethnic conflict provided a much more attractive forum for the
Libyan Colonel's idiosyncratic combination of whimsical ideological
fads, cynically selective philanthropy and Lilliputian military
adventurism.

Gaddafi's scars on Libya

But nowhere were the consequences of Gaddafi's unique combination of
pathologies more disastrously in evidence than in Libya itself. A little
knowledge, they say, is a dangerous thing. To the longstanding cost of
the Libyan people, Gaddafi managed to cobble together a collection of
bits and pieces from his sophomoric understanding of the great
ideologies and philosophical traditions of the modern era, sufficient to
create his own crack-brained "Third International Theory", which found
its practical expression in the Great Socialist Popular Libyan Arab
Jamahiriyah. The administrative chaos and social atomisation created by
some 2,000 overlapping "people's committees" created an environment
perhaps uniquely susceptible to domination by the Brother Leader's
signature combination of political manipulation and brutal intimidation.

Despite his professed lifelong aversion to Communism, the wily and
ambitious colonel from Sirte was able to consistently manipulate
cold-war and great-power rivalries to his benefit. He was thus able to
acquire huge stocks of weapons from his Soviet and East-Bloc friends
without ever subordinating himself to their ambitions, but most
importantly, he was able to harness the expertise of the East Germans in
one skill area critical to his long-term survival: social repression.
This writer had a great deal of contact with people from many Arab
countries during the 1980s and 1990s, but nowhere did he encounter a
people so thoroughly cowed and intimidated in those years as the
Libyans. The life of a Libyan official or anyone in a position to harm
the interests of the regime was life in a snake-pit. Brother could not
trust brother. In any group of three, at least one would have to be
mindumed by the others to be a regime informant.

In retrospect, it seems that Gaddafi's great turn to the West in
2003, when he accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing,
divulged so-called WMD programmes, and began to cooperate on
counter-terrorism, was a sign that the end was nigh. Tired now, and
focused on transferring power to his sons, Gaddafi could no longer claim
to be in the ideological vanguard of the region, let alone the world.
Nminderist Arab nationalism had run its course, and had long since been
replaced by Islamism as the leading political current in the region,
posing a direct threat to him and his intolerantly secular regime. A
manipulator to the last, Gaddafi was willing to deal with his long-time
enemies in the West in order to better preserve his power at home.

This marriage of convenience was never a comfortable one, based as it
was on a very limited and highly tactical convergence of interests.
Such cooperation might have been justifiable under the circumstances,
and indeed was supported by this writer, but must also be acknowledged
for what it was: An accommodation to an unfortunate reality in a highly
imperfect world. Some might have thought that the opening between Libya
and the West was a potential means of eventual reform, that the
transition to the younger elements of the Gaddafi clan might carry with
it the possibility of an evolving accommodation to the people's
legitimate rights and wishes. What it signalled instead was a turn to
the defensive, as a hideously outmoded and incorrigible regime found
itself swimming against multiple tides of history.

A regime such as Gaddafi's is almost unimaginable now in all but the
most regressive portions of the globe. A world in which street-sweepers
have cell phones, where even the most humble citizens are intimately
connected to a wider world, is one in which a bizarre historical
artefact like the Gaddafi regime could never survive. The fact that he
is finally gone will not by itself enable Libyans to realise their most
ambitious and noble aspirations, but it must be seen for what it is: A
necessary, if insufficient, start.

Robert Grenier was the CIA's chief of station in
Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. From October 2002 until December
2004, he was the CIA Iraq Mission Manager. He was also the director of
the CIA's counterterrorism centre.

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