LIBYA: Finita la commedia?

 

The West is using underhand tactics to ram through a Libyan putsch that the country cannot afford, warns  

Gamal Nkrumah

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Frantic backroom discussions are currently underway to either secure a safe exit for the Libyan leader, his family and henchmen or to grant the unrepentant colonel a new lease of life -- a second political life.

Second chances are rare in politics. The burning question is whether the embattled Libyan leader now has one. That largely depends on him learning from his mistakes and not exaggerating the extent of his strength. It will be hard for a fictional take on the life and times of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to be more bizarre than the original. It was only six weeks ago that the Libyan uprising against Gaddafi began. Yet it feels as though aeons have passed. 

As if his apparent dressing down from the Pan-Arab and Western media had not discomfited Gaddafi enough, he now faces the grim prospect of being left high and dry if Washington were to buckle over the prickly issue of his political survival. 

For a fortnight the West has gleefully watched as the Libyan leader's closest assemblage and retinue rebuked him in public and deserted him in his hour of greatest need. 

The Brother Leader has metamorphosed into the Godfather. Libya's polarising period is in full swing. By creating a new estranged albeit ensanguined character, Gaddafi is now setting the scene for a uniquely personal civil war. He sees the world ganging up on him as he hastens towards his own tragic version of Finita la commedia. Now he faces a Hamlet moment, as his sons conspire with Berlusconi -- so rumour has it -- to unseat him.

Yet, there are chess games played in Washington and Tripoli that are desperately in need of bolder gambits. Gaddafi's hitherto most trusted friend in Europe, Italy's Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi announced that Rome has officially recognised the National Transitional Council (NTC) headquartered in Benghazi as the sole representative of the Libyan people. France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, of course, had earlier come to the same conclusion. So far, Washington has prevaricated. 

The bitter truth is that NTC does not have a solid, democratic and popular platform for change. It is fair to underline that the NTC is galvanised by a dubious cabal to undermine the socialist agenda of Gaddafi. Sadly, the beleaguered Libyan leader has been doing this himself since his about-face in recent years.

Gaddafi has repeatedly failed to sketch out precisely how he might go about updating his Green Book socialism. The rapprochement with the West, both governments and multinationals has turned out to be a fraud, and he fell for it. 

Gaddafi acts like a chess grandmaster playing simultaneous games in a show of prowess. He has clumsily evaded being checkmated, but all the games are gridlocked.

There was something dysfunctional about the Libyan armed opposition forces from the beginning. They could not carry out important advances even when NATO air cover was provided and when the anti-Gaddafiites's most crucial strategic interests were involved. The Western strategy, or at least Washington's at any rate, is designed to get the Libyan armed opposition forces back on track after suffering humiliating setbacks under Gaddafi's better trained forces armed to the teeth. 

The key component of Washington's strategy is that it does not guarantee the rebels' quest for ruling Libya. Their reward for daring to oppose Gaddafi is merely the right to continue playing a nerve-wracking chess game -- they have crisscrossed the country but have failed to checkmate their nemesis. 

The rebels' repeated blunders on the battlefield and ineffectiveness in forcing Gaddafi to surrender have dismally failed to perk up morale among the Libyan rebels. The signs still point towards the Libyan armed opposition forces' being kicked hard by Gaddafi's militias with or without Western military backing.

But what are the benefits for the West in sponsoring such a venture? The story endlessly retold on Western and Pan-Arab satellite television channels is that Gaddafi has done a rotten job of ruling his people and that the West is sharing the responsibility -- with the Arab world -- of saving the Libyans from the megalomaniac tyrant. 

Ominously, only 11 of the Arab League's 23 members voted for the no-fly zone, and six of them are conservative Gulf states led by relentless and uncompromising Saudi Arabia, long a sworn enemy of Gaddafi. Even as Washington weighs up Libya's no-fly zone, hawks of the Wahhabist kingdom egg the imperialists on. The divisions within the wider Arab world mirror the murky cosmos of the pro- and anti-Gaddafi forces within Libya itself.

Yet Gaddafi's policy of systematic and consistent reconciliatory responses and overtures to his opponents has muddied the waters further. Libya's armed opposition forces have rejected offers by the Gaddafi regime to open dialogue with the Libyan leader, proposing instead that Gaddafi withdraw his forces from the cities he controls. Read: give up. 

The fact of the matter is that clever conceits cannot hide the jagged edges of power in the Libyan capital Tripoli. Libyans live in an eerily disorienting era of jagged lines where established power structures founded by Gaddafi four decades ago are now buckling. Yet it is far from certain what will replace these structures.

