Libya - 2011 Part 2: DICTATORIAL DISASTER

My loyal reader/s, I offer you my sincerest apologies for yet another too-long hiatus since my last post.

But fear no longer, for now I present to you the second of possibly three parts in my series of posts entitled "Libya - 2011". In the last post, "WHAT IS LIBYA", I relayed to you a rundown of the historical and cultural background of the country we know on our maps as "Libya". This was because without knowing where we are starting, how can we possibly know where to go? - A fundamental factor in navigation, be it literal or metaphorical.

In Part 1, we broadly covered the historical background of the geographical area now know as “Libya”, and we did it with an eye for demographics.
I took you through the centuries of exploitation, domination, and infestation of the area by outside states and empires.
I took you to the creation of the United Kingdom of Libya, and its downfall with the coup d’etat of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
I will now pick it up with what we see in modern Libya today, and explain why it is making the news so much now in 2011.


As a dictator, Gaddafi has been a general failure. He pulled the coup off in 1969 without too much trouble, but having a coup is really only the easy part of a dictatorship.
The HARD part is the maintenance of one’s rule.

The most stable governmental bodies in our world today are all of the “Western Democratic” style. Avoiding details that would take me away from my point here, suffice it for me to tell you that our democracy has existed for over a hundred years with no revolutionary problems because the role of the government is legitimate.
LEGITIMACY is a precious thing, because it can be the hardest to establish, and the most difficult to fight. When the people of an entire nation rally to revolt, they are telling their rulers that their rule is no longer legitimate. Once this course of activity takes effect, a change must take place.
In the case of dictatorships, they are often entrenched in their positions by virtue of time, armaments, and brutality. Most often when a dictatorship faces popular revolt, it is that ever-so-powerful image of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
What shall occur?

Muammar Gaddafi took power in a classic coup, with the aid of his military cronies. The first few decades of his rule were bolstered by Libya’s pariah status with the outside world. The first trick a dictator must employ when consolidating his power is to establish enemies for his subjects to hate and fear and worry about. This takes their minds off the carnage of their own civil war, and significantly reduces attention paid to the Dictator’s inhumane methods of power consolidation.
All Dictators must employ brutal methods inside their own borders. If the outside threat of invasion from an “imperialistic power” lulls in the people’s interests, then internal enemies must be brought to the fore. Hitler used the Jews, Sukarno and Suharto of Indonesia used Communists, the Soviets used anyone they could.

So, these first two necessities for a Dictatorship are (1) outside enemies, and (2) inside enemies.

On the first, Gaddafi scores full points. Well done, gold star! He successfully engendered hatred among his people for all the states of Europe, the USA, Israel (what the hell!), and anyone else he fancied. I should make it clear here, though: recall the mixed history of Libya, and the exploitation felt throughout the timeline. It did not take a rocket scientist or politician extraordinaire to accomplish this first factor of Dictatorship.

On the Second, Gaddafi scores low. He surely brutalised his own people, but given the nature of his country and the need to unify against all the ‘enemies’ outside, Gaddafi could never really afford to single out one, and only one, demographic to hate. He basically had to spray it everywhere.
This is evident now in June of 2011, when we still refer to the insurgence against Gaddafi’s regime as “the Rebels”, with no clear name, ideologiy, or even human leader to call upon.

The third and most vital factor of a Dictatorship, the factor that can make or break the regime regardless of the other two, is Enforced Isolation.
A Dictator stands no chance of ever holding onto power if he cannot make his subjects oblivious to the outside world, oblivious to how good life can really be, and therein oblivious to just how bad life is under the Dictator’s rule.

In this, Enforced Isolation, Gaddafi scores an “F”, as he didn’t even know it was part of the game when he began!
Gaddafi shows absolutely NO finesse in his delivery of his rule, with no acknowledgeable structure to his foreign relations whatsoever.

Gaddafi’s Libya has had a classic love/hate relationship with Europe. The location on the Mediterranean and the apparent abundance of oil in the land of Libya made him too important to ignore for the Europeans. Over many instances, many within the last two years, Gaddafi has almost simultaneously expressed his desire to warm relations with Europe, and his desire to see European power and American alliances crumble. This sort of behaviour is deeply typical of a Dictator who has no long-term strategy, and jumps from whim to whim in executing relations and ‘diplomacy’.

In 2009 the UK government decided to allow a “compassionate release” of the Lockerbie Bomber, al-Megrahi, back into Gaddafi’s custody. The Lockerbie Bombing back in the 1980s was an act of terrorism, and was sponsored by Gaddafi’s regime. The release of the terrorist to Gaddafi was an overpoweringly blatant attempt by the UK government to secure favour with Gaddafi so he would sell them oil at discounted rates in the near future some time.
(I should add that the “compassionate release” of the terrorist was based on a claim that he would die of prostate cancer in three months time. He is still alive and kicking in Tripoli today, more than two years later).

It would be expected that Gaddafi would scratch their backs once they had scratched his, and the thought probably crossed his mind at one point. But then Gaddafi flew his pet terrorist back to Tripoli, first-class, and held a heroes welcome ticker-tape parade upon landing! The terrorist was being lauded as a hero, before the world’s eyes!

Ambiguity in foreign relations has resulted in Gaddafi’s return to pariah status. Any favour he had curried with anyone in Europe over the last decade or two, any promises he may have made to supply oil, in exchange for amity, have all been eroded by Gaddafi’s ocean of ambiguous activity and increasingly insane personal behaviour.

In shinting and stumbling through his woeful foreign relations, Gaddafi has unwittingly formed avenues of communication with the outside world.
It must be understood that for a Dictator, once the decision is made to converse with the outside world, that can of worms cannot be closed up again. A Dictator must choose to stay totally isolated, like North Korea, or dive in head-first with foreign relations. And the ones that take a dip in the foreign relations pool always sink in the end.

Technology, the road-maker for our dreams, has been the avenue builder for many Libyans, too.
Gaddafi could never afford to shut down his education system, because that would blast his regime back to the stone age, and would make any idea of talking to Europe impossible. He must have scientists and smart people capable of understanding what the rest of the world is talking about.

Education is itself a big ol’ can of worms. Communication through the internet and phones with Europe and the rest of Africa has facilitated education in Libya. But all this spells certain doom for Gaddafi’s Libya.

What it all comes down to is this:
Once enough of the population is educated, and granted the tools to increase their own understanding of things, the iron-fisted rule of the Dictator begins to rust, badly, and quickly. Craziness of the Brother-leader doesn’t help the Dictatorsip, either.

The people of Libya have been exposed, more than Gaddafi should have let them (if he wanted to be an effective Dictator) to the world outside their borders. Unlike the insanity of Kim Jong-Il in the isolated North Korea, the insanity of Gaddafi in open-and-prone Libya is all to apparent to his people.
After long enough, it is all too obvious that Gaddafi has squandered Libya’s resource potential, and kept all the oil money for himself. The people of Libya are aware of Gaddafi’s shoddy rule, and they are aware that things simply don’t HAVE TO be the way they are.
Like any intelligent, self-respecting human being, the people of Libya have had enough of the stupidity, and the brutality and corruption that came with it, and have said “ENOUGH!”.

Thus begins the Revolution.

But the Colonel is a Dictator. A failure he may well be, Dictating is all that he knows, and defines his existence. When his Dictatorship ends, his existence must also end. But he is not going to go without a fight.

And that brings us to the present day, where the civil war in Libya still rages.
NATO has gotten involved now, including contingents from Europe and the USA. A question you may ask is “why is NATO concerned with a civil war in Libya?”
I will make this clear in my next post, along with the goals and motivations of the Libyan Rebellion.