Memo from Gaddafi to tyrants: hold on to your nukes!

As Muammar Gaddafi prepares to get the hell out of Tripoli – not on camelback but by the fastest means of transportation available – he’s probably tugging at his scraggly beard and lamenting: “Why, by the beard of the Prophet, did I ever give up my nuclear weapons?” For all the bravado that Gaddafi had been exhibiting in the weeks and months leading up to today, his fate was effectively sealed the day NATO began its aerial bombing, with Arab League backing, in support of the rebel forces that were fighting his troops. Given the overwhelming aerial superiority that NATO enjoyed, it clearly marked the beginning of the endgame for the desert fox, who had survived an amazing 41 years at the top, marking him as the longest-serving Arab despot (other than from a royal family). And although the man whom Ronald Reagan christened “the mad dog of the Middle East” has survived several assassination attempts in these 41 years, and been subjected a succession of military strikes and economic coercion for his active involvement in terrorist strikes targeting the West, his cardinal mistake was giving up his nuclear weapons as part of a “rapprochement” with the West in 2003-04. The only logical explanation to account for Gaddafi’s having surrendered his life insurance policy is perhaps that he had been unnerved by the speed with which the Saddam Hussein regime buckled under the US “shock-and-awe” onslaught of Iraq in 2003. Although Gaddafi had been passing on counter-terrorism intelligence even in the late 1990s to British and US intelligence and been inclined to trade in his nuclear trump card in return for not having to live in mortal fear of Western assassination plots and an end to economic sanctions that were cramping his lifestyle, it was perhaps Iraq that finally tamed him . [caption id=“attachment_66051” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“For all the bravado that Muammar Gaddafi had been exhibiting in the weeks and months leading up to today, his fate was effectively sealed the day NATO began its aerial bombing. Reuters”] [/caption] But that was perhaps the wrong dictatorial lesson for Gaddafi to draw from Saddam Hussein’s experience of 2003. It was the fact that Iraq, for all its posturing and shadow boxing with the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not have a nuclear deterrent that eventually rendered Saddam’s regime vulnerable and hastened its downfall. So too with Gaddafi. His attempts to make nice with the West – and come above ground as an ally in the West’s war on terror – may have given him a few additional years, but as he probably realises by now, he was never really “one of them”. And like an overly generous Karna gifting away his body armour, a de-nuclearised Gaddafi was always vulnerable to Western military superiority when the tide turned, as it did in February 2011 with the spread of the Arab Spring uprising to Libya. For at least two rulers with a history of troubled relations with the US and the West – Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinajad and North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, Gaddafi’s fall holds the important lesson that their only true defence is the nuclear weapons they are suspected to have. The West finally gets a war right For the US and for NATO forces in Europe too, the operation in Libya may go down as the one war they got right. As opposed to Iraq and Afghanistan, where they’ve been bogged down in virtually unwinnable wars for over a decade, NATO’s intervention right from the start was predicated on not having boots on the ground, but only providing air cover for a native rebel force to seize territory gradually. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was recently asked if the US, by not doing more in Libya and Syria in support of the opposition forces, was perhaps signally a US reluctance to underwrite stability in the world anymore. [fpgallery id=155] Of Libya, she said : “If you look at Libya, this is a case for strategic patience, and it’s easy to get impatient. But I think when you realise that this started in March, there was no opposition, there were not institutions, there was nothing that – there was no address even for trying to figure out how to help people who were attempting to cast off this brutal dictatorship of 42-plus years. The distance they have travelled in this relatively short period of time, the fact that for the first time we have a NATO-Arab alliance taking action, you’ve got Arab countries who are running strike actions, you’ve got Arab countries who are supporting with advisors the opposition…. “This is exactly the kind of world that I want to see where it’s not just the United States and everybody is standing on the sidelines while we bear the cost, while we bear the sacrifice, while our men and women lay down their lives for universal values, where we’re finally beginning to say, ‘Look, we are by all measurements the strongest leader in the world, and we are leading. But part of leading is making sure that you get other people on the field’ And that’s what I think we’re doing. But now that Gaddafi is out of the way, the demand is already being raised for NATO to have “boots on the ground”. Writing in the Financial Times, Richard Haas, president of the Council on Foreign Relations reasons that NATO now needs to “deal with its own success” in Libya – and arrange to have an international force to put down the civil war and snuff out supporters of the Gaddafi regime. That is perhaps the wrong lesson to learn from Iraq, where it was a hollowing out of the ruling Baáthist party superstructure that rendered Iraq without the only shell of governance it had ever known in a generation. It was the power vacuum that followed that accounted for much of the cycle of violence over the past eight years. For the US and NATO to wade in now, when they’ve had remarkable success at low cost in Libya, would be to compound their Iraq folly.

Memo from Gaddafi to tyrants: hold on to your nukes!

Like Karna without his armour, Gaddafi was vulnerable ever since he gave up his nuclear weapons as part of a Grand Bargain. Now, why would any tyrant ever give them up and commit suicide…

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