Gadhafi Again, and once more I am humbled

Once again I return to Gadhafi. And once more I am made humble.

A few weeks back I confidently predicted that he would fall. (At least I wasn’t alone in that. Half the world seems to have assumed it.)

But, now, he may be winning. Those Who Know Best in political science departments, embassies, and European capitals are beginning to rethink their projections. China and Iran breathe a little easier. People Power is not, after all, invincible. If you are willing to bomb and strafe, and use mercenaries, and leave bodies in the streets...you can remain on the throne, no matter how despised you may be.

So, I am humbled. My predictions are shown to be nonsense. My only defense is that it never occurred to me that the West would not support (at least passively) the rebellion. I never considered the vast resources that oil had made available to the Gadhafi family over the last few decades. It never occurred to me that they would use those resources to pay for an army of foreigners to slaughter their own people.

And, maybe most of all, I never dreamed that something like the Japanese earthquake and tsunami would occur. The world, you see, is finite and interlinked. When something of this magnitude occurs, we focus our attention on it. Which is good, and speaks well for our humanity…but it also means that other actors are now free to do as they like without scrutiny. The cat is away, and the rat, as they say, well, you finish the sentence.

So, it may be that I was abjectly wrong and Gadhafi will win his war on Libya.

Yet, I will argue still that, on one level, I will be vindicated, and Gadhafi’s triumph will, in fact, be pyrrhic.

You see, here’s the thing: he may “win,” but only through massacre. And he will have expended much in the way of time, effort, money, and political capital in his struggle. It could be that eventually another rebellion, another crisis, will strike, and this time he (or his heirs) may not have the wherewithal to respond.

More...he is now revealed.

He came to power, and kept it, as a Man Of The People. He was a populist revolutionary. Like Nasser, and Peron, he was the man of action who took power in the name of the common folk, who would protect them from foreign imperialists and homegrown elites. He was tolerated because of that. Yes, the world said, he was a little strange, a little bloody-minded, and he funded terrorists…but, well, his heart was in the right place.

But, now, that’s gone. The world sees him as he really is: a tyrant, ruling with naked force over a seething people who would destroy him if that were possible. And, if he is remembered at all by history, it will be as that, illegitimate and foul, united in spirit with the Greek colonels, and the Argentine Junta, and Mobutu with his private Zaire…like them ruling exclusively for personal gain, like them kleptocrats, like them brutal and crude, like them kept in place only by the gun, the bullet, and the whip.

And, in the long run, that perception will matter. It will matter more than bombs and mercenaries. It will matter more than his “victory,” should that occur.

For, you see, truth is invincible. And once unleashed, as it is now unleashed, it can be deadly. At least to those who live by falsehood.

And this, Gadhafi and his heirs will discover. This they will learn, too late, as it twists and disfigures them...as it destroys them… as truth, for them, proves more toxic than poison, more fatal than plague.