wmldswlxh's blog: "wmldswlxh"

Moammar Gadhafi's penchant for extravagant uniforms, gold regalia and Bedouin tents provided a theatrical backdrop for four decades of harsh repression at home and a foreign policy that made him a bete noire of the West. On Tuesday night, those props were smashed, pilfered and paraded in mockery when rebels stormed his fortified compound. One man wore the familiar braided hat he said he found in his house. The tent where he received foreign dignitaries was set ablaze. The decapitated golden head of his statue was trampled. Gadhafi, who has been fighting a rebellion for six months, was nowhere to be seen. In tandem with his eccentricity, Gadhafi had a charisma which won him support among many ordinary Libyans. His readiness to take on Western powers and Israel, air yeezy both with rhetoric and action, earned him a certain cachet with some in other Arab states who felt their own leaders were too supine. While leaders of neighboring Arab states folded quickly in the face of popular uprisings, Gadhafi had put up a bloody six-month fight, taking on NATO as well as local insurgents who quickly seized half the country. For most of his 42-year rule, he held a prominent position in the West's gallery of international rogues, while maintaining tight control at home by eliminating dissidents and refusing to anoint a successor. Gadhafi effected a successful rapprochement with the West by renouncing his weapons of mass destruction program in return for an end to sanctions. But he could not avoid the tide of popular revolution sweeping through the Arab world. The Libyan leader, his son and his spy chief are wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for planning the violent suppression of the uprising. As his oil-producing North African desert country descended into civil war, Gadhafi's military responded with the deadly force that he had never been afraid to use, despite the showman image that captivated many. When the insurgency began in mid-February, protesters were gunned down in their hundreds. As his troops advanced on Benghazi he famously warned rebels there would be "no mercy, no pity." They would be hunted down "alley by alley, house by house, room by room." Those words may have been his undoing. Days later the United Nations passed a resolution clearing the way for a NATO air campaign that knocked out his air force, tanks and heavy guns.Raids also targeted his own headquarters in Tripoli. One raid killed his youngest son and three grandchildren. It was not the first time that the West had killed a Gadhafi family member. President Ronald Reagan called Gadhafi a "mad dog" and sent warplanes to bomb his Bab al-Aziziyah compound in 1986, after the bombing of a West Berlin discotheque he blamed on Libyan agents. One of the 60 people killed was Gadhafi's adopted daughter. Gadhafi used the Tripoli building bombed in the raid, left unprepared for 25 years, to deliver one of his first defiant speeches of the war, standing beside a memorial in the shape of a giant metal fist crushing an American warplane.