Muammar Gaddafi: Inside the mind of a tyrant
As Colonel Gaddafi retreats deeper into paranoia, Michael Burleigh assesses the lessons to be learnt from history’s despots.
This week, newly released papers from the German government revealed something rather pertinent for those considering what the embattled Col Gaddafi’s next trick would be. The papers declared that on May 27, 1980, Gaddafi handed a written demand to Günter Held, the West German ambassador in Tripoli, for the eyes of Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.
He insisted that Schmidt expel exiled Libyan opponents of his regime who were living in Germany. If the Chancellor refused, Gaddafi swore he would take “counter-measures” against 2,500 Germans in Libya, including the few being held in jail. The Colonel asked if West Germany wanted “to co-operate with traitors – or the Libyan people”. He even offered to stop subsidising Red Army Faction terrorists, provided, of course, that Schmidt allowed him to liquidate “a relatively small number of people” living on German soil.
This, in a nutshell, is Gaddafi’s modus operandi. He bears grudges heavily, is never shy of wreaking blood-soaked havoc or proffering deadly threats – and has next to no sense of reality outside his own paranoid bunker.
Now Libya’s fate, and the credibility of the coalition’s governments, hinges on what this devious and ruthless man is thinking inside his Tripoli military-cum-residential compound. In power for 41 years, Gaddafi is not what his son Saif’s friend, Peter Mandelson, calls “a quitter”.
Shaken by Ronald Reagan’s 1986 attempt to kill him with air strikes, Gaddafi picked himself up and went back to the business of sponsoring international Arab, Irish republican, German and Japanese Leftist terrorism – with a handy sideline bringing more chaos to sub-Saharan Africa. Following the mass murder at Lockerbie in 1988, he defied international sanctions designed to make him hand over the perpetrators. Just a year later, his proxies blew up another passenger jet over Niger, UTA Flight 772 from Chad to Paris Charles de Gaulle, killing 170 people in retaliation for defeats Gaddafi’s mercenaries had suffered in Chad.
Until this year, Gaddafi has kept control of his country via his risible “Third Universal Theory”, expanded in his Green Book. This was an extreme form of “communitarianism”, which devolved power to the smallest units in Libyan society. In reality, it was an efficient use of divide-and-rule – a convenient way of ensuring there was no organised mass or tribal opposition.
More recently, though, Gaddafi’s suspicions of the regular army have led him to tighten his grip by creating a parallel security apparatus commanded by his sons and other relatives. To further reassure himself that he still retains control, the Colonel, or rather Leader and Guide of the Revolution of Libya, has awarded himself with ever more megalomaniac soubriquets: Imam of All Muslims, Dean of Arab Rulers, and King of Africa’s Kings.
For, despite his lofty talk of the “Libyan people”, Gaddafi’s philosophical mumbo jumbo occludes the fact that real power lies with him and his ramified family. They control armed might and the purse strings in a mono-economy based on oil and gas. One son, Khamis, who is rumoured to have been killed by a defecting Libyan fighter pilot who crashed his jet into his headquarters, leads one of the country’s best-equipped forces. The student playboy prince Saif has rallied round as the regime’s super-spokesman, discarding whatever superficial Western polish he had acquired at the LSE to issue condign threats to the rebels in and around Benghazi. Out went the vapid jargon of academic seminars, and in came talk of bullets, cockroaches and rats, and vengeful house-by-house killing sprees. Another son, Mutassim, acts as the Colonel’s national security adviser, and is said to have headed one of the brigades which tried to take Benghazi last week.
All competition for the succession to the Libyan “throne” is now a distant memory for Gaddafi’s seven sons. Although there is no love lost between them, they have rallied round their grisly father for, if he goes, they go too. Clearly, ushering Gaddafi to the exit must entail prising apart the inner group in order to leave him isolated. Gaddafi has tried to insulate himself against such attempts by surrounding himself with those who are most loyal to him – and therefore have the most to lose.
Abdel-Monem al Houni, until recently Libya’s ambassador to the Arab League, agrees: “These people are tied to him and will live and die with him, and some of them have blood on their hands, so they will be wanted.”
In an attempt to stir suspicion and division among his inner circle, Western governments have made public intelligence intercepts that suggest Gaddafi and some loyalists are arranging their exits to the few countries that might still take them. The short list is headed by Belarus, Venezuela and Zimbabwe. I doubt that such a veteran survivor is going to go gently into the twilight, even though he and his sybaritic family have salted away huge sums of money for just this eventuality.
