The Libyan "Iron Fist" is about to keel over: A WARNING to the Cambodian Iron Fist?

Squaring Off With Libya's Iron Fist

March 18, 2011
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times

PARIS — Almost from the minute he seized power in 1969 as he and a group of other young officers toppled Libya’s monarchy, Muammar el-Qaddafi has displayed an overwhelming urge to secure the world’s attention — often as not through maverick support of violent groups committed to overthrowing the existing order.

Over time, in the quest for acknowledgement as a leader not only of his own people but also of much broader constituencies, he has sought the mantle of pan-Arab champion and pan-African redeemer, often as not uninvited. His armies have crossed his neighbors’ frontiers, and he has spent part of his country’s vast oil wealth on alliances with lands the West calls pariahs and with groups labeled terrorists. In 2003, a dramatic about-face even found him courting the United States and Britain in his quest for recognition as a statesman.

In the last month, though, Colonel Qaddafi’s desire for the center stage has been fulfilled in a spectacular fashion that he probably neither coveted nor imagined as his forces sought to roll back an uprising that had once harbored the same dreams of revolution in his own country as those that unseated the elites in Libya’s neighbors, Tunisia and Egypt.

Indeed, by some unpredictable law of unintended consequences, Colonel Qaddafi may have made a greater contribution to history than many would have forecast, rewriting the region’s playbook in a game-changing way that, after the vote at the United Nations late Thursday authorizing the imposition of a no-flight zone, could draw the West into yet another conflict in the Muslim world and resonate among autocracies from the Mediterranean to the Gulf. (In response, Libya declared a cease-fire, but that produced some skepticism. In the words of a British lawmaker, “this is a regime that needs to be judged by its deeds, not its words.”)

And, in some ways, Colonel Qaddafi may already have achieved significant goals, including his own survival. Until revolt began to simmer in Libya in mid-February, the Arab world’s young and disaffected protesters seemed sustained by the vision of a future in which, like dominoes, their oppressors would tumble with the same swift dispatch as Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

All it took, it seemed, was to marshal forces on the street, shed the fear ingrained by hated autocrats and rely on social networking sites to keep alive the faith that persuaded a generation of young Arabs to confront elders seen to have failed them.

But Libya offered a different model. Regimes, it seems, do not have to fall just because people raise the volume of their demands that they be gone.

Regimes can fight back. They can use real force — warplanes, tanks and artillery. They can meet the clamor for democracy with bullets and armor.

Just this week, Bahrain allowed 2,000 soldiers from its neighbors’ armed forces, mainly from Saudi Arabia, to bolster its own security establishment in confronting an uprising against the monarchy, flushing protesters out of Pearl Square — the urban arena that would-be revolutionaries had likened to Tahrir Square in Cairo as the incubator of their revolt.

In Yemen, too, the security forces have seemed increasingly ready to use lethal force.

Each country in the region has a different dynamic, of course, but, compared with the early days of the uprisings, when the Arab world seemed gripped by the perceived inevitability of revolutionary contagion, the impetus for change has eased, as if the barriers erected by Colonel Qaddafi had turned back a broader tide, heartening unelected rulers and giving their adversaries pause.

In Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria and Libya, kings and presidents have survived the stirrings of dissent. Where the militaries of Tunisia and Egypt once seemed to side with the protesters — if only by promising not to shoot them — that promise has been replaced by the recourse to armed might and the fine-tuning of repression in a swath of lands.

Initially, too, Western powers, caught off balance by the protests, sought to remain aloof as the back-to-back upheavals in Tunisia in January and in Egypt a month later dethroned leaders who had served as allies for decades. But the spectacle of Libya’s vengeful forces advancing this week across the same desert reaches contested by Rommel and Montgomery in World War II seemed to galvanize a change of heart: Hands-off was no longer an option.

There has been a “sea change in opinion,” the U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, said while visiting Cairo, referring primarily to calls for a no-flight zone over Libya, which won the unexpected and unusual support of the Arab League — an unlikely and reluctant advocate of foreign military intervention.

Perhaps, though, her remark was eloquent of a dawning recognition that the failure to contain Colonel Qaddafi would have much broader consequences for the West’s stake in oil-rich lands, such as Libya itself, as the region’s kaleidoscope turns.

The calculation seemed particularly relevant to the conflict between ruler and ruled in the Gulf, conjuring sectarian ghosts and regional rivalries that seemed absent a few weeks ago.

The involvement of the Saudi military in Bahrain has drawn a clear battle line not just between monarchies and marchers, but also between Sunni Muslim elites and the region’s restive Shiites, who form the majority of the population in Bahrain and whose faith allies them with the Shiite leadership in Iran — another land that, like Libya, has shown scant tolerance of dissent.

“Saudi Arabia’s dangerous quasi-invasion of Bahrain is a reminder that Libya is very far from being the only place where hopes are being stifled,” the columnist Seumas Milne wrote in The Guardian, a British newspaper. “The Saudi regime fears both the influence of Iran and the infection of its own repressed Shia minority — concentrated in the eastern region, center of the largest oil reserves in the world.”

Yet, “across the region people insist they have lost their fear,” Mr. Milne said, adding: “All the signs are that, sooner or later, the dominoes will fall.”

That confident prediction, so widespread a few weeks ago, is precisely what Colonel Qaddafi has set his face — and his armed forces — against.