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Libya at the brink: who is Saif al-Islam Qaddafi?
As events in Libya began to spiral out of control, it was Qaddafi’s son Saif who went on the air to give a rambling speech that talked of impending civil war and dark conspiratorial forces at work.
I noted yesterday that “Qaddafi’s son Saif is an interesting figure, who was apparently behind a failed drive for reform in Libya a couple of years ago.” The reform, offering greater freedom of speech and the beginnings of democracy in that beleaguered and oppressed and highly tribal country, were rejected by Qaddafi in 2008, and Saif gave a speech at the time in which he announced his retirement from public life.
The question now is: was Saif’s dedication to reform a sham all the time, an attempt to put a modern face on the Qaddafi regime while perpetuating the dynasty? Or was it real? And if the latter, what compelled Saif to be the one to make that speech the other day?
There are those who believe that Saif’s latest speech has ripped the mask off the Qaddafi scion’s pose and revealed him to be a non-reformer in hiding all the while. There are others—including David Held of the London School of Economics, a professor who helped Saif with his doctoral dissertation there (yes, he’s Doctor Saif al-Islam Qaddafi), who says:
The discussions [Held had with Said] were passionate and often “very, very heated…When I first met Saif, he was struggling with himself and his place in the world, in the context of his family. By the end of his time at the LSE, he had discovered a deep commitment to liberal democratic reform of his country.
“The man giving that speech wasn’t the Saif I had got to know well over those years. The Saif I knew will be in turmoil over the beliefs he had to betray in order to demonstrate his support to his father…”
Held remembers Saif as man with a curiosity for knowledge and a huge appetite for reading and learning. “He always wanted to test arguments for his views, always wanted to engage in dialogue,” said Held.
Then there’s this WaPo article from last May, which seems to be conveying that idea that Saif is/was mostly sincere. Contains this:
Gaddafi turned down his father when he offered him the second-most powerful post in the government. “We want to see a constitution to create a more democratic and transparent political game in Libya,” he said. “Until that time, I am not interested in being part of the government.”
Gaddafi’s biggest rivals are his brothers — Mutassim, Libya’s national security adviser, and Khamis, a military commander. Unlike Saif, both reportedly have strong power bases in the military, whose support is essential to hold power, analysts say. Mutassim also appears to be close to the hard-liners who oppose Saif’s reforms.
One potential weapon Saif Gaddafi holds is Libya’s youth. In a nation where an estimated 70 percent of the population is younger than 30, he views himself as the champion of a generation longing for change. “I embody the dream of the young people,” he said.
His popularity is visible on the streets of Tripoli. In cafes, young Libyans openly declare their support for him and credit him with gaining them more freedom to speak openly.
That was then; this is now. If you go to a translation of the full text of Saif’s speech (unofficial, but it’s the only one I could find so far) and study it, you’ll find it a very curious document. Saif talks about a coming civil war and “100,000s of deaths,” but does he threaten such a war or merely warn of it? He talks about reforming Libya, which seems like a transparent lie but is given a sharply ironic twist by his previous seeming commitment to such reforms.
He warns Libyans that tribal struggles and division of the country will ensue, and that Islamicists and/or colonial and other foreign powers (including Arab) will try to take over Libya. This seems another way to manipulate the people into backing off and leaving his father in charge. But then again, who knows who it is who is actually behind the uprising in Libya, which seems to have organized itself unusually quickly, and who knows what the final result will be? He says the killings of the Libyan people resulted from the fact that the army was under stress and unused to crowd control. This seems a very lame excuse, as later events have indicated.
Since Saif gave that speech, the Libyan conflict has escalated. Qaddafi the elder has reiterated the charges against the demonstrators that Said first outlined. Iraqi planes have strafed demonstrators and many more are reported to have died. The fog of war and the lack of outside observers precludes our knowing the details, but suffice to say that it seems very brutal.
So was Saif’s former reputation a good cop bad cop scenario, a fiction designed to disarm? One would think so. But the nagging notion remains that it was real but unheeded, and when everything fell apart Saif decided on family loyalty and going down with his wretched father’s ship. Or perhaps he was threatened and forced by father and brothers to be the face of the regime’s message, due to his previous reputation as the good (or at least better) one.
One thing is certain: therein lies a tale worth telling, although we probably will never hear it. My guess is that if we did, it would sound somewhat like the story of Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies: the son who may have initially aspired to be something better (scholar, war hero), but returned in a time of crisis to family loyalty—and to the family business of graft, power, and murder.
