We awake this morning to the news that Muammar Gaddafi has retired from his position atop a throne of skulls in the customary way. I would be churlish to note that “days not weeks” resulted in 216 of the former, the latter being an exercise left to the reader. If true, this is a huge victory for Nicolas Sarkozy, Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian oil consumers, and – potentially – the Libyan people. President Barack Obama may also be congratulated for the first successful demonstration of the former hyperpower’s ability to “lead from behind.”
The Libyan Transitional National Council had claimed that its fervent desire was to see the dictator tried and punished for his manifest crimes. In an age of abbreviated attention spans, the legal niceties have apparently been foregone.
Happy as I am to see a people unshackled, and satisfied to see a brutal thug laid low, yet do I wonder all the more what will emerge from the wreckage left in his wake.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
– W.B. Yeats
You must admit, “Shot while trying to escape” and reportedly begging for his life at the end, is a beautifully ironic ending for a merciless thug and dictator who presided over any number of fatal escape interventions and violent silencings of pleas for mercy.
Most fitting, to be honest. One could go so far as to say “Justice was served in the manner the recipient had previously dispensed it.”
What goes around, and so forth.
I find it interesting that so many dictators over history, when overthrown, utter as their last something to the effect that they did what they had for their country.
Pol Pot supposedly said that he wanted everybody to know that what he did, he did for his country. Botha uttered something similar. Grover Cleveland opined that “I have tried so hard to do the right.”
Even Robert Erskins Charles (Irish Nationalist, executed by an Irish Free State firing squad) reportedly said, “Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.”
Socrates, of course, said, “I drank what?”
Gadaffi’s last words seem to have been, “Don’t shoot!”
Call me a skeptic, but I’m not seeing any risk of him being held as a martyr by anybody any time soon.
– Max
Can’t help but think that this is just another case of “Meet the new boss; same as the old boss…” –Pete Townsend
I am not optimistic about life in Libya for anyone with divergent views, religious beliefs, sexual preferences…Look at the warm and fuzzy the Jewish community is receiving in the “New” Libya.
Cheer
OBTW Captain, I have loved your posts from Mountain Home. To echo many others on here over the years, where’s the book?
Are the euros gonna write us a check for those munitions we loaned them? This there first expedition into this kind of thing (since Hitler) where they were not following us in line. I sure hope they learned something. Like to stop relying on us to be the big kid on the block in NATO.
A check? yeah right. Dead beats they be.
Joe Lieberman’s editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal relates to the “upside” scenario, which hinges on whether the lead template for the Arab Fall (pun intended) will be the same as it was for the Arab Spring – namely Tunisia.
If there is any Arab nation which has a shot at operating a true multi-party democracy it will be Tunisia. No coincidence methinks that the strong western connection there dates back to Roman times.
It’s a stretch to think the tribes of the eastern desert will fall that way, but if Tunis gets its act together at least its a local model, something that the Arabs have never had.
Actually, the Arabs do have a geographically quite local model: Israel.
Yeah, that does go back a while. A few years ago I read that Tunis had signed a peace treaty with the Roman Senate (which still exists) and that the Punic Wars are finally over.
“lead from behind” Heh. Indeed. (sorry) Looks like we have another Niven fan here. I must remember to call him “The Hindmost” more often.
Sorry, the above comment was supposed to go at the bottom of the page. I don’t know what went wrong.
This is the, what, fifth time he has been killed?
This times it appears to be up on you tube.
As one wag asked, “did they get every spelling finally?”
It really does appear they got Daffy this time for real.
A new devil in a devilish region. There is that old proverb, no – curse really – about living in interesting times …
Apparently he’s gone to his reward. I had the opportunity to do a little AG flying in Libya.Back in’77 for this company
that had a contract with Kadaffy. I was a bit skeptical so I called a friend of mine who worked for Mobil as a pilot,
he said: “DON’T” “Uncle Mo” is about to throw all Euros and
Americans out!” “Run away unless you want to spend time in a Libyan jail.” So I turned it down. The Guy they hired spent a lot of his own money getting back from Gibraltar.
Glad he’s gone but what next?
I fear this is merely the end of the beginning..
I agree, things can still get real scary in the mideast/ Arab Africa, as indeed they probably will. This is a disquieting time to live in.
Get? GET?!?!!?
End of teh beginning at best. We are looking at world changing events over the next 3-5 years. Pslam 83 and Ezekial 37 and 38 merit review. They will be happening as soon as the US has been reduced to the point we can no longer help Israel. It looks like that won’t be too much longer.
