Qaddafi has always despised the Sunni Arabs of the Middle East. He has his own ambitions, not nasserian or saddam-husseinian, but rather to be the Leader of Africa, if necessary starting with the Maghreb.
His entire career has been marked by a contempt for the Arabs of the Middle East -- particularly for the daggers-and-dishdasha Al-Saud, with xanadu yachts and with the grandest of grand with those Monte-Carlo or London or Malaga months of non-stop gambling and drinking and call-girling for those estivating emirs. All of this Qaddafi despises. He sees it as their betrayal of “the Arabs,” and the echt arabische noble bedu whom Qaddafi, tenting tonight on the old camp ground of the Libyan desert (he eats up that stuff), likes to think that he, Muammar Qaddafi, Last of the Great Arabs, and possibly now Founder of a Fatimid Caliphate, embodies.
It’s all preposterous, of course. But it is in such preposterousnesses that the Arab Muslims live. Saddam Hussein, King of the Arabs, was preposterous. Gamal Abdel Nasser, King of the Arabs, was preposterous. The brutalities follow one upon another -- the “Palestinian” terrorists bending down to lick up the blood of Wasfi el-Tal, the Iraqis who watched the spectacle, or even joined in, as the body of “strongman” Nuri es-Said was dragged through the streets of Baghdad in 1958 after the coup of Qassem, still half-clothed in women’s garments in which Nuri had attempted to flee, or the televised showing of Qassem and his bodyguards when they were subsequently murdered, or the killing of King Fahd, or the murder of Sadat on the reviewing stand as he celebrated the “great victory” of what the 1973 war (a war in which only the Americans prevented Ariel Sharon from destroying the Egyptian Third Army), and all the rest of it -- all the meetings of the Arab League, all the support for Saddam Hussein as long as he was only killing Shi’a and of course Kurds (why should Arabs care when Arabs kill Kurds, or Berbers, or black African Muslims?)and all the rest of the nonsense and paralysis of it all. Well, it’s enough to make even a Qaddafi outraged, not morally, but rather practically. The Arabs of the Middle East are to him an ineffective joke, and he’s not having it. He’s having the Fatimid Caliphate, and he’s going to solve the Sunni-Shi’a split by an appeal to history, to that Shi’a-led Caliphate.
It’s a fantastic suggestion. And a suggestion that will echo in the press of Egypt, where Mubarak and others in his family-and-friends plan have been warning for many months about the meretricious never-to-be-trusted Shi’a, who in their eyes are close to Infidels -- why, in Mubarak’s remarks one hears a slightly toned-down version of Al-Zarqawi’s denunciation of the Shi’a as “Rafidite dogs.” Loyal commentators in the Cairene press have followed suit.
Oh, this scheme or dream of Qaddafi is wonderful. It will scare the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. They have been worried about, or claiming to worry about, Shi’a efforts to proselytize among the Sunni Arabs of Syria. Their fears were, earlier, exaggerated. They were trying to exaggerate the claims of a “Shi’a crescent” for their own purposes (just as Iraqi Shi’a had inveigled the Americans, for their own by-now clear purposes, to remove Saddam Hussein).
The Sunni rulers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and elsewhere want two things.
First, they want the Americans to make sure that the Sunni Arabs in Iraq are not forced to acquiesce to the new Shi’a-dominated order, by remaining for as long as possible to pressure the Shi’a regime and to attack and disarm the Shi’a.
And secondly, they want what they have always wanted and always will want -- and they are adept at reframing their request to exploit whatever worries the Americans may harbor at any one time. What they have always wanted and want now is even more American pressure on Israel to surrender its legal and historic rights, and to make still further territorial and other concessions, rendering itself still more vulnerable than it already is to further Arab pressure, and to a future Arab military assault on an Israel weakened by diplomatic, economic, and demographic undermining. The farcical “Peace Plan” of the Saudis (the kind of thing only a Tom Friedman could take seriously) offers up as “moderates” the Slow Jihadists of Fatah. They are ready to make a deal with the Americans. They are presented to the American government and to the ever-compliant Europeans as being so very different from the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, when in fact they differ only in tactics and timing as to how to achieve the same desired result. And they use the need to keep the Arab masses happy by “showing progress” in the “peace process.”
