Just How Bad is Colonel Kadafi?

I was living in Missoula, Montana in the summer of 2002. The U. S. was ratcheting up the war of words against Iraq. The American military was preparing for war there (note the active verb) and the American public was being prepared (note the passive verb) for war there. The First Presbyterian Church of Missoula held a series of midweek lectures that summer (lectures with discussion, it turned out) and one of the lectures had to do with this increasing bellicosity toward Iraq. The church membership was mostly conservative but some of its members were faculty at the University of Montana and they were mostly liberal.

I was there for the lecture on Iraq. It was given by a faculty member whose name I have forgotten, but I will never forget his pitch to the congregation. He was warning against the impending invasion of Iraq in the strongest terms. He was warning a gathering of his friends, nearly all of whom thought that removing Saddam Hussein, that “Hitler of the Middle East,” was our duty. The speaker made a good case against the war, but it was a pretty standard case. I could have made it, myself. But he got a hearing for his point, which I would not have been able to do, by talking about all the nights he and a lot of his fellow members stayed after meetings to finish washing up the dishes. He apologized to another section of the congregation whom he addressed as “my fishing buddies,” for the contentious nature of the argument he was making. He was wonderful. I understood why he was so well received in a church that had no ears at all for his message.

Afterwards, I had a conversation with an old man with a very heavy German accent. I am going to try to represent the accent in the way I spell his words because I want you to be able to “hear” what I heard. The old man said, “I know vere ziss iss goink. I haff heard all ziss before.”

My blood ran cold. I knew he had heard it from Hermann Goering in the 1930s. He heard it over loudspeakers, and all the radio stations, and saw it on the “newsreels” in the theaters. This is the Goering who said:

“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

This week, I have been feeling a little bit like that old German man. Muammar el-Qaddafi is getting more reprehensible by the day, following the path by which Sadaam Hussein got more deplorable by the day. For people who pay any attention at all to public affairs and who are old enough to remember the run-up to the Iraq War, this has got to sound familiar. We may be excused for feeling, “I haff heard all ziss before.”

So just how bad is Kadafi? We can’t know, of course, so I have another way of approaching the question. How bad do we need him to be? I think someone who knows more of the facts on the ground in Libya and on the proper floor of the Pentagon could work out a correspondence that would help us. I’m thinking of something like this.

1a. Kadafi is a pompous hypocrite.
1b. We are trying to draw that attention of potential allies to the need for some action against Libya.

2a. Kadafi is terrorist.
2b. We have begun efforts to isolate him diplomatically and economically

3a. Kadafi has unleashed the power of a brutal regime against his own people.
3b. We have decided to neutralize his air defenses and to ground or destroy his air force.

4a. Kadafi is a clear and present danger to everyone and has a stock of mustard gas that he will unleash on anyone he deems an enemy.
4b. We are about to begin bombing civilian targets in Tripoli and are making “surgical strikes” against buildings where Kadafi or his family might be hiding.

We could go on, of course. I am not saying that any particular charge about Kadafi is untrue. I don’t really know. My point is that if they are true, they were always true—he took over in 1969, when my 50 year-old daughter was not yet 10—and the information we can glean from which ones are trotted out is best treated as the information that will justify whatever we are preparing to do next.

I know that’s cynical and it may not be fair, but I haff heard all ziss before and I am deeply uncomfortable.

Footnotes:
1. I haven’t made a study of this, but my guess is that the spelling of his name is going to get stranger and more foreign-looking by the day. Imagine a time when we referred to him as “Uncle Mo-Mo” in the way we were taught to refer to “Uncle Joe” Stalin after the U.S.S.R. became our ally in World War II. He could then become “Colonel Kadafi,” which isn’t that bad since there are U. S. colonels as well. And maybe after a few references to that title, it might just be “the Colonel,” to call up the notion of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then we could go to the whole name, Moamar Kadafi—the pronunciations would vary, I am sure from NPR to Fox News—and get, eventually, to the form I saw in the New York Times today, Moamar el-Qadaffi. Notice the –el (strange and foreign-sounding) and the substitution of Q for K as the first consonant. Short of “Adolf el-Qadafi,” I don’t know where else there is for us to go.

2 Should it become necessary, we can always begin referring to Libya by its official name, “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”