Hijacking has bad ending: pirates kill hostages
US naval ships who were shadowing the Somali pirates who had captured two American couples were negotiating with two of the kidnappers, who had come aboard one of the Navy vessels, when the pirates unexpectedly launched a grenade at the ship and gunfire erupted on the kidnapped yacht. When US special forces boarded the boat, a fight ensued that left two pirates dead.
Unfortunately, so were the hostages, apparently killed by the pirates at the outset for reasons unknown. These were no ordinary naive vacationers:
Since 2004, the Adams lived on their yacht in Marina Del Rey for about half the year and the rest of the year they sailed around the world, often distributing Bibles in remote parts of the Fiji Islands, Alaska, New Zealand, Central America and French Polynesia, Johnston said.
Scott and Jane Adam documented their maritime missionary work on their website, S/V Quest Adventure Log…
Johnston said that despite an adventurous spirit, the Adams were meticulous planners who knew the dangers they faced. The couple had sailed with a large flotilla to stay safe from pirates near Thailand earlier in the trip.
RIP Jean and Scott Adam, and Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle.
Civil war in Libya?
As a consequence of the domino effect that’s currently sweeping the Arab world, Libya’s Qaddafi is facing the challenge of his 41-year dictatorship’s life.
There are tyrants, and then there are tyrants. Qaddafi is no Mubarak; he’s more brutal and repressive, and already a great many more people have been killed in demonstrations in Libya than in Egypt as Qaddafi tries to hold on to power. That’s the way it is with dictatorships: the worst of them are always prepared to do more violence against their own people.
That means it ordinarily takes far more courage and far more lives to depose them, or is even impossible. If the ruler wants to up the ante, it can be made very costly indeed. The turning point often happen only when their own armies and police forces refuse to follow orders.
It’s impossible to know how many people have already died in Libya, and even more impossible to know how many more will be killed. Qaddafi’s son Saif has warned that “rivers of blood will flow” if there is civil war. He has also played the Islamist fear card simultaneously with the colonial fear card, saying:
If civil war ensued, Qaddafi warned that “oil will stop. Foreign companies will leave Libya tomorrow.” He said it would also invite a return of colonial powers: “Do you think Europe, NATO, the U.S. will accept an Islamic emirate in the middle of the Mediterranean,” he said.
I have read nothing that indicates any sort of knowledge about who the Libyan protesters are. Patriots eager for liberty? Islamists eager for a theocracy? Enemies of Qaddafi eager for their own leaders to take over, establish their own tyrannical dictatorship, and enjoy its spoils? Young men just tired of being poor, and angry in general? All of the above?
[NOTE: Qaddafi’s son Saif is an interesting figure, who was apparently behind a failed drive for reform in Libya a couple of years ago.
…Ahmed Gabriel Fituri, a Libyan analyst close to the regime, [said] “What Saif al-Islam [a son of Qaddafi] offered in lieu of reform could have saved the regime and transformed it at the same time.”
But Saif’s struggle with the traditionalists, largely from Muammar Qaddafi’s revolutionary committee movement, who dislike change and feared that Saif’s reform program would threaten their own privileges and interest, was ended by Qaddafi himself in 2008, in favor of the traditionalists””ending Saif’s attempt for gradual reform.
Many young Libyans who embraced Saif’s “Libya al-Ghad” plan were left angry and in despair. Their hope that the regime might understand and respond to their economic needs and their yearning for more openness and freedom were dashed, said Tahani Tarapolisi, a writer and activist.]
Elections have consequences, and what’s going on in Wisconsin right now is one of them
The spotlight in Wisconsin has been mostly on the demonstrators and the governor, Republican Scott Walker, who has been trying to get the state’s fiscal house in order by seeking more of a contribution from the state’s public service workers, and also asking them to give up collective bargaining except in matters of salary, and to vote on union membership every year.
It’s the latter parts that have created most of the furor. For them he’s been given the epithet “union-buster” and far worse. There’s no question that Walker is spearheading the drive, but he could never do so with such confidence unless he felt he had the support of the legislature.
November of 2010 was a mid-term election that featured a huge reversal in the US Congress, with the House being taken over by Republicans, and the Senate remaining in Democratic hands but barely so. This was the big news. But the fine print described an even more startling reversal on the state level in much of the country, and Wisconsin was one of the epicenters of the quake.
I described it here shortly after the election, and pointed out that Wisconsin had gone from 52[D] and 46[R] to 38[D] and 60[R] in the House, and 18[D] and 15[R] to 14[D] and 19[R] in the Senate. Expressed in terms of percentages, which makes the switch easier to see, the Wisconsin House went from 53% Democratic to 61% Republican, and the Wisconsin Senate from 54% Democrat to 57% Republican.