In the old days Qaddafi was content just to be one more melamaniacal despot, a kind of desert Kim Il Sung, peddling his new form of government, the “Jamhariya,” as set out in his Third Way, in that Little Green Book, which told the world How Permanent Happiness Can Be Achieved If Only Everyone Listens to the Great Leader, Muammar Qaddafi.
Many were excitedly convinced in 2003 that because of the American invasion of Iraq Qaddafi had changed utterly. He gave up his attempts to acquire nuclear and other weapons, but it was forgotten or overlooked in all the excitement that those projects had failed and there was little tangible to give up (though information about A. Q. Khan may well have been of horse-out-of-the-barn value). They not only forgot that Qaddafi was famously mercurial, but that he remains a Muslim, and a megalomaniac with more-than-steigian dreams of glory.
Thank God that his Dreams of Glory now take the form -- the breathtaking even if only polemical temporary form -- of the restoration of a Shi’ite Fatimid Caliphate. The very idea is going to make the Al-Saud and Mubarak and the assorted plucky little kinglets and sheiklets of the Gulf very unhappy indeed, and more determined than ever that the Shi’a in Iraq must not prevail, must never be allowed to dominate what for 500 years was the center of Islamic Civliization, and the site of fabled Baghdad, madinat al-salaam.
Great.
I hate the saudi monarch too but this man, Gadafi, is crazy because he is calling for the replacement of sunnis with shits
When examining the reasons for Qaddafi's embrace of non-proliferation to appease America, one need look no further than his falling out with then Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the Arab summit in Riyadh that year. Qaddafi's agents had been caught earlier trying to assassinate the then-Crown Prince, and Abdullah responded with a public threat at the summit that apparently got the Libyan leader's attention.
Next thing you know, Qaddafi was cow-towing to the Bush Admin. and pledging to give up his WMDs. Everybody mistakenly attributed it to lessons learned about Iraq....that ole Maumar did't want to go the way of Saddam. The truth is, he knew Bush was the one entity in a position to pressure Abdullah to call off the dogs.
"Gadafi, is crazy because he is calling for the replacement of sunnis with shits"
Hey Abdullah, was that a Freudian slip? I couldn't have said it better myself.
Ironically, in the fiction I'm reading right now, Mecca and Medina are slag, and Baghdad is the center of the Arab Muslim world again.
If you want to find today's prophets, just read good books.
replacement of sunnis with shits, hey baby Abdulah
they are all little shits these islamic pious terrorists. as long as muslim follow the child rapist, thief mohummad, no greatness will ever come of them. islam does not allow for free speech, and
many more freedoms enjoyed by the Western World, and so islamic countries are nothing more than beggars.
For clarification Mr. Fitzgerald, Ghadaffi or Khadaffi from the olde days when he wore silk pajamas 22/7 and the other 2 was dressed in his little colonel soldier costume, was never content to be a local despot.
Early in his career he tried to divert the entire Nile river system into Libya and thereby destroy Egypt as his main rival.
Ghadaffi was always Caliphate minded in being one of the first leaders to try and implement the India to Morocco empire again.
He was the original bob in sponsoring terrorism and confronted American in "his gulf" to which President Reagan thrashed him and them blew him out of his tent one night with F 111 bombers which put the cure in Ghadaffi.
Bush 43 put the scare into him over nuclear weapons which Ghadaffi was intent on building and has now decided he will again now that he is a "non terrorist state".
This has little to do with Sunni or Shia, but more to do with potential rivals to his dream. He has watched closely in the chess board what has worked and what has not worked. He deems his rivals as 4, since Saddam was eliminated.
