Tightening the net around Gaddafi

The UN, the US and Europe have at last emerged from their lethargy, chastising Gaddafi with a set of somewhat tardy measures to pressure him. The unanimous Security Council resolution makes the Libyan dictator an international pariah, and includes a formal request to The Hague that he be tried as a war criminal. In its relative firmness, and in spite of the interminable delay in preparing it, this resolution constitutes a landmark for the slow-moving United Nations machinery.

These measures serve to tighten the net around the sanguinary despot, but they will be slow to take effective shape, while some can have only a symbolic value in a phase of the confrontation in which Gaddafi seems more decided to stand firm and die killing than to seek personal safety outside the country that he has terrorized and robbed for more than 40 years, and which has now risen up against him.

This external pressure now includes a military threat. Washington is bringing part of its Mediterranean fleet up to the Libyan coast, and Barack Obama and his European allies have begun to speak openly of military preparations, such as the imposition of a no-fly zone over the North African country, as a first option.

But these movements are quite another story, and the tempo of developments inside Libya and outside are drastically different. The naval deployment now underway is fundamentally aimed at intimidation, and also at a possible mass evacuation of civilians in a zone where a refugee crisis of huge proportions is fast developing. And the desirable closure of Libyan air space, to prevent Gaddafi from using his air force as a weapon of extermination — which, in the last resort, would mean shooting down his planes — is necessarily a slow and complex operation that demands the elimination of his anti-aircraft defenses as a prelude. Direct action in favor of the rebels would be pointless as long as the Libyans fighting against the tyrant do not constitute a single front of sufficient political and territorial homogeneity to make this feasible. It seems that an open land intervention, which could only be led by the Americans, has so far been ruled out in Libya — not only because it would require the unlikely unanimity of the Security Council, but also because both Europe and the United States have been haunted by unexorcised ghosts since the interventions in Iraq and Somalia.

Gaddafi is a political corpse, and it is more likely and much more desirable that it be the Libyans themselves, now gaining greater control of the situation day by day, who should be allowed to settle accounts with the epauletted colonel. The international net around him must be further tightened so as to shut off the military, political and economic inputs to one of the world's most contumacious despots.

But the tidal wave that has been shaking the vast Arab world derives its moral authority from its genuine roots in popular feeling, quite innocent of connections to spurious interfering interests, foreign or domestic. If it is his own compatriots who put an end to Gaddafi's lengthy experiment in rule by terror, the outcome will be far more positive for the new Libya.