Prof Jerrold Post agrees. An expert in political psychology, the CIA have consulted him to comprehend how men such as Slobodan Milosovic or Saddam Hussein see the world and their enemies. Post says that, for these narcissists, advancing years do not bring thoughts of retirement but of accelerating the mission that gives their empty lives meaning. This was also true of Hitler and Stalin. Post also argues that Gaddafi is utterly unable to grasp mass opposition to “his” revolution.
The defecting Libyan ambassador to Washington, Ali Aujali, concurs, telling me this week that the Colonel has totally lost touch with reality, confusing hired claques with popular support. Gaddafi is obviously a megalomaniac. Take one of his speeches: “I led a historic revolution that brought honour to the Libyans. Libya will be leading the whole world – Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nobody can stop this historic march.” His paranoia is evident, too. In his televised rants, Gaddafi has variously blamed the protests he faced after February 15 on the evil machinations of al-Qaeda or the CIA putting hallucinogenic drugs in people’s Nescafé. The entire population of Benghazi is apparently “high”, because you would need to be out of your head to oppose the Colonel. They are “cockroaches” and “rats” doing “the work of the devil”.
But, however paranoid and delusional he might be, I cannot see Gaddafi taking the “Hitler route” out of his increasingly imperilled position. Suicide is not part of his make-up.
And so he presents a face of lunatic determination in the face of massed coalition air power. He initially threatened to re-route Libyan oil contracts to China and India rather than the West. Then he described the leaders of Britain and France as “crusading” imperialist “Fascists”, while sending the cerebral US President a letter rebuking him. With amazing effrontery, Gaddafi began the letter to Obama: “Dear Son.” One can only imagine the response when that particular envelope was opened.
Aside from the posturing, a potentially sinister development has emerged from the death throes of Gaddafi’s reign. MI5 is now warning that Libya may have black sites, off the formal diplomatic radar, which involve wealthy expatriates who could organise bombing incidents in countries such as Britain, perhaps by slipping devices on to planes in the laxer security airports of Africa. This leopard does not change his spots.
Perhaps Gaddafi’s canniest defence has been to splinter Libyan society so effectively over the decades that opposition elements find it nigh on impossible to cohere. Because of the deliberately engineered decentralisation of power in Libya, the opposition leaders are an inchoate group of doctors, lawyers, academics and businessmen, who have had enough of being governed by the erratic and uncouth Gaddafi and his greedy and thuggish sons.
They are led by a National Council, in which the chief figure is the former justice minister, Mustafa Abdul Jalil. The rebel army of enthusiastic amateurs and mutinous soldiers is headed by former interior minister Omar Hariri and Gen Abdul Fatah Younis. Ambassador Aujali says these people are widely respected – in Jalil’s case because he opposed Gaddafi’s human rights abuses. The “rebel” soldiers are ordinary Libyans who, in an example worth mentioning, are made up of those like one 60-year-old who would like the chance to vote before he dies, as well as young people enthused by what they saw in Egypt and Tunisia.
Pessimists have emphasised that many young Libyans went to fight Western forces in Iraq and others have taken senior roles within al-Qaeda – Gaddafi has made much of this, too. However, according to Noman Benotman (the Libyan grandson of King Idris’s defence minister, and a veteran former jihadist himself who spoke passionately at a Policy Exchange meeting this week), most of these young men went to Iraq so that they could boast of their combat experiences back in Libya. In reality, he says, most Libyan Muslims are moderate Sufis. Benotman thinks extremists would be marginal to any Libyan new order, which, he says would have to include fundamentalists, as will be the case in Egypt.
Anyone contemplating either liberal intervention or its realist opposite has to acknowledge the capacity of events to run out of control. According to Gen Sir Graeme Lamb, the former Commander of the Field Army who spoke at the same Policy Exchange session, the coalition governments must stick to the letter of UN Resolution 1973 – protecting the Libyan people and ensuring delivery of humanitarian aid, which they will urgently need since the oil no longer flows. If we exceed that limited remit, al-Qaeda will have a propaganda field day that will resonate with Muslim populations, who, as US strategist Ed Luttwak rightly says, cannot comprehend altruism in their own dog-eat-dog existence.
If and when many Arab governments change, perhaps the Arab League will be less cautious, meeting President Obama’s expectation that they employ their own prodigious military establishments, to do what we are doing, not for oil or gas, but to stop an ageing psychopath murdering innocent people. Until then, we must try to outwit the cornered rat – and act accordingly when the moment comes.
