Muammar Gaddafi’s inner ‘I’

Jerrold M. Post

In March, a few days after Nato planes began bombing Libya, Muammar Gaddafi delivered a speech to the nation he had ruled for more than four decades.

“Great Libyan people,” he began, “you are now living through glorious hours.” In the speech, designed to rally Libyans with soaring rhetoric to stand against the rebellion and the foreign attacks, Gaddafi ended with a promise. “We will defeat them by any means.... We are ready for the fight, whether it will be a short or a long one.... We will be victorious in the end.”

The speech may well have been an attempt by Gaddafi to emulate Winston Churchill’s stirring World War II oratory during the London Blitz, when Britain endured 58 bombing raids designed to break the will of the British people. In a speech on June 18, 1940, Churchill exhorted his countrymen to “brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British empire and its commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

The charismatic British prime minister’s powerful addresses to the nation were widely credited with maintaining national resolve and bracing the people during their darkest hour. In another speech, he spoke eloquently about the “many, many long months of struggle and suffering” ahead and vowed “to wage war with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime.”

However much Gaddafi may have hoped to inspire his people as Churchill did, he had a problem that couldn’t be overcome: his narcissism. Ultimately, the speech descended into characteristic Gaddafi-speak — self-aggrandising and written mostly in the first-person singular.

“I say to you,” he intoned, “I’m not afraid, not afraid of the planes that cause so much destruction. I am defiant.... I do not fear storms that sweep the horizon, nor do I fear the planes that throw black destruction.”

Where Churchill placed himself squarely with the people, favouring the second person and talking of “we” and “us” and “our,” Gaddafi set himself far above other Libyans.

“I am resistant,” he said. “I am the creator of tomorrow, I am here, I am here, I am here.” The thought reflected Gaddafi’s sense that he is Libya. As he earlier put it, Libya is “my country. I created it, and I can destroy it.” Gaddafi has been characterised as insane, a madman, “the mad dog of the Middle East” (in President Reagan’s words). But for the most part he is crazy like a fox, a consummate survivor who is firmly in touch with reality and capable of shrewdly assessing his situation. Still, there are two kinds of situations in which he is highly likely to display faulty judgment and erratic behaviour: when he is winning, and when he is losing.