Recently, when the Wisconsin Democratic legislators responded to Walker’s proposals by running and hiding, they did it because they knew they didn’t have the numbers to do anything else about it but stonewall. In Wisconsin, 3/5 of Senate members are required to be present in order to pass fiscal legislation. So a disappearance seemed like a fabulous idea; perhaps the only idea..
But Governor Walker has a plan:
Though the Wisconsin constitution requires three-fifths of the senate to be present to pass fiscal legislation, a simple majority of 17 members constitutes a quorum for other bills in the 33-seat state senate. So the 19 GOP senators who remain in Madison can pass any number of bills while their Democratic colleagues are on the lam, and Republicans are a majority in the assembly, too. “They can hold off, but there is a whole legislative agenda that Republicans in the senate and assembly can start acting on that only requires simple majorities,” Walker warns.“If they want to do their jobs, and have a say, they better show up.”
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. In Walker, the Democrats have a formidable adversary. But he would be able to do nothing without his fellow Republicans in the legislature.
Speaking of those fellow Republicans, the Wall Street Journal reports that some of the more moderate ones have a plan, too:
The proposal, written by Sen. Dale Schultz and first floated in the Republican caucus early last week, calls for most collective bargaining rights of public-employee unions to be eliminated””per Mr. Walker’s bill””but then reinstated in 2013, said Mr. Schultz’s chief of staff Todd Allbaugh.
Governor Walker says it won’t fly. And Democrats are insisting on removal of the collective bargaining issue altogether. The stakes appear way too high for either side to give in.
Egypt’s Khomeini comes home?
I observed a while back that:
One very large difference between Egypt and Iran is that Iran had a ready-made charismatic figure in Khomeini, who was ruthless in his drive to power. Egypt seems to lack a similar figure””so far.
Well, Bryan Preston points out that:
Muslim Brotherhood mastermind Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi returned to Egypt, from which he had been banned for decades, and gave a speech before hundreds of thousands. As Andrew McCarthy and Big Peace’s al-Mutarjim note, here’s a portion of what the cleric said:
“A message to our brothers in Palestine: I have hope that Almighty Allah, as I have been pleased with the victory in Egypt, that He will also please me with the conquest of the al-Aqsa Mosque, to prepare the way for me to preach in the al-Aqsa Mosque. May Allah prepare the way for us to (preach) in the al-Aqsa Mosque in safety”“not in fear, not in haste. May Allah achieve this clear conquest for us. O sons of Palestine, I am confident that you will be victorious.”
For the leader of a religion of peace, Qaradawi sure talks an awful lot about war. This call for conquest, in particular, should disturb everyone: The Al-Aqsa mosque stands on the Temple Mount in the heart of Jerusalem. Qaradawi’s call for conquest of that mosque is a call to destroy Israel.
This all might seem like so much bluster, but for the Egyptian army’s role in allowing Qaradawi in, and providing security for his speech while keeping non-Islamists off the stage. The Egyptian revolution now has its Khomeini, come home to roost.
Whenever I hear this sort of thing, I think of Churchill’s quote about the return of Lenin to Russia: that he was “transported…in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.”
More from Nir Rosen, expert on Mideast sexual assault
It turns out that the Lara Logan incident was not the first time journalist Nir Rosen had opined on the subject of female journalists being assaulted in the Middle East. On August 2, 2010, during an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review about Wikileaks, Rosen had offered another nugget of trenchant observation on the topic:
[Q]Women have an easier time getting around?
[A]In general in the Muslim world, non-Muslim women are at an advantage. There’s like a force field around them, people don’t want to come too close. Jill Carroll maybe was an exception, but there haven’t been that many women who I know of that have been attacked. Maybe groped here and there. Men are just maybe more uncomfortable around women, or don’t even see them.
Michael Totten has new a book coming out
Many of you are probably familiar with Michael Totten, PJ writer and intrepid journalist extraordinaire specializing in the Middle East. He’s got a book coming out, and here’s a sneak preview.
The anti-American, anti-Israel Nir Rosen, and the MSM
I’ve got a new piece up at PJ.
You may ask: why are you giving Nir Rosen more attention than he deserves? My answer: because although his biases were so blatant, so transparently and typically far-left, he has nevertheless managed to be a highly respected member of the mainstream media, trusted to be a fair and honest reporter in the Middle East.
I know the MSM is biased, and I know it leans left. But Rosen is a far left ideologue of the purest kind. So how did he find such a comfy home in the mainstream press (WaPo, NY Times, Time, Atlantic, etc.), not just the far-left press? And not just as an opinion journalist, either—which would have been acceptable—but as an unbiased reporter of what’s going on?
