CMES is pleased to share the following draft article by Roger Owen and Judith Gurewich.
Libya’s Eccentric Leader: Dangerously Crazy, Pathologically Delusional – or What?
By Roger Owen in collaboration with Judith Gurewich
Libya’s Colonel Qaddafi has been in power for nearly forty-two years, making him the longest-serving Arab head of state. For most of this time he has been treated by the outside world as a kind of eccentric clown, amusing, annoying, childish, and perhaps more than a little crazy. Even the well-funded British/American public opinion campaign that kicked off with a discussion on world philosophy between Qaddafi and David Frost in 2007 appeared like nothing so much as an elaborate joke. Anything, it seems, to avoid taking him seriously. Anything to prevent a clear-headed analysis of his highly personalized often brutal regime and of the unusual psychological make-up of the man who runs it.
How to make amends? Two approaches seem potentially fruitful. One is to see Qaddafi’s regime as a particular example of the exercise of untrammeled personal power in an oil-rich state with very underdeveloped institutions. A second would be to try to understand how we might match the psychotic personality of the ruler with a system created by his family and close associates to give a semblance of cohesion to the leader’s own delusions, while allowing them a maximum of freedom in the pursuit of their own individual interests.
Both start from the place at which a young revolutionary aspired not just to lead the Arab world after the death of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser but also, when this proved impossible, to shake up Libya’s tiny population by creating a system of councils and committees designed to give them the impression that they were capable of managing their own government and their own political lives. Libya, as Qaddafi never tires of repeating, is a republic of the masses. Or, as he told a recent BBC interviewer, there is nothing for him to step down from: “I am not a president and the people love me.”
It is at this stage that the two approaches divide. Is Qaddafi simply a delusional megalomaniac, as many Libyans and most outsiders continue to believe? Or is there more to it than? Let us try to sketch out a possible answer.
Suppose that Qaddafi is a psychotic for whom, in order to avoid psychic collapse, the world has to be a closed entity, has to be entirely predictable. And suppose too that his associates, and then later his sons, sensing this need, first helped him design a system which reflected his necessary sense of his own omnipotence and then continued to pump up his own image of himself as the beneficent guide of a loving people who only needed a bit of encouragement from him—or what Qaddafi himself has called “incitement” to achieve great things? In functional terms this would have had the double effect of calming him down while allowing them to get on with their own business of running the country—not always with his knowledge—and of feathering their own nests.
Libya’s modern history provides ample evidence to support such a hypothesis without, of course, ever being able to pin it down. There is Qaddafi’s obvious need to seem to be in charge, to be in control. In day-to-day terms this leads him to operate without constraints, to treat the matter of government as something he can conduct without any consideration for the interests of others, for example, by keeping high officials waiting outside his tent for hours and hours while he entertains himself. Then there is the sense of omnipotence revealed by his declaration to Oriana Fallaci that he is the Gospel. After which, as she says, he became more and more agitated when he perceived how amazed she looked. Such is the extreme narcissism of the man. Such is his deep underlying fragility.
Meanwhile, as far as Libya’s relations with the rest of the world are concerned, Qaddafi has always tried to subvert organizations which he can’t control, like the Maghreb Union of North African States, while seeking fresh regions on which to try to impose his presence. Hence in 2010 he saw himself as the “King of Africa,” bringing African heads of state to Libya and posturing before them in “African” costumes of his own design with absurd-looking round little caps. For him, everything is understood literally, given his limited ability to create metaphors and systems of meaning.
How does such a man, and how does such a system, react to a real crisis when dangerously threatened by some of its people from within and a coalition of international forces from without?
Starting with Qaddafi himself, his response has been one of a sense of personal ‘betrayal’ by those western leaders, like Tony Bair, who had previously supported him. More importantly, he has sought to wipe out his Libyan opponents who, in his opinion, could not be motivated by anything other than drugs and outside agitators. For a man like him who lives in a binary system there can be neither acknowledgement nor toleration of dissent. It is either total power or total chaos. It is always either them or me.
For his family and associates the problem is much more difficult. Clearly, the old man has to be humored and placated while, covertly, they see ways to secure regime survival in spite of him and his antics. But how to do this in an atmosphere of secrecy and suspicion when, as each day’s news reveals, it is not clear what other influential members of the inner circle are doing? Or even, in all the confusion, where they actually are.
Hence, the apparent attractiveness for Qaddafi’s son, Saif, of a return to old paths and well-tried networks of communication, notably those which, historically, have connected Libya with London. But hence too the difficulty for them, as well as potential interlocutors like Britain’s David Cameron, to work out which of them is acting in good faith, which opportunistically, and which simply trying something on.
The language of political science, just as much as the language of journalism, has little nuance when it comes to describing third world leaders whose apparently irrational or, at times, homicidal behavior puts them at odds with Western interests and a Western world view. Those old enough to remember the early post-colonial period may recall hearing a Gamal Abdel Nasser branded as Hitler, a Jomo Kenyatta called a bloodthirsty savage, with countless others dismissed as simply deranged, delusional or, quite simply, out of their mind.
But in this case at least, Qaddafi’s apparently mad behavior can be shown to have its own meaning, its own inner logic. And we miss something enormously important if we fail to understand something that has been known and exploited by the coterie around him for decades.
Roger Owen, A.J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History, Harvard University
Judith Gurewich, Lacanian Analyst Practicing in Cambridge, Publisher of The Other Press