There are a lot of reasons why the not so good Colonel Qadafi needed killing. And so I won’t weep at his passing. Just as I won’t weep at the passing of Hugo Chavez, and if that fat freak Idi Amin is still alive, he can go too. It i8s a bit unfair that he will finally expire from too many gin and tonics poolside in some resort outside Uganda, but you take what you can get. Death catches us all–for some not soon enough.
But you do have a point Lex in worrying about what rough beast will come alive now. The Arab Spring is most likely to result in just a different version of the same old same old in North Africa.
Amin is dead. They’ve been arguing about repatriating his corpse.
I first read the Yeats poem as a sophomore in college, and it still gives me cold chills.
25 years too late for some folks in Berlin.
I can’t bring quotes to mind like our humble scribe, but this one’s got me thinking of Shelley; “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Not sure if it will apply to Libya or some other country.
“Shot trying to escape..”
Hmmm…pretty neat hole in his temple…good shooting while he was “running away”…
Hell gets another resident…
and you should have heard the `ashamed to be British` brigade on the BBC today, arguing that his convoy shouldn’t have been targetted to allow the `mob to murder him`. For me, I hope it was a missile from a British aircraft that stopped him in his tracks (even if it WAS loaned by a reluctant Uncle Sam). I say `thanks Sam for the munitions, the logistial support and everything else you provided`. That bar-steward had a colleague of mine machine-gunned to death in a London street, his semtex killed and maimed many of my countrymen and women as well as our brethren on Pan Am 103 and those upon whom the debris fell. I saw a flight of RAF Tornados pass over my home this morning. Highly likely having been in Libyan skies. I welcomed them back and said a prayer for Yvonne Fletcher and her colleagues from Bow Street Police Station who watched her die.
If you watched Obama’s triumphal announcement in the Rose Garden, you’d think he was piloting the Predator personally, while simultaneously signing the checks to pay for the missile, and hand-building the replacement.
Shouldn’t he be kind of careful about promoting enthusiasm for the extrajudicial expunging of a widely disliked head of state?
Puke-inducing stuff-strutting. Like a REMF skulking up to the frontline to hunt for souvenirs from a battle they never fought.
re “ability to lead from behind”. As someone who loves the English language and only occasionally uses it well, would it not be “lead from the rear”?
Yup, dear leader leads from the rear.
/s/ pedantic pecker-wood
Glad as anyone to see him go. The videos of his capture look pretty grim. Does anyone know if they then washed his body, wrapped him in cloth, then gave him a respectful Muslim burial at sea?
Actually, he’s parked in a freezer until they determine “cause of death” to some better resolution than “acute lead poisoning.”
Muslims only get cranky about their traditions when it advantages them.
…Let us read from the book of Isaiah, Chapter 14, Verse 15:
15 Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.
16 They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms;
17 That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?
18 All the kings of the nations, even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own house.
19 But thou art cast out of thy grave like an abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to the stones of the pit; as a carcase trodden under feet.
20 Thou shalt not be joined with them in burial, because thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people: the seed of evildoers shall never be renowned.
Thus endeth today’s lesson.
Mike
In Gadaffi’s case it was a case of ` Look, one Isaiah than the other`
[...] charismatic, convincing, deadly. Three of the most evil men walking the earth in my lifetime were Muʿammar al-Qaḏḏāfī, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden. Qaḏḏāfī was killed today, another evil dictator who [...]
Well, I, along with 2 flts of my Sq, was in Tripoli @Wheelus the night Qaddafi kicked us out–looks like my liver out-lasted him, lol–wonder if the key I kept to my BOQ room as a souvenir still works?
According to Jake Tapper of ABC- next: the Iraq Bug-Out.
So we will have another dictatorial tyranny to deal with…
August, 1939 .
Pardon me if I do not wax enthusiastic over “Obama’s victory”. He did everything that he formerly savaged republicans for doing, but since he has a loyal opposition, and a protective media, he got away with it. Republican presidents do not have a “loyal” opposition, but rather one that is willing to prolong wars and consume the lives of our troops and our enemy’s civilians to make sure their political opponent does not succeed. This is not conjecture – it has been demonstrated over and over, and even explicitly stated as a strategy by the execrable Sen. Schumer of NY in an acidently leaked memo.
My opinion of the Democratic party is not fit to print here.
That was a large sum of money we borrowed to spend to turn over ANOTHER country to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Thank God there wasn’t a bunch of American blood spilled doing it-
Dave-it just happened:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/libya/8844819/Libyas-liberation-interim-ruler-unveils-more-radical-than-expected-plans-for-Islamic-law.html
Sorry about the long link, can be read on Drudge or the Telegraph site too..