The only thing that tripped him up was that, in the end, he made comments about Lara Logan’s attack that offended leftist sensibilities. Otherwise he would still be going strong. It will be interesting to see whether he will get as many assignments as before.
The bottom line is that his MSM editors must have either been negligent in not knowing who he was long ago; or (far more likely) they knew and did not care, or in fact are on the same page.
Just the tip of the iceberg?
The new, old, states’ rights
The turmoil in Wisconsin, and the Obama/Democratic/union response, has got me thinking about the phenomenon of federalism.
Like so many other concepts on which our country is based, we supposedly learned about it in civics class (or whatever passes—or doesn’t pass—for civics class these days). I wonder whether the younger generations have received the instruction at all, but even for those of us who did, what did it really mean to us? Book learning is nowhere near the same as living it. Now we are getting an education in what it’s really about, and why it’s so important to preserve it.
Our founders lived in a time when states had been more powerful than they are now, and each state had a very distinct identity, with its citizens highly aware of their state allegiance. What’s more, the founders realized that a federal government would have a tendency to want to grow and to swallow up states’ autonomy unless its powers were strictly limited, which they attempted to do.
Over the years the federal government has grown anyway. One of the differences between Democrat and Republican parties in recent decades has been that the first has been behind that growth, and the second has wanted to limit it, although in recent years many Republicans have violated their own principles in that regard. But with the financial crisis and the Obama administration, as well as the influence of the Tea Party, Republicans are now reclaiming at least some of their old mantle.
In that they have been helped rather than hurt by the transparency of Obama and Democrats’ heavy-handedness in attempting to thwart them. It seems a long time ago, but remember Jan Brewer and the feds’ lawsuit against the state of Arizona? Then there’s the lawsuits by over twenty states against Obamacare. And now, in what is perhaps the most visually graphic of the battles, we have Wisconsin and the Democrat-supported (and Democrat-supporting) public employee unions against almost everybody else, particularly the cash-strapped other citizens of these cash-strapped states.
The old image of states’ rights was of Democrat Governor George Wallace standing in the doorway at the University of Alabama, trying to hold back the feds’ insistence on integration. From that, states’ rights got a very bad rap. Now we’re seeing a different picture: governors (so far, Republican) protecting the fiscal integrity of their states against the influence of public service unions that feed the Democratic Party and are fed by it in turn.
Has Tim Geithner…
…suddenly stepped into the Jim Carrey role in the movie “Liar, Liar?” You know, the one where Carrey plays Fletcher Reede, a lawyer whose son makes a wish that his dad will be unable to lie for a day, and it comes true?
Because otherwise there’s no way I can account for this startling exchange:
[Hat tip: Bryan Preston at the Tatler.]
Trouble in Wisconsin—and elsewhere
It’s not just the Arab street that’s boiling over. There’s trouble in the streets of—Wisconsin.
“Trouble in Wisconsin” sounds like an oxymoron. But it’s just a reflection of similar troubles all around the country, and even the world (see Europe, for example Greece).
Sooner or later, in state after state after state, there will be some sort of showdown between state employees who won’t give up the benefits to which they’ve grown accustomed—with the help of their unions, that have become pythons with a stranglehold on state budgets—and the beleaguered states who plead that the crush is killing them.
I purposely used strong language in the above paragraph, because I noticed that President Obama has gotten into the fray and used some strong language himself. He has accused Wisconsin’s Republican Governor Scott Walker of “assaulting” the unions by backing legislation that would limit the collective bargaining rights of state employees.
What is being proposed by the governor and his supporters? That state public workers—excluding police, firefighters and state troopers—pay half their pension costs and 12% of their health insurance costs, and lose their right to collectively bargain anything but pay.
Doesn’t sound all that onerous to me. But I guess if you’re used to tremendous benefits, it’s very hard to give them up. But for Obama, it is the equivalent of a vicious attack on his most-favored constituency, public employees and public unions.
Note that the public employees we consider most vital and heroic are exempted. That leaves, I would guess, mostly teachers. (not that they’re not vital and heroic, you teachers out there). So it seems roughly parallel to the fight going on in New Jersey for Chris Christie (although firefighters are included there), except that Obama has yet to insinuate himself into that battle, as far as I know. Perhaps the president is loath to take on Christie, and is sticking with Governor Walker as an opponent. Or perhaps Obama feels more proprietary towards Wisconsin, which after all is practically a suburb of Chicago.
Does it surprise me that Obama has taken on this battle, despite its being a state issue? No, not at all. Fine points like state autonomy do not concern him, and in fact they have mostly been troublesome for him. He sees winning this fight as essential to placate his base of support.
[NOTE: See this for plenty more about the fight.]