Once a Mad Dog

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Whether or not he survives the wrath of his own subjects, Muammar al-Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator, will be missed only by a grab bag of plug-uglies whose terrorism he encouraged for decades. But it would be a mistake to write off the latest chapter in the Arab revolt as a case of a bomb thrower hoisted by his own petard. Gaddafi, beyond the oddities of his personality, represents as well as anyone the shame and the awfulness of the first decades of post-colonialism. It might be well to consider that his durability is also a reproach to the Western powers that let appalling regimes take shape and endure -- he lasted more than four decades -- out of their own indifference.

Gaddafi is -- or was, depending on when you read this -- not as murderous as Saddam Hussein, nor as contemptuous as Zine Ben Ali, but all that signifies is that not all Arab zaims look alike, any more than do African big men or Latin caudillos. Indeed, his surface eccentricity, just like Libya's historical and geographical peculiarities, should remind us how different the various Arab lands really are, and how fatuous were the dreams, the chimeras rather, of pan-Arabism, no less than those of pan-Africanism. Gaddafi, an African Arab, tried both. He was unsuccessful, but the efforts caused much mischief. A bullying child cannot persuade other children to acquiesce in his desires, but he can try to coerce them. Similarly a megalomaniac among his peers, on the Continent as in the Middle East, he was feared more than derided.