Times change for the despot of brute force

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Financial Times:

Even by his histrionic standards, Muammer Gaddafi’s cameo appearance on television in the early hours of Tuesday – bolstered by another speech later in the day – was a classic of the genre.

As his country imploded in a rebellion he is trying to beat back by mowing down protesters, the colonel appeared in a woolly hat and under an umbrella, saying rain had prevented him from addressing the loyal masses but that he was still in Libya, despite lies by “dogs” in the foreign media that he had fled to Venezuela.

With his raddled face, he looked more like a derelict on the lam than the most vicious dictator in a despot-infested region.

Hosni Mubarak and Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, the defenestrated gerontocrats of Egypt and Tunisia on Libya’s flanks, managed to don suits, make sure their hair was dyed, and deliver pained and avuncular addresses to the nation before their departures. That did not work. But it does not look as though Colonel Gaddafi’s menacing meanderings will either.

After the fall of his fellow dictators he started a fight to the death at the first stirring of unrest. He was not going to give the inches Mr Mubarak’s and Mr Ben Ali’s opponents turned into the full mile.

His desperate tactics – using warplanes, heavy weapons and mercenaries, according to the fuzzy picture emerging from his closed country – are a throwback to the heyday of Arab tyrants.

In 1982, Hafez al-Assad of Syria responded to an insurrection in Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood by razing parts of the city over their heads and then paving them over, killing perhaps 20,000. Col Gaddafi responded to a riot by mostly Islamist prisoners in 1996 by machinegunning 1,000 inmates.

In his present predicament, he appears to have believed that if he could destroy the uprising in Benghazi by brute force, he could prevent it from reaching Tripoli. But Benghazi, after the loss of hundreds of lives, is in the hands of the rebels, helped by defecting troops and tribes, and the Libyan intifada is lapping at his gates.

Times have changed. The banners of freedom in the Arab world are being raised by popular mass movements. They are led mostly by young, urban middle classes that have lost all fear of tyranny and any acceptance of servitude. These are not narrowly based or sectarian uprisings that can be throttled at will.
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With his own ministers now turning on him, Gaddafi's days appear to be increasingly numbered. I'm betting that Syria is very nervous right now. This is one revolt that deserves to succeed.