1. The Israeli state which can now be chewed up by terrorist Philistine neo Syrians.
2. The Saudi Jordan axis which he believes can be toppled once a shooting war starts by al Qaeda.
3. Iran which he believes can be destroyed by America.
4. Egypt which he believes can be toppled from inside by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Syria is not deemed worthy as Assad is weak and the Israeli state or Europe will vaporize Damascus when Assad fires off his biological weapons.
In Ghadaffi's mind, this means he can "effect the grande vision" of Muslim dreams and pick up the pieces to form his Caliph when all others are destroyed.
In the strangest of psychopathies, his son is "pardon the French" "dating" a Jewish actress in the fullest Biblical form of knowing her as a Ghadaffi family act of doing to her what they want to accomplish to the Israeli state. This "tradition" harkens back to Muhammed teaching of the victor getting the spoils and that meant sexing up the women as part of the fun.
Ghadaffi has had jealousy, but his issues are not Islam related only Islam excuse to exploit fissures. He is a racist in the highest form as he deems his "African" which is a European hybrid of displaced Middle Eastern Phoenicians breeding captured white European slaves is superior to the Egyptian and Middle East Arab, Assyrian, Ishmaelite and Persian Mede. Ghadaffi is the well bred French in mind compared to the French distate for the Turk.
The parlors might be well educated but all of these peoples are where racism is born.
Ghadaffi is a very dynamic persona, but his son is twice the bugger the old man is in drive though he lacks his presence.
What to expect from this is simple:
Ghadaffi will revamp his military with sophisticated weaponry out of Russia as the Middle East blows up.
He will in the chaos of American evacuation and peace accords start making thrusts at Europe again starting at Italy. This is probably 3 to 7 years down the road, but when it heats up it will not be British sailors being kidnapped in the game but actual British royals.
Ghadaffi is African minded. European centric in malevolence and Islamic cloaked like secular Saddam was for the equivalent of the Holy Roman Pope which they seek to emulate for western understanding.
Khadaffi is more dangerous than bin Laden, Zawahiri, Assad and Iran combined. He will prove it in the future when the pikers are removed and he is left odd man out and even tyrant in.
Lame Cherry:
Exactly right, and the fissures are great in N Africa. From Morocco the Sahrawi of Western Sahara have been displaced, and are living in refugee camps, and would love nothing more than to strike back at Morocco. The same with the Berbers in N Africa, who have been treated like second class citizens. The new oil fields in Algeria/Morocco are a great incentive for Mo Q as well.
Mali and Mauritania are ripe for the picking, as well as Algeria and Tunisia, to a lesser extent. So Mo Q may have a better chance to turn all of N Africa into an alliance/Caliphate under his control. We need to pay attention to North Africa before it spins out of control, if it hasn't already.
Khadaffi is more dangerous than bin Laden, Zawahiri, Assad and Iran combined
Kadaffi is but a man an old one at that, who inspires only himself, and when he suffles off to the dark side, he leaves only a shell of a country.
I wonder how many N African AMazigh, form Kabyles and Rifs to the North, to Altas and Saharan Amazigh to the south, were actually getting their hopes up that Gaddafi would appeal to his Amazigh identity and become a voice for them. The resentment they have already had toward Arab Islamics has no doubt intensified, and it's definitely time for us to encourage them to make more demands for their most basic of rights, just like we need to be doing in Darfur.
Granted, it is not realistic that doing so will result in all Amazigh suddenly declaring themselves apaostates. But some will, to become agonistics, pagans and Christians, and the rest will at least feel entitles to become more critical of fundamental islamic practices and lose what little loyalty they had to the concept of the islamic umma, just like in Darfur or among Persian activists in Iran or among any black africans living among islamic arabs or Sindhis or Baloch or even those Indian, Balgadeshi or Indonesian muslim workers being severely abused in Arab states. And of course, to some extent, the Kurds.
There may be mor ethan a billion muslims, technically speaking, but we definitely do not have to treat them universally as potentila enemies and harbringers of the caliphate. Our options for stopping that clearly are numerous.
Ummm...ya misspelled "gory".
It's "dreams of GORY"
;-)