Did he jump or was he pushed? We do not know whether Moammar
Gaddafi, supreme guide of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab
Jamahiriyah for 41 years and embattled Tripolitan strongman during
six months of civil war, died with a gun in his hands or was killed
after being wounded and captured by troops answering to the
country’s National Transition Council. They had been fighting for
weeks in Sirte (his home town) where his loyalists made their last
stand.
Either way, he perished by the sword, as befits a tyrant.
What were his last thoughts? Did his career appear to
him…
full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying
nothing…?
It is worth considering if there was anything in his mind
approaching the notions that went through the mind of English
literature’s most famous tyrant before Macduff’s righteous sword
cut him down. The reason it is worth considering is that if there
is one thing that we ought to know about the civil strife that has
beset the Arab societies of North Africa and the Middle East for
nearly a year, it is that we have viewed it almost exclusively
through Western eyes.
Our policy leaders, if not the rest of us necessarily,
certainly ought to do just that: their first responsibility, after
all, is to ask what dangers and opportunities these events
represent for the Western nations. In this sense, therefore, it is
quite right to ask whether the winners among the multitude of
parties (one report mentioned a hundred) that are competing in
Sunday’s election in Tunisia (where the “Arab Spring” began) are
“democrats” or “islamists” or variations of these, and whether they
want to do business with us in a way that works for us as well as
them. This is incomparably more important than whether the
elections are “free and fair,” by whatever standards some
boondoggling busybodies in or out of government want to
apply.
Elections come and go, what matters to us is who is in
charge and what their intentions are. Here we are ten years into
our neocolonial venture into the Arabo-Muslim world, and we have
spilled blood and spent treasures for what? To see Christianity,
such as it was, totally eradicated in Afghanistan, with Iraq soon
to follow and Egypt as well, incredible as this sounds. But it is
not incredible. What remains of Lebanese Christianity, or Syrian?
And how is it that the Iraqi government that exists only because we
have protected it manages to be ambivalent in its attitude toward
the turmoil in Syria — does this government not realize that the
entire civilized world is aghast at the brutality with which the
Alewi-dominated regime of Bashar al-Assad is repressing its
opponents?
However, this is what viewing events through Western eyes
will do that to you. We assume too readily that the authorities in
Kabul or Bagdad care what the civilized world thinks. They care to
the degree that it gives them some sense on how to deal with
us.
Is it likely that Moammar Gaddafi, who overthrew King
Idris to establish his regime, thought like Macbeth when he had the
king of Scotland murdered? Did he worry that the horrid
deed would drown the wind with tears? Tyranny for
Gaddafi was not a moral problem any more than murder. Macduff’s
outburst, “We’ll have thee as our rarer monsters are, painted upon
a pole, and underwrit, Here may you see the tyrant,” might scare
him — it did scare him, and he murdered political opponents by the
thousands, forced thousands more into European and American
emigration. But it did not affect him the way it did Macbeth, whose
feelings of guilt contribute to his undoing. Shakespeare did not
underestimate political power; on the contrary, the crimes or
political crises in his plays are resolved by political means and
military force, or the police power of the state. However, his
dramas take place against a moral or political background that is
readily intelligible to his audience, which expects to see guilt,
or contrition, or at least rationalization in his
protagonists.
It is not at all clear that non-Western tyrants (let us be
nice and not single out the Arabs) see any reason for such
sentiments. We have been engaging in “nation-building” efforts a
key component of which is to transfer to these distant lands the
political habits and individual moral outlooks that we take for
granted. We expect them to want to be, if only hypocritically,
decent personally if they are going to set up decent political
regimes.
The Arabs (and others) always understood this to be a
major Western weakness. That is why, among other things, they use
the language of Western progressivism in their PR. They are for
“socialism” — jamahiriyah means “people’s state,” as in
“people’s democracy” in Stalinist Eastern Europe — they
participate in human rights panels and committees at the UN, they
denounce “colonialism” and “imperialism” and support one another’s
“liberation movements,” when they are far away.
Democratic forces and human rights movements did not scare
Arab tyrannies. They repressed them, co-opted them, ignored them,
depending on what was most cost-effective, or what pleased the
whims of the ruling cliques. These forces and movements, such as
they were and are, always appealed for support in the West, rarely
obtained it. It is not surprising the strongmen should feel
invulnerable.
Tormented by his own evil, paranoid, Macbeth falls back on
the desperate idea, obtained from the witches, that he is
indestructible because the forces needed to overcome him have not,
or cannot be, mobilized. In this Shakespeare understood a central
factor in the psychology of tyrants applicable to all times and
places. But there were mobilizations in many Arab countries in the
past year. We had nothing to do with them, as best anyone knows,
and it is not at all certain they will have anything to do with us
in the spring’s aftermath.
Did Gaddafi have a final insight when they cornered him
and did it move him, the old soldier — a graduate of Sandhurst, no
less — to one last fight?
I will not yield
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet
And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
Though Birnan Wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
The Arab tyrants of Gaddafi’s generation explained their
deeds and their regimes with a mixture of references to Islam when
it suited them, to a golden age that may have existed once, to
anti-colonial struggles they turned into founding myths, even if —
especially if — they participated in the often violent
displacement of the founders. This official front worked for
decades. The Arab revolt of the past months tore it down. Zine Ben
Ali gave up, slunked out of Tunisia for a quiet exile in Riyadh.
Hosni Mubarak gave up, perhaps demoralized as his own old Army
comrades abandoned him. Gaddafi chose to fight and die. Can the
revolt now restore some degree of normality to these lands scorched
by bitterness?
Hail, King! For so thou art. [Macduff says to Malcolm]
Behold where stands
The usurper’s cursed head. The time is free.
Would that we knew how to help them use the time they have
paid dearly for. But if we do not, perhaps the best we can do is
stand aside.
