Libya: Colonel Gaddafi’s last stand?
Off economics today, but here is my take on the remarkable Gaddafi speech.
Dangerous, understandably paranoid, utterly divorced from his countrymen’s enveloping revolt…but still utterly vain.
It was what might be a last stand for Colonel Gaddafi, at the Bab al Azezia – the very spot where the US sent fighter jets to kill him in 1986 preserved as it was then. Then, he was in a bunker while his daughter died. Today, 25 years on, no let up in the defiance, this time of his own people. 
“If I was the President I would throw my resignation in your faces. In the faces of these insects. But I don’t have a position. I have nothing but my gun and I will fight to the last drop of my blood with the Libyan people behind me. Get out of your homes and attack the rats in their dens,” he said.
A seemingly massed crowd was greeting him, even kissing pictures of him. The caption read “live” except this was clearly pre-recorded, faked. The actual crowd was rather sparse. The Colonel using every trick in the book to prolong his 41-year rule. An offer of more consultative people’s committees, yes, but threats and intimidation never far away.
“I will not leave my grandfather’s remains here – I will die with him as a martyr at the end,” he said.
He rambled incoherently, blaming drug-addled teenagers, al-Qaeda, foreign imperialists, quoting from the pre-revolutionary legal code, the code that he overturned, not his own Green Book of philosophy. He listed the crimes that would then have commanded the death penalty, such as acting against the military and the constitution, culminating in this sinister threat: “It will start from tonight and tomorrow. I haven’t given the order to use shooting yet, when the order to use force comes we will be ready. After that everything will be burnt.”
So right now Colonel Gaddafi thinks he is holding back. And this is what that looks like: foreign militia paid by his regime, continued to roam the Libyan capital. Eyewitnesses reported that they were French-speaking from Chad and Niger. In unverified footage ambulances too were apparently under fire, footage of bodies consistent with heavy artillery attacks on civilians was too distressing to show.
An eyewitness in Tripoli said: “If you go outside you will get shot at. The mercenaries shoot to kill. They will shoot anything moving. They will shoot you – they shoot the head. The colour of the bullets – my brother told me – the colour of the bullets is red.”
Eyewitnesses on the ground report the use of Libyan air force helicopters and military jets against their own country – Gaddafi’s own people. Two jets did land in Malta yesterday refusing to take part. Yet the Libyan airforce has ten more of the French-made Mirages. The Airforce is run by Gaddafi’s close knit Al Ghadadifah tribe and appears to be being used against the many renegade army units. Sources in Libya said there may be a face off tonight.
The Colonel, apparently on his last stand, signing off warning the world that Libya could turn into Afghanistan and warning his people that HE was the revolutionary.