Removing Osama was the easy part; now taming Gaddafi is the real job

The very welcome departure of Terror Inc chief Osama bin Laden has sent hope soaring that al Qaeda and its various offshoots, including our very own al Shabaab, is in its death throes.

But this might be one example where cutting off the head does not kill the snake.

President Barack Obama’s stunning elimination of the arch-nemesis has also raised expectation that other stubborn characters standing in the way of global peace and security will not elude Uncle Sam’s long reach.

Many are looking towards mercurial Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi to meet a similar fate. But that is where comparisons end.

The redoubtable guide and leader of the Libyan revolution may be a despot and tyrant, but he is a head of state still commanding a strong, well-armed, and loyal military.

Col Gaddafi is not some outlaw hiding from GloboCop. He is operating from his capital Tripoli and directing a fight-back that has defied the early obituaries predicting a quick exit in the wake of the people’s revolts that toppled some fellow North African leaders.

Libya did not go according to script. Gaddafi bared his fangs and the ensuing intervention by Western military forces has only resulted in a stalemate that is getting increasingly bloody.

One big problem is that the people’s revolution has been stolen from them by imperial forces.

The United States, France, Britain, and the other Western powers may want to pretend that they are motivated by the need to save the Libyan people from massacre by the Gaddafi forces.

But their intervention has had the effect of de-legitimising the people’s revolution.

Another big problem is that they have never adequately explained why intervention in Libya, even under United Nations authority, was considered necessary while the people of Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria — also challenging brutal feudal regimes and dictatorships — were left to suffer brutal repression.

Now, I am no fan of the colonel, brother, leader, and guide, not anymore. Much earlier in life and far less wiser, I was enamoured of the dashing revolutionary.

Like many University of Nairobi students in the early 1980s, I was a regular visitor at the Libyan People’s Bureau — that is what they call their embassy.

The place was popular with impressionable young minds eager to get their hands on posters and booklets on the Palestinian struggle and the Libyan revolution.

I never quite managed to get through the dense prose of the colonel’s little Green Book and to date I have little clue what his Third Universal Theory is all about.

The fellow I thought was a dashing revolutionary with his soaring rhetoric, designer shades, and shapely female guards turned out to be a dangerous demagogue and megalomaniac.

Much has been said of how Col Gaddafi is a vast improvement on the feudal sheikhs of Saudi Arabia and nearby kingdoms and Western client states who keep their people in poverty and ignorance while using the vast oil wealth as personal piggy banks.

Gaddafi, it was said, has used oil revenue for the advancement of his people. A big lie, a Kenyan friend with years as an expatriate in neighbouring Tunisia says.

The Libyan people are the most repressed in the region, he tells me, deliberately kept poor, illiterate, and ignorant.

I had some first-hand experience of Col Gaddafi’s domineering ways at the African Union Heads of State Summit in Accra a few ago.

The egomaniac in him threw protocol and the programme into a spin and was determined to ram through his madcap idea of the immediate declaration of United States of Africa, obviously with himself as leader and guide.

He had played a large role in bankrolling the African Union and, therefore, demanded unquestioned obeisance.

He was going to bulldoze his way through the conference until strong leaders such as Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda (the latter’s descent into the ranks of egomaniacs is a story for another day) firmly applied the brakes.

A frustrated Gaddafi hit on another harebrained scheme, throwing his loose change in the direction of a motley collection of African traditional rulers, kings, chiefs, and what have you, who gleefully scrambled for the money and declared their benefactor King of Africa.

He forgot that kings are a dying breed. Now I just wish his people had the resolve to depose him on their own without the need for foreign help.

mgaitho@ke.nationmedia.com