Colonel Muammar Gaddafi – sometime King of all Kings of Africa – has promised the West, should it intervene in his country’s affairs in order to stop him dropping bombs on his own people, that a huge number of Libyans will die. Of course, he did not put it so prosaically. This is what he said: “If the Americans or the West want to enter Libya, they must know it will be hell and a bloodbath. Worse than Iraq.” Hell and a bloodbath, eh? Of course he must mean that the hell and the bloodbath will be the result of the war that his army will fight with the foreign force. But, given he is now ordering his military to kill his own people, I wondered when I first heard him say it if he was threatening to kill more Libyans should the West try any funny business. Like a robber threatening to kill hostages should the police advance.
I interviewed George Galloway last week – possibly the best friend of Arab causes and issues in the West. A former member of the British Parliament, he has dedicated his career to promoting the plight of people in Palestine, Iraq, and throughout the entire Middle East.
I asked him how Gaddafi compared to Saddam Hussein, whom he met twice. Galloway – who is an incredibly articulate man (as the American Senate found out to its cost, particularly Senator Norman Coleman, in 2005) – was quick to answer. I think what he had to say bears repeating at length.
He said: “Gaddafi is a madman, and Saddam Hussein was not. Gaddafi has no achievements, Saddam had many. Both have destroyed their regimes by their mistakes. But Saddam at least had achievements to his name, which Gaddafi can’t begin to match.
“Every Libyan should be a multimillionaire. They have had more than 40 years with a tiny population, 6.5m people, and literally trillions of dollars of earnings. And anyone who has ever been in Libya, as I have, goes around asking themselves, where did all this money go? It didn’t go to the individual Libyan, it didn’t go to the public realm. If you go off the public road in Libya you will find streets with no lighting, potholes like caves. This money has been at best wasted, and at worst, stolen. I think it is a mixture of waste and theft.
“But Saddam Hussein nationalised the Iraqi oil. He spent so much money educating Iraqis that at one time they had more PhDs than all the other Arab countries put together. In the 1970s and part of the 80s there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in further education overseas…. The public realm in Iraq showed signs of the country’s wealth, and the personal wealth of Iraqis in the seventies was extraordinarily high.”
“Saddam’s disastrous invasion of Iran, the equally disastrous invasion and occupation of Kuwait, the even more disastrous failure to withdraw from Kuwait to avoid the catastrophe, and the conduct of the Saddam regime, through the long period that led up to its demise, all were reasons why Saddam in the end was a disastrous failure.
“I am not qualified to say whether he was a psychopath… What I would say is he made mistakes so gigantic, that any good that he did is lost in the tide of blood caused by those mistakes. But he is in a different league to Gaddafi, a different league altogether.”
So there you have it. Gaddafi is not fit even to be placed by the side of Saddam in the pantheon of corrupt, megalomaniac Middle East dictators. Do you agree?
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