ONE had only read in history books about Nero fiddling at his flute and singing with joy while Rome burnt. But here, in today’s Libya consumed by a crisis of epic proportions, one can see Muammar Qadhafi making merry of a television interview by western media and insisting that his people loved him and would die for him. Dying they are, indeed, but not for him, rather at his hands and those of his troops.

For once President Obama’s UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, who last week brazenly cast the Obama administration’s first veto in the UN Security Council to shield Israel against censure for its illegal settlement-building on Palestinian land, was right: Qadhafi is being “delusional.” Or is it a typical case of an attention-seeking Qadhafi strutting on the world stage in a manner that would compel all and sundry to take notice of him?

Qadhafi had seized power in 1969, at an age of 27, and was hailed as a new ‘star’ on the Arab firmament. He cut a dashing figure in the military uniform with his looks of a movie idol. Gamal Abdel Nasser of neighbouring Egypt was his role-model, or so the saying goes. But within a year of Qadhafi’s coup, Nasser passed away. Qadhafi thought he was a natural successor to his Arab socialism and anti-western neo-imperialism. So he set about the task of putting his imprimatur on his claim that he was the logical successor to Nasser.

But Nasser was anything but shoddy or theatrical, while Qadhafi soon proved himself as being anything but serious or meaningful. The Libya he lorded over was a big country with few people — less than 3 million at that time — and huge mineral resources, topped by oil and gas.

He had the option to turn his country into a utopia of blissful plenty for his people. But he didn’t mind letting his bemused citizens wallow in poverty and misery while he lavished Libya’s billions on fuelling the IRA uprising against Britain in Northern Ireland, and arming the Moro Liberation Front, in southern Philippines, resisting Manila’s writ in their patch of land.

What was it if not an act of sheer madness for him to blow the Pan Am flight in the sky, over Lockerbie in Scotland in 1987, and then, years later, not only accept responsibility for it but also pay billions in compensations to the families of the victims of his insanity? He made each one of the western recipient of his largesse a millionaire while Libyans grovelled for food handouts.

As he entrenched himself into absolute power with the passage of years, he became proportionately absurd and inane. Divorced from reality, he started living in a macabre cocoon of his make-believe world, and thought that was the real world.

I’ll never forget the weird experience of waiting for him, in the company of my fellow ambassadors, at the Algiers airport. Protocol demanded our presence there because ‘Brother Qadhafi’ was coming on a state visit to Algeria. We waited for hours cooling our heels in the VIP Lounge before a Libyan special plane landed. We all rushed to the tarmac. But Qadhafi wasn’t there; only a handful of flunkies disembarked.

Half an hour later another such flight landed; we rushed again. This time a posse of smartly-attired damsels in military uniforms came out of the aircraft. We’re told they were the personal bodyguards of the ‘leader.’ We’re comforted by their dazzling sight and told that ‘Brother’ was going to be on the next airplane. Another hour later we’re informed, by the protocol, that Qadhafi would be arriving next morning but we didn’t need to turn up that early hour to greet him. Lucky break it was for us.

So he might still think the real world is how he perceives it, and not what six million Libyans, who have risen in arms against him, think or believe. They’re, in his demagogic rant, only worthless “rats” and “cockroaches.” A harrowing, maddening disconnect between the leader and his people is what lies at the heart of the present turmoil in the Arab world, from Morocco to Oman, from Libya to Saudi Arabia.

Most Arab leaders, if not all, are caught up in that haze of mental exhaustion and fatigue that lulls senses, and renders them incapable of listening to reason. That alone explains Qadhafi, in dire straits according to the rest of the world, believing as a matter of conviction that his people still love and venerate him, while they are beseeching the world to help them get rid of this inanity styling himself as their patriarch and redeemer.

Some of these Arab rulers are very intelligent people like, for instance, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and the Amir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmed, whom I’ve known so well for so many years. Both have quickly announced lavish packages of socio-economic sweeteners with the clear intent to pre-empt an uprising of the kind sweeping the Arab spectrum in varying degrees of intensity and force.

These sweeteners may well work for some but only up to a point, as they’ve, with obvious success, up until now, in the oil-wealthy and sparsely populated emirates and kingdoms of the Gulf. But these packages alone may no longer be enough to keep their peoples in tow behind the rulers’ whims and fancies.

