Libya

A friend wrote during the night to say that he had seen Seif al-Qaddafi’s speech and found it rambling, incoherent, and panicked. Now I find that the NEW YORK TIMES ACCOUNT agrees: “In a rambling, disjointed address delivered at about 1 a.m. on Monday, the son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, played down the uprising sweeping the country…”

This is a real sign of panic. Seif al-Qaddafi came to speak here in Cairo last spring and I thought he was quite a polished speaker, and he also came off as a surprisingly decent guy. But I guess that was just the “good cop” side of the family we were seeing last spring; I’m not cutting him another inch of slack after the despicable way they’ve responded to the protests. [ADDENDUM: And if I’d done more background research before his visit to Cairo last year, I’d have learned that he’s not a decent guy at all. His remarks about the Lockerbie case were in fact quite horrible.]

Until now I had thought the capital was still under government control, but now I read this in the TImes:

“Witnesses in Tripoli interviewed by telephone on Sunday night said protesters were converging on the capital’s central Green Square and clashing with heavily armed riot police. Young men armed themselves with chains around their knuckles, steel pipes and machetes. The police had retreated from some neighborhoods, and protesters were seen armed with police batons, helmets and rifles commandeered from riot squads. The protesters set Dumpsters on fire, blocking roads in some neighborhoods. In the early evening the sound and smells of gunfire hung over the central city, and by midnight looting had begun. ‘The state has disappeared from the streets,’ said Mansour Abu Shenaf, a writer living in Tripoli. ‘and the people, the youth, have practically taken over.'”

When reflecting on the Colonel in the past, I usually focused on his eccentricities, as in the Wikileaks report that when asked to supply a photo for his visa to travel to the U.N., he told the American government simply to take a photo of any of his many billboards in Tripoli and shrink the photo down themselves.

But at the moment I’m not amused by the eccentricities. The nature of the crackdown was vile, and if he pays with his life in this situation I won’t have the least bit of sympathy.

Go, Libya:

“In Benghazi, the second-largest city and the starting point of the revolt, three witnesses said that special military forces called in as reinforcements had instead helped the protesters take over the local army barracks. ‘The gunshots you hear are the gunshots of celebration,’ said Abdel Latif al-Hadi, a 54-year-old Benghazi resident whose five sons were out protesting.”

The army barracks in Benghazi is under protestor control, amazingly. And with Tripoli now coming apart, it seems possible that Qaddafi might actually fall.

The problem seems to be tribalism within the military, rendering it a less credible takeover force than in Tunisia or Egypt.