The Web is still choke-full about the ousting of Washington’s favorite tyrant, Hosni Mubarak.
Right now Europe’s favorite tyrant, Muammar Gaddafi (or Khadafi) is facing a a similar situation.
Even when Ronald Reagan was threatening him of annhilation and US jet fighters were pounding Lybia during Operation Eldorado Canyon, European countries were conducting business at usual with him. While Tripoli was being bombed Italian engineers were in Lybia performing maintenance on Italian-built G222 (US designation C27 Spartan) transport planes. Those same airplanes were used to airlift weapons and supplies used in Chad against another US ally, France, whose troops were fighting against Lybia.
Sounds confusing, eh? Imagine how confused we were when during that crisis a Lybian MIG21 fighter crashed in Sicily, apparently en route to a maintenance facilty in the then Yugoslavia, just miles from important NATO installations. It wasn’t picked up by military radars and shot down by interceptors: it crashed to due to a technical problem and a shepherd found it by chance. Both the pilot’s body and the fighter’s wreckage were quickly removed and returned to Lybia. It appears the Italians were providing Lybians with their own transponders and call signals while the US simply turned a blind eye on the whole thing since there’s no way they couldn’t have known. Gaddafi showed his appreciation by firing a few Scud missiles on the tiny island of Pantelleria, just for “kicks”. It was back then that I started to consider him less than a colorful figure and more of a complete lunatic.
In recent years, when he became a staunch ally in the “War against Terror” and we had to deal with his five sons I started wondering if we are the lunatics, for allying with such a family of scoundrels. While the antics of Saudi noblemen visiting Europe are legendary at least they keep to their luxury hotels and private clubs. Gaddafi’s sons have taken this to the next level, by having their bodyguards closing down whole roads while they go shopping or beating up people in public, all while local authorities just look the other way. Last year the Swiss had about enough and declared these five shall I say gentlemen personae non gratae on their territory. Gaddafi flew into one of characteristic rages, all the while backed by those two bastions of moral integrity and courage, Presidents Sarkozy and Berlusconi.
It may be argued that Lybia has oil, but that’s not the whole story. France and Italy had been purchasing oil and natural gas at inflated prices from Gaddafi’s family for decades: it’s not the usual “cheap oil” story. Everybody has profited immensely: Gaddafi, the French and Italian oil companies and governments (higher fuel and gas prices transform into higher tax revenues) etc. Everybody but the hapless French and Italian taxslaves and the poor people of Lybia, who saw their once popular leader turn into the usual foreign-backed dictator and suffered accordingly.
In the past two decades Gaddafi added another source of revenue and threats for the pavid Europeans: immigration. Lybia is the main transit point for people trying to get into Europe. Gaddafi has been able to milk the EU billions by threatening to “open the floodgates”, though somebody rightly remarked we wouldn’t see too much of a difference from today when pretty much everybody not brandishing TNT sticks and an AK47 is let in. Gaddafi has become the Kim Jong-Il of the Mediterranean: when he wants money, he resorts to threats. The main difference is Kim Jong-Il isn’t met by an adoring political class during his trips abroad: the Chinese always treat him as the junior partner he is. Gaddafi always comes out as the senior partner, obtaining everything he wants.
When somebody asked Berlusconi, who still calls himself “a close friend” of Gaddafi, to call him and ask him to stop butchering people in the streets he candidly said “He’s in a bad situation, I don’t want to add his grief”. I fear he may even offer him and his sons asylum should they be thrown out. How on earth people can admire this man just because he has the financial means to pay for sex with young prostitutes it’s well beyond me.
Gaddafi has shut up the country from the outside. What little we know right now tells army units are mutining and joining the protesters, something nobody expected to happen. This may have been precipitated by Gaddafi’s practice of hiring large numbers of foreign mercenaries (like all good dictators he doesn’t even trust the army he came from), the same mercenaries that are now firing on crowds in the streets. This won’t be repetition of what happened in Egypt. Watch carefully as this is much more serious.