Gaddaffi is Dead! Now what?

The 42-year reign of power and terror of Muammar Gaddafi/Kaddafi  came to an end yesterday with the fall of Sirte and his death. It is unclear at this point whether he died from wounds received in his capture or was executed afterwards. Here is a link with an embedded video purporting to be the confession of a Libyan rebel who executed him.  It makes little real difference. Gaddafi (I'm seen probably a dozen different spellings of his name in English) was one of the world's longest-serving heads of state. His reign goes back to the Nasserist era when pan-Arabism was king in the Arab world and military dictators were all the rage. His fall is also the biggest victory of the Arab Spring (or al-intifada al-Arabiya or al-thawra al-Arabiya if you prefer) to date. Previously the heads of state had changed in Egypt and Tunisia, but at least in the former the military regime remains in place.

For months now the Syrian opposition has been calling for the West to double-down and mount a military offensive against the Ba'athist Assad regime as it had aided the rebels in Libya. But this was not on the cards for two reasons. First, Italy was threatened with an influx of illegal immigrants from Libya if Gaddafi remained in power. Second, Gaddafi had created scores to be settled by many Western governments by his indiscriminate use of terrorism. Whereas Assad pere and Assad fils believed in the discriminate use of terrorism against their regime's most dangerous enemies at home and in occupied Lebanon. Damascus carried out no Lockerbies, Gaddafi carried out at least two--against the U.S. in December 1988 and against France in Septermber 1989. He also supported the IRA for decades--he was the Provisional IRA's only governmental supporter abroad. This contributed to hundreds of deaths in Northern Ireland and Britain from the tons of Semtex explosive and the hundreds of assault rifles that he exported to Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s. Thus, at least four governments felt that they had an incentive to get rid of him when the opportunity arose. Such is not the case with the Assad regime, or with any other regime in the Arab world at the moment.  See this discussion with George H.W. Bush official Richard Haass on why Libya isn't a precedent.

Gaddafi was always the leader of a weak, thinly -populated country that was not a major player in inter-Arab affairs. Rather than use his oil wealth to improve the lot of his population, he used it mainly to play at enhancing his influence in Africa and the Middle East by supporting rebel movements and rulers in neighboring countries. President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda was an early recipient of such aid when Gaddafi sent troops to fight alongside Uganda's against invading Tanzanian troops in 1979. But the Libyan soldiers performed rather poorly. In the 1980s he was preoccupied with influencing politics in neighboring Chad, one of the poorest countries in Africa, as well as supporting the Abu Nidal organization, a terrorist organization that broke from Fatah and specialized in assassinating any Palestinian who spoke of peace with Israel. This was after Abu Nidal had left Iraq and then Syria. Gaddafi liked to sound more Palestinian than the Palestinians, rejecting any prospects of peace with Israel. But Israel never really bothered with him because he was never considered a serious threat--certainly much less of a threat than the Palestinian rejectionist terror organizations, Iraq, and Syria. Here is a link to an article that attempts to explain Gaddafi's eccentric behavior.

The Western press always treated him as a buffoon rather than as a serious figure. But this disguised that he had much in common with his fellow Arab dictators like Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak in Egypt,  Hafiz and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Like these other dictators he either took power in a coup or inherited it from a predecessor who had taken power in a coup--Gaddafi carried out his when Libya's King Idris was outside the country undergoing an operation. He spoke of power deriving from the people but maintained a ruthless security apparatus. He was a Soviet client until Moscow could no longer supply his needs. And most of his oil wealth was used to create a large military and thus appease the supporters who put him in the palace and might be tempted to replace him.

I predict that the Arab Spring will now go into hibernation while the "new" regimes in Egypt and Tunisia attempt to consolidate themselves through elections and while the new Libyan regime attempts to reconstruct and repair the damage from the war against the dictator.

