Destiny of the Dictators

As of now, most things in Libya are matters of speculation, because Gadhafi has gone to ground and can't be found, though the consensus seems to be that he is still in Libya and even in Tripoli.

When he does come up for air, Gaddy's first order of business should be to clarify the spelling of his name.  It seems to be at the mercy of anyone who happens so much as to mention him, and there's no doubt that the different ways must by now be in the hundreds.  The upside, though, is that none of those supercilious spelling czars can come stomping down on you hard for mispelling it.   And think of all the completely defeated spellcheckers in the world!

Angry Arab probably has the longest and most bizarre-looking version -- Qadhdhafi -- but as he is death on anybody who doesn't speak Arabic, he probably thinks his spelling is the only correct one.   I think, though, that he would catch short shrift with it in the western world, especially in the raucous, impatient  country in which he neverthless has unaccountably set up shop in apparent preference to anywhere in the Arab world: the U.S.

Meanwhile you have to wonder what people like Gadhafi and Assad of Syria are thinking.  Especially Assad.  For a while now he has been meeting the numerous protests of his countrymen by trying to mow them all down with gunfire.   The number of dead at his hands must be up in the thousands by now, yet the protestors still turn out every day in large numbers.  With all that blood on his hands and with no one in the outside world to approve of his actions, how can Assad think this can have any kind of a good ending for him, even if he should prevail and the protests finally subside?   What kind of a country would he be left with?   And has he been watching the outcome of his neighbor despot in Libya?
       The rebels have overrun Gadhafi's compound in Tripoli, and he has done what at least two other dictators of his stripe also did, though they did their thing on an even larger scale.   He has gone undeground, and now the hunt is on, and history says that most likely he will be pulled up into the air soon enough, like any ordinary bedraggled, scraggly mole.   In so doing he is following the example of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and of Germany's Adolph Shickelgruber -- not an illustrious pair for him to be following, either in their careers or in their endings -- and if he doesn't know that, someone should tell him.

You may remember that Saddam was pulled out of a hole in the ground out in the countryside and soon thereafter was hung.   And before that Gruber offed himself with cynaide pills, following which his underlings doused and burned his remains with many gallons of valuable gasoline, and the Russians never revealed what they did with whatever they found of him.

You would think that instead, if he followed his true god to the end, Gadhafi would come up out of there, shake himself off, and say, "Here I am, y'all, and the name if you don't mind is spelled such-and-such."   He has all the credentials he needs for that kind of quirkness and cheekiness, and it would at least be the honorable thing to do, and he might even live long enough to go to the wonderful country of Holland, there to spout off what he thought he was doing.   That would be far preferable to what he is doing now, which is sounding like that Iraqi minister who, in one of those two ventures when the U.S. rolled up Saddam, kept idiotically proclaiming the imminent crushing of those Mark Twain Christians, though they were the ones who were actually holding all four aces in the deck.