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Why The West must share of blame for Gaddafi
In the name of business a blind eye was often turned to his predatory behavior.
For all practical purposes, the rule of Muammar Gaddafi has ended.
The fall of Gaddafi marks the end of the third Arab-African dictator within the space of eight months.
The lesson here for the West is to not support dictators whenever it is convenient, and for the remaining Arab-African rulers to reform or face a fate similar to the fallen dictators.
As is normally the case with dictators, Gaddafi had increasingly become delusional. At the helm for 42 years, he thought that he had become infallible and that, with the exception of his equally delusional son Saif al-Islam, there was nobody to replace him.
His rule was based on fear, torture, patronage, self-adulation and aggrandisement. He plundered Libya’s oil wealth in pursuit of bizarre and idiosyncratic ideas and practices that demeaned Libya internationally and stigmatised the Arab and African people as a whole.
Yet, he stayed in power not simply because he was able to deceive the Libyan people and the world for so long. There was also the matter of the West’s love-hate relationship with him. They loathed him because he was, as the late US president Ronald Reagan put it, ”the mad dog” of the middle-east, and therefore an unpredictable rogue and supporter of international terrorism who needed to be watched and feared.
But at the same time, they found it expedient to embrace him as a tolerable rogue, at times elevating him to the position of esteemed leader and potential ally. This was because he presided over Libya’s oil wealth to which the West wanted access, and he opposed radical Islamism in any form that the West wanted to fight, something that remains a priority.
All this was against a backdrop that implicated him in a string of terrorist operations against Western targets:
* the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in 1986, in which scores of American servicemen were killed;
* Supporting the Irish Republican Army in its operations against Britain;
* the blowing up of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
