Why is Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi only a colonel?
He’s been the leader of Libya for a very long time. You’d think he’d be general or emperor by now.
What’s up?
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20 Answers
He chooses to be a colonel. Who is going to argue with him?
Gaddafi says all sorts of crazy sh!t. He might as well call himself Colonel Nutjub.
For some reason, he chose colonel and is sticking to it.
BTW @hawaii_jake if you want the “real” answer, it is apparently due to the fact that Gaddafi made it law that no one in Libya can be higher than a colonel.
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It’s part of his whole “for the people” persona. Not promoting himself was a way of showing that he’s not an elitist, sort of like how he insists he is not actually in charge of the country and Libya belongs to all the people.
It alliterates better in English?
Because he already outranks the only other military leader he admires and emulates, Corporal Adolph Hitler.
Man, you just godwinned this discussion.
Qaddafi is a horrible human being, but he isn’t comparable to Hitler. He hasn’t committed genocide, or even advocated it.
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@Qingu No, we stopped him just before he was able to do so. There are almost 700,000 people in Benghazi and about 1.5 million in the Eastern half of the country. Qaddafi’s tanks and artillery were on the outskirts of Benghazi when we stopped them from the air.
Qaddafi has held public executions of over 1,000 people in a single day. In this case, he said the people in Eastern Libya were rats and germs and he was going to send his troops door to door to exterminate them. Now maybe he didn’t really mean that. Maybe he was going to just hand out candy bars to them from his tanks. But I think it was reasonable, given his past behavior, to take him at his word.
Bear in mind that Libya is a tribal country with tribal last names. It is possible to look at any citizen’s papers and tell immediately which part of the country they come from, and what tribe. It’s quite likely that Qaddafi would have gone after all the members of all the tribes he felt were against him.
It’s part of the supposed tribal, anarchistic nature of Libya. Just as Americans are as one kings and emperors, theoretically, one shouldn’t be able to be more than a coronel. In practice it sounds like one has to sit down and shut up.
Judging from his fancy uniforms, you would think he would be at the very least a prince or a king of something!
Killing 1,000 people is not equivalent to genocide. Killing all active and suspected rebels in a city isn’t even the same as genocide.
Genocide is the wholesale extermination of an ethnic group, including innocent civilians, women, and children.
Also, Qadaffi had already conquered rebel held cities and there were no genocides or even mass exterminations.
@Qingu International Law states:
…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
– Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II
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Had the UN not stepped in, I do not think there would be a need to even clarify this.
@Qingu We have no idea how many civilians have died in cities Qaddafi’s troops retook. He doesn’t allow free access to find out. All press visits are managed and what the press sees is staged for them. And it is quite possible he planned to totally crush any military opposition by those objecting to his dictatorship before beginning mass exterminations. Again, I do not think, given his past behavior, that it would have been the humanitarian thing to do to wait till he exterminated some predetermined number of people before preventing a likely genocide. In a country like Libya where your driver’s license immediately says what tribe you belong to, tribal extermination—genocide—was a very likely end game if Qaddafi had not been stopped.
Okay. Many governments facing rebellions have engaged in the exact same behavior that Qaddafi was trying to do in Benghazi (and has probably done in other cities). Disappearances, wholesale intimidation, indiscriminate detention and killing of suspected rebels.
Our special forces are currently doing this in Afghanistan. We track down suspected insurgents, surround their houses at night, and “capture or kill” them. We find them in their closets. (Hopefully we use much more restraint and professionalism than the Sandanistas did, but the idea is exactly the same).
This behavior is atrocious, and a strong argument can be made that we should have prevented.
But it’s not genocide. For starters, i haven’t seen evidence he’s targeted all Benghazis, including women and children. He is also facing an armed rebellion. When people are in wars, they tend to do horrible things to rival groups to win the wars. This is not the same as ethnic cleansing or genocide.
I am not defending Qaddafi’s behavior. I think he should hang. But I also think the word “genocide” has a specific meaning, and it shouldn’t be thrown around willy-nilly.
@Qingu I understand the meaning of the word, “genocide.” What Qaddafi has done to date doesn’t rise to that. What he said he was going to do did. And he had made the moves necessary tocarry out that threat. Rather than wait to see ig genocide actually occurs before doing anything, I think it was sensible to intervene and prevent that possibility.
Going house to house to find and probably kill suspected rebels isn’t genocide either, though.
I also agree it was “sensible” to intervene in the way we did, though I’m not sure if it more sensible than not intervening.
@Qingu Let’s remember that these “rebels” were citizens the went into the streets in peaceful demonstration for freedom until they started getting shot. And let’s remember that going door to door will likely include purging by tribal lines, not any evidence that a particular person has borne arms against the government.
Not having a crystal ball, I can’t prove that the final outcome make Libya a better place than it’s been for the last 40 years under Qaddafi. But I can speculate that the budding freedom in the Middle East would have suffered a death blow had Qaddafi proved to other Middle Eastern despots that the way to cling to power is to use whatever level of brutality is required.
Do you ever listen to yourself you f#$ing idiot?
Going house to house to find and probably kill suspected rebels isn’t genocide either, though.
I also agree it was “sensible” to intervene in the way we did, though I’m not sure if it more sensible than not intervening.
I just copy/pasted what you wrote. Untouched. No wonder @ETpro gave up trying to explain things to you a$$hole.
I also agree it was “sensible” to intervene in the way we did, though I’m not sure if it more sensible than not intervening. So is it sensible or not?
Yeah, don’t answer. You and your friend Kaddafi deserve each other. Assad is next.
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