New York- I appear in this week’s episode of Real Dictators by Noiser Podcasts and hosