I’m not sure it’s fair to call Colonel Gaddafi ‘paranoid’.
I’m not sure it’s fair to call Colonel Gaddafi ‘paranoid’. Not really. ‘Paranoid’ is what the King of Bahrain would be if he decided that western governments actually did care that he was rounding up protestors — and the doctors who treat them, and reporters, and students, and pretty much anybody else with the wrong sort of beard — and that these western governments were actually secretly planning to do something about it, despite giving every outward appearance of not giving a monkey’s arse. Say. Whereas Gaddafi just seems to think everybody is out to get him, and they are.
It’s a slow-motion disaster, Libya, isn’t it? First we reckoned that so-called Gaddafi loyalists were bound to rise up on the side of freedom whatever happened, and then they were bound to rise up on the side of freedom, but if only we could stop him from bombing things. Then, quite subtly, we shifted to believing that they were bound to rise up on the side of freedom if we started bombing things. Two and a half months on, we’ve run out of things to bomb and, by some accounts, bombs to do the bombing with, and so we’re going to start dropping smaller bombs, with helicopters, with greater precision. And still, an awful lot of those so-called bloody loyalists persist with their so-called bloody loyalty. ‘Nato?’ you want to say. ‘This whole bombing thing? Are we sure?’
I mean, sure, some are getting less loyal. The odd general defects, now and again, and we tell ourselves that finally the rising up on the side of freedom has happened. Only, really, they probably just don’t want to get bombed.
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