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About four years ago I met the ghastly Saif Gaddafi in New York and mistook him for a drug dealer — he looked and dressed like one. This is the same Saif who escorted the great Libyan hero Megrahi back to Tripoli when the mass-murderer was freed on compassionate grounds. The younger Gaddafi’s arrogance was breathtaking. He went on Libyan TV last Sunday and blamed the rioting on people who were on drugs. In the meantime, the gangster regime had to bring in French-speaking African mercenaries to shoot unarmed protesters.
To illustrate the bestiality of the Gaddafis, while Saif threatens civil war, the Libyan air force is ordered to bomb and strafe the protesters. Yet two colonels fly their fighters to Malta, disobeying orders as any honourable military person would do. But while this is going on, the Security Council of the UN is having cocktails and talking, instead of declaring Libya a no-fly zone and sending Nato planes to enforce it. Forty-two years of cruelty and emptiness by Gaddafi is now replaced by impudence and bravado. Ban Ki-Moon should go back to Korea and sell fish.
What is depressing is the diplomatic language used by various Western governments when dealing with such monsters. Instead of immediately suspending relations, freezing all Libyan funds — and that includes the Gaddafi family’s vast real-estate holdings in central London — our leaders beat around the bush asking for restraint. But why am I surprised? That French clown Sarkozy allowed the maniac to come to Paris with his hookers and pitch a giant tent right in the middle of the historic city, tying up traffic for the duration. Gaddafi, with his dyed hair and Prisoner of Zenda uniforms, covered in medals despite the fact he’s never been in the line of fire, has gauged the West correctly. We’ll do anything and everything for his gas and oil, and to hell with the humiliation of having to spread open our you-know-what at his command.
Washington, needless to say, is always two steps behind. When Ronald Reagan sent a cruise missile as a birthday greeting to the mad dog back in ’86, he missed the bum. He should have rained in a dozen more. If, and it is a very big if, the Tunisian and Egyptian armies ever go back to the barracks and those two countries follow the Turkish model, Uncle Sam will be in yet another bind. Uncle knows only how to deal with dictators in Arab lands. A partnership of equals is beyond the old boy. It will also mean that Israel will have to do without the bragging rights of being the only democracy in the Middle East. Mind you, it’s a funny democracy that holds more than a million people in an outdoor concentration camp in Gaza because the Gazans chose the Hamas party in a democratic election. Not to mention the occupied West Bank. Not only are Uncle Sam’s friends all dictators and oppressors of their people, even the one that is not is an oppressor and a jailer of the majority of the inhabitants. Go figure, as they say.
For a while there was some euphoria that things might change for the better, but I don’t see it. Democracy is hard to impose on people who are tribal and have never trusted the state. That’s when demagogues thrive. When a few years ago the Swiss arrested Hannibal Gaddafi for imprisoning and beating up his Filippino servants, I wrote in a Swiss paper that, if Gaddafi bluffed and threatened to cut off oil supplies, they should freeze all Libyan funds and expel every Libyan freeloading diplomat from the country. The wise Swiss did not listen to wise Taki.
Soon after, the mad dog arrested two innocent Swiss working in Libya, accused them of spying and had the Swiss president getting down on his knees and greasing up to him. He got one innocent out, while the second one is still in some dungeon. So now’s the time to grab all the loot that we can — Libyan coffers are loaded and all over here — ship in as many weapons as we can plus some stealth air cover, and prepare some plaques to be placed on the palm trees from which the mad dogs of the Gaddafi family are hanged. But I won’t be holding my breath, that’s for sure. Nor will I be listening to the pathetic blather of the diplomats proclaiming their outrage over the shootings of innocents.
And there’s another problem, and this one could affect me personally. If some of these dictators are overthrown — I’m thinking of the Khalifas and other Gulf so-called sheikhs — where will these pox-ridden slobs end up? Not in some council flat in east London, that’s for sure. They’ll take great houses on the Riviera, buy a few Greek islands, drive up the prices of Belgravia flats, enrich Russian hookers making do only with footballers and broad-faced Slavs nowadays, fill to the brim the already overcrowded marinas of the Med, and make it impossible to fly private by cornering the NetJets market. Things are looking very grim.
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