The Libyan armed opposition by definition is neither peaceful nor non-violent in its hostility to Gaddafi. It is the one "pro-democracy" movement in the Arab world that doesn't warrant Western sponsorship, precisely because of the ill- defined nature of its cause. 

There is an unquenchable thirst for explanation as to why the West rushed to their defence while ignoring the equally brutish crushing of pro-democracy activists in countries such as Bahrain, Yemen or Syria. Why was Gaddafi singled out for retribution?

There was a brief lightening of the atmosphere across Libya as Gaddafi forces disappeared from the scene in several eastern Libyan cities. Benghazi is a city paralysed by fear, and so are other cities of Cyrenaica. Gaddafi supporters are being hunted down, but many suspect that the Libyan leader's militiamen are in hiding waiting for the right moment to surface and take control of the cities of Cyrenaica. 

Gaddafi's militias are still sending convoys of armed personnel carriers down the highway from Tripoli to Benghazi. There was nothing very new in what the Libyan armed opposition forces were doing. They would edge towards the west, towards the oil terminals of Ajdabiya and Brega, Ras Lanouf and Ben Jawwad, their prime targets, only to be chased out hours later by Gaddafi die-hards. They would not attack until Gaddafi's forces had been thoroughly softened up by NATO bombers as Libya spun into the bloodiest phase of the civil war.

The ineffective tactics of the rebels is going nowhere fast. They have yet to clear the desert shrub forests of Gaddafi green. They have no qualms about being backed militarily by the West. Their cries of "Where are you when we need you, Sarkozy!" are most incongruous. Of all the Arab rebellions, Libya's is obviously the least homegrown. It is hard to imagine a course of action by the NTC more likely to guarantee subservience to the Western powers if and when Gaddafi falls.

The armed opposition forces of Libya are already adjudged collaborators by progressive forces the world over. Victory delayed is victory denied. A dangerous sense of drift towards militant Islamism may grow. Gaddafi has always insisted that Al-Qaeda may be behind the rebellion. 

Whoever cobbled together the coalition called the NTC will remain clandestine and their real motives shrouded in mystery. Initially their intention was to build up guerrilla resistance step by step until a regular army was formed. However, leaderless and ill- equipped, and given the far better armed Gaddafi troops, they resorted instead to sporadic attacks on strategic oil-producing areas and oil terminals on the Mediterranean. They cannot dispense with the services of their Western mentors and military minders.

Gaddafi has tried to burnish his Islamic credentials. I don't believe the West, or Gaddafi's own people for that matter, ever gave credence to Gaddafi's nuttier theories. His powerful and thuggish militias, left to their own devices will emasculate their opponents and alienate in the process a wide cross-section of the Libyan population. 

Two points emerge from this tragedy. The first is that Gaddafi has for the first time come under attack from his own side, his closest associates who have defected in droves to join the armed opposition.

Hence the importance of the second point: that Western powers, and Washington in particular, have emerged as powerbrokers in Libya. The imperialists -- whom Gaddafi has spent a lifetime trying to overpower -- are back from the dead.

For four decades, Gaddafi has upstaged everybody else in Libyan politics. By intervening militarily, the West has effectively ruled out a proper debate against a credible alternative Libyan leader to Gaddafi. This is a regrettable and unforgivable inconsistency in the West's evolving position on the pro-democracy revolutions rocking the Arab world. This partly explains why the rebels' record has been bitterly disappointing. The West is pressing ahead with this indecisive policy of not propping up a strong challenger to Gaddafi.

We shall see whether this works. There are many who suspect that Gaddafi is not going away, at least anytime soon. Others believe his days are numbered in spite of Western equivocation on this crucial matter. The Western media is fond of taking Gaddafi's sermon snippets out of context.

Yes, Gaddafi's rants, temper tantrums, and especially his verbal excesses have embarrassed not just his Libyan aides, sympathisers and right hand men, who felt the Brother Leader should be cut some slack.

The dissenters claim to have put country before personal pride and profit. It is worth noting that Gaddafi has not said anything new on the wake of the Libyan 17 February pro- democracy revolution. He has not said anything that the world has not already heard him say. 

Gaddafi is now taking a gamble of his own. And a host of pro-Western Libyan technocrats would emerge from the maelstrom of post-Gaddafi Libya, if the West resolves to remove him from power. 

Gaddafi has been betrayed by both his new "friends" in the West and his Arab brethren. Many Westerners will continue to ask whether their governments were right to give the NTC the benefit of the doubt. Yemen, Bahrain and now Syria appear to be in a state of heightened political tensions. Libya, in sharp contrast, is in the grip of civil war. Miracle or monstrosity, Gaddafi will go down in history as a legendary figure.