The Price of Delusion

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

BENGHAZI, LIBYA — Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi is a vain man. Like the other Arab dinosaurs he has his dyed hair, his designer shades, his spoiled children and his compound full of sycophants. He doesn’t want, one day, to be dragged from a rat hole like Saddam Hussein or hauled from a bunker like the Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo.

So what’s his calculation? Does he have one at all? Here in liberated eastern Libya, where the tricolor Qaddafi banished now flies over hundreds of miles of Mediterranean coastline, I had dinner with an official who’s met with the colonel several times and described him as coherent and articulate. Qaddafi is not mad.

But never underestimate the human capacity for delusion. Here’s a despot who’s managed at various times to pocket America and Europe with après-moi-le-déluge talk of the need for his rule, bought off several smaller African states, cocooned himself for more than four decades with fawning acolytes, murdered with impunity, sired with abandon, enriched himself beyond measure and — like any self-respecting modern tyrant — doled out the cell phone companies to his kids. Through all this he’s survived.

Qaddafi might have maneuvered himself into a gilded overseer’s role and gifted power to his bespectacled son Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the nice, educated boy who lost it when he realized — The horror! The horror! — that he might have to give up all his toys.

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