In international affairs Gaddafi's Third Way led him to some peculiar pathways. This included support for terrorism as a means of fighting his imperial enemies. He was denounced in Britain for his support for the Irish Republican Army and for the more obscure left-wing Workers' Revolutionary Party. This mentality in international relations naturally evoked the ire of successive Western leaders. That is until the 'War on Terror' gave them common cause with Gaddafi in fighting Islamic enemies. This, combined with the opportunity to make oil and gas deals, saw Western leaders reconciling their differences with Gaddafi, and scrambling to deal with him, he suddenly became a world statesman and businessman. The maverick Gaddafi became a man to be courted. This was just a few years ago! No wonder Gaddafi appeared bewildered when NATO began bombing.

The rulers of societies based on public property and socialist ideology have always faced the danger of losing their authority due to the corruption of power. If ruling parties or individuals in such states come to be ruled by self-serving kleptocratic elites, this often leads to explosive discontent. Repression is an unreliable ally when trying to silence this. The character of this discontent is commonly rooted in the lack of legitimacy of income and power disparities. Why should officials of a 'socialist state' live the life of capitalists or kings? Monarchies claim a divine right to wealth and splendour, capitalists claim that their enrichment is their reward for abstinence and investment, but what reasons were there for Gaddafi's ostentatious, his palaces, gold chairs, golden gun? His self-image seemed to be comically constructed out of the archetypal character playing 'the enemy' in a James Bond movie.

So herein lies the fundamental internal reason for the discontent with Gaddafi that expressed itself in the Benghazi uprising in the spring. Legitimate grounds for unrest do not automatically mean that the civil war that followed is a progressive war. The main forces leading the revolution were armed militias financed by businessmen and backed by NATO airplanes, which flew tens of thousands of sorties. The military operations on the ground were organized and supported by Western special-forces experts.

These forces are not in the least concerned with what will benefit the people of Libya. They are concerned with their own interests. The businessmen are keen to transfer the state economy to private hands, their NATO allies are keen to send their oil and gas businessmen to get part of the action as soon as possible.

Of course many hope that 'democracy and freedom' will represent some progress for the people of Libya, but the dominant forces of the revolution are those virulently backing a socio-economic counter-revolution. Revolutions often appear as festivals and joyfully express the hopes of a people, but the Arab spring entered a more dark and violent phase as the Libyan civil war, backed by NATO, broke out.

The hopes of the Arab and North African peoples will no doubt find some satisfaction from the final end of Gaddafi, and his victims will feel they have grounds for legitimate celebration. But how a regime falls and who makes it fall shapes the character to the new order. Sadly there seems little ground to expect fine fruit to grow from the ashes of Sirte.

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:

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