Betrayal by insiders and regime collapse

(Conclusion)

FORCES LOYAL to Col. Moammar Gadhafi are locked in a fierce battle with rebel forces for the control of Port Brega, an oil export terminal 800 kilometers east of Tripoli, underscoring his determination not to be toppled in the same way leaders of Egypt and Tunisia crumbled after their armies abandoned them.

The battle for Port Brega is shaping up to be a critical turning point in the two-week uprising against Gadhafi’s 41-year dictatorship. Rebel forces repelled on Wednesday a counter-offensive by regime loyalists in eastern Libya, spearheaded by a militia convoy of trucks mounted with antiaircraft guns. Port Brega is a key oil facility and hosts an airfield that was taken by rebel forces last month and is a rebel stronghold in Benghazi in the eastern portion of Libya, now controlled by the rump administration, the National Libyan Council, set up by senior officials and army units that had defected from the Gadhafi regime.

Witnesses said government forces were backed by air power. So important was the port to Gadhafi that he warned on national television that “we will enter a bloody war and thousands and thousands of Libyans will die if the United States or Nato enters.” He added: “We are ready to hand out weapons to a million, or two million or three million, and another Vietnam will begin.”

Some Middle East experts have raised questions about military loyalty to the regime as the decisive factor in the outcome of the revolution. This issue is relevant to the 1986 People Power Revolution in the Philippines, where a revolt by a minor segment of the Armed Forces provided the spark that caused the shift of military loyalty to the dissident group.

In an article that was published on Feb. 14 by BBC News, Dr. Mark Almond, a visiting professor in international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, raised this issue. In the article titled, “How Revolutions Happen: Patterns from Iran to Egypt,” Almond wrote:

“Revolutions can be short and bloody, or slow and peaceful. Each is different, though there are recurring patterns, including some that were on show in Egypt.

“Trotsky once remarked that if poverty was the cause of revolutions, there would be revolutions all the time because most of the people in the world were poor. What is needed to turn a million people’s discontent into a crowd on the streets is a spark to electrify them…

“Violent death has been the most common catalyst for radicalizing discontent in the revolutions of the last 30 years. Sometimes the spark is grisly, like the mass incineration of hundreds in an Iranian cinema in 1978 blamed on the Shah’s secret police. Sometimes the desperate act of suicide by a single inflammatory protester like the vegetable salesman Mohammed Buoazizi in Tunisia, in December 2010, catches the imagination of a country.

“What collapses a regime is when insiders turn against it. So long as police, army, senior officials think they have more to lose by revolution than by defending a regime, then even mass protests can be defined and crushed. Remember Tiananmen Square. But if insiders and the men with guns begin to question the wisdom of backing a regime—or can be bought off—then it implodes quickly.

“Tunisia’s Ben Ali decided to flee when his generals told him they would not shoot into the crowds. In Romania, in December 1989, Ceausescu lived to see the general he relied on to crush the protesters become the chief judge at his trial on Christmas Day.

“The United States has repeatedly pressed its authoritarian allies to compromise and then, once they started on that slippery slope, to resign. (Remember when Sen. Paul Laxalt, on behalf of President Ronald Reagan, told the crumbling Marcos regime, under siege from the people power led by Corazon Aquino in 1986 to ‘cut and cut clean’).”

In a report on Feb. 19, the BBC ran a story on the role played by the Egyptian army in forcing President Hosni Mubarak to step down. The moment the president deployed the army on Jan. 18 to deal with the protesters, “it became obvious to everyone that the soldiers would hold the key to his survival,” the report said.

At some points in the protest, “the army showed signs of impatience with the president’s handling of the crisis,” said the report, quoting a source within the army. “Mr. Mubarak was in very bad shape for the last three or four days of his rule. He was losing his command of things, he was not meeting any of his advisers and the military were getting uncomfortable. They were suggesting to him in a very polite way that it was in everyone’s interest to step down.”

On the ground in Tahrir Square the military, or at least parts of it, appear to have been telling the young protesters something else. A protester told the BBC, “We had some sources within the army saying that it was close.”

The protesters saw this as a sign that if they were to escalate their action further, Mubarak would be forced out. The protest movement did escalate, with the demonstrators proceeding to surround the state television headquarters, and marching on the presidential palace.

Another insider source told the BBC that it was the man at the very top of the army, Defense Minister Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who delivered the final blow. “My understanding is that Tantawi went and met the president and told him: ‘Mr. President, I think the time has come for you to make a patriotic decision. You’ve served this country for 30 years and the time has come for you to ask the vice president to announce that you are stepping down.”’

This is virtually what the Enrile-Ramos cabal, the closest martial law collaborators of Marcos, did to him.