They’ll not work because bread-and-butter alone is no longer the only call of the Arab mainstream. The restive Arab youth, from Algeria to Iraq, is now demanding his piece of those universal values of freedoms of choice, voice and expression that have been denied to him for so long.

Another reference to my personal book of experiences gained from years of exposure to the Arab world becomes essential at this stage. There was this charming Saudi colleague of mine, in an Arab capital. He was witty, sharp and intelligent; a very suave and sophisticated man, indeed. He’d argue with me, for hours at end, whenever I nudged him on the denial of basic human freedoms in the Arab world that his countrymen would never agitate for those freedoms because the system catered so well to their mundane needs. He’d get all worked up when I insisted that they would still demand those rights, one day, with or without their bellies full and say, as his piece de resistance, that such a moment wouldn’t arrive in his or my lifetime.

I feel so sorry for that departed mate of mine. He was right about himself: that moment didn’t arrive in his lifetime, but it has arrived in mine.

The Arab tribal culture has a lot to do with this congenital antipathy of the ruling elite to the people’s instinctive hankering for basic human freedoms. The tribal cultural ethos anchors on the patriarch or the chieftain being the font of all wisdom and endowed with the sole right to decide what’s good or bad for his tribe.

The late Saddam Hussein insisted on this patriarchal prerogative in his famous interview with Diane Swayer, of NBC, recorded on the heels of his invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. Qadhafi has echoed the same morbid thought in his interview with Christiane Amanpour of ABC, among others, in Tripoli in the wake of much of his country lost to those demanding the freedoms he has usurped so callously over his years in power.

Qadhafi is beleaguered, there’s no gainsaying that. In his desperation, he sank so low as to declare his people being slaves to Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda. In his befogged imagination, he wanted to touch sensitive chords in the West in his favour by conjuring up the chimera of Al Qaeda in Libya. It just shows how totally disconnected from reality he still is in the throes of a massive convulsion.

Qadhafi would go the way he had come to power: by force, because he refuses to contemplate taking the course of the deposed Tunisian and Egyptian leaders. It’s hard to say, given his lack of mental balance, if he’s conscious of it that in the process of defying the Libyan people’s collective call for him to go, Qadhafi is opening the door for those very neo-imperialist powers to help liberate his people that he ostensibly resisted with such élan all through his years in power.

But the American foot-dragging on the Libyan people’s call to shield them against Qadhafi’s punishing air power is a blessing in disguise to him. Hillary Clinton waxed eloquent, initially, on US lending a helping hand to the Libyans arrayed against Qadhafi’s tyranny. But she has quickly changed her tune and tone. Defence Secretary Robert Gates is obfuscating with excuses of not having enough logistics to enforce a ‘no-fly’ zone over the Libyan air space.

They did exactly the same thing to the Iraqis of southern Iraq following the first Gulf War of 1991. In what should go down in history as a case of monumental and treacherous double-crossing of the Iraqi Shias, Bush Sr., then president, coaxed them to rise in revolt against Saddam but also allowed Saddam to use his gun-ships against them. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Shias were butchered in the process.

That’s what they are waiting Qadhafi to do to the Libyans who have risen against him. Nicholas Burns, State Department’s top mandarin under George W. Bush, said it in so many words in his interview at Al Jazeera Television. He said the situation was still not that critical to warrant an international response to the Libyan people’s call for help.

In other words, the US and ‘allies’ would wait until thousands have been massacred by Qadhafi’s loyalist troops before taking any action against him. Arab blood is cheap, and has been so for a century since the western imperialists took the European Zionists under their wings and then conspired to dismember the Ottoman Empire to enslave the Arabs.

To date — and more so in the wake of the Arab awakening — US policy in the region is two-pronged: check Iran, and make sure Israel remains unchecked and unchallenged. Last week’s veto at the UN exposed this strategy in crystal clarity.

So US stalling is encouraging Qadhafi to indulge in his blood-lust with virtual impunity. And the predator in him is quite capable of doing to the Libyans what Stalin did to the Chechens and others in the Soviet Union in WWII. Qadhafi is a Stalinist psychopath in any case.

The writer is a former ambassador. K_K_ghori@yahoo.com