Martin McGuinness, candidate for Irish presidency

Last week Sinn Fein (SF), the all-Ireland party and political half of the Republican Movement, announced that Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness is its candidate for the Irish presidency.  SF's thinking is that with Fianna Fail not running, the party now has the opportunity to by-pass the once dominant Irish political party. McGuinness could conceivably come in as runner up in the election, thereby further mainstreaming SF within the Republic of Ireland. The election is to be held on October 27, 2011. McGuinness will have to take a leave of absence from his job as deputy first minister in Northern Ireland during the campaign. In Ireland the presidency is a largely ceremonial position.

During the peace process, SF's leadership spun a scenario to the Republican Movement's rank and file of a united Ireland coming about peacefully because the party would use its influence both within the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive and the Irish government in the Republic to bring this about. The projected date of unification was sometime in 2016, the centennial anniversary of the declaration of the Irish republic on the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin in 1916 at the start of the Easter Rising. Until recently this was a fantasy because SF was a marginal party within the Republic and shunned by the other parties as a coalition partner. Hypocritically Fianna Fail and Fine Gael would urge Northern unionists to share power with Sinn Fein while the IRA still had its guns, while excluding it from power in the South for the same reason. Then last year the collapse of the Irish economy and of Fianna Fail's dominant status within the Irish party system seemed to make this dream feasible. But ironically, the same collapse made a majority of Northern nationalists opposed to unity with the Republic in the forseeable future.

McGuinness's nomination is also another sign of the eclipse of Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams. It was speculated after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that Adams remained outside of the Executive because he was being groomed for the bigger prize of the Irish presidency. Throughout the peace process Adams was the most popular politician in the Republic in public opinion surveys because of his role. But three things changed. First, the robbery of the Northern Bank in Dublin on December 20, 2004 exposed Adams to the scrutiny of the Irish press and his credibility was tarnished. He claimed not to have known any details of the robbery while he had been negotiating with the Democratic Unionists and British government on a power-sharing deal. Second, Ed Moloney's Secrets From the Grave tied Adams to the disappearance of Jean McConville, a young Belfast mother of ten, in the early 1970s when Adams was reputed to be a senior figure in the Belfast Brigade of the IRA. Moloney interviewed a number of senior republican and loyalist figures for Boston College's Troubles project with the stipulation that the interviews would only be made public upon the death of the subjects. When this occurred with Brendan Hughes, Moloney published. Third, in 2010 it was revealed that Gerry Adams was lying about his patronage of his younger brother, Liam, a suspected child abuser, within SF. Adams had kept his knowledge of Liam's sexual problems to himself allowing Liam to find work with young people. The press then exposed these lies. 

Adams was elected a TD (deputy in Irish Dail) last year from the border county of Louth. So he is still a marketable commodity. But if McGuinness someday ends up as Irish president, it will be like the guy who saves himself for his one true love only to have his best friend wind up with his girl. 

McGuinness was a 20 or 21-year old butcher's apprentice in Derry when he joined the IRA in 1971. Ironically, he originally joined the Official IRA but left it for the Provisional IRA after a few months because he was not interested in politics but in action. By the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1972 he was second in command of the Derry IRA. The Official IRA went on a permanent ceasefire in May 1972--22 years before the Provisionals did. After 1976 he and Adams wrested control of Northern Command from more moderate figures and made it the dominant force in the IRA. In the latter half of the 1980s he was IRA chief of staff and remained in that position well into the 1990s guiding the organization through the peace process. He also became Gerry Adams's deputy within SF and its chief negotiator during the Good Friday and subsequent negotiations. He also became education minister during the period of the First Assembly from December 1999 to October 2002. In the spring of 2007 when the peace process was resurrected it was McGuinness who became the partner of the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the DUP--the infamous Dr. No of Ulster politics. The two were dubbed the "chuckle brothers" by the media for their public shows of affection. McGuinness has always been more open about his past IRA background than Adams who to this day denies every having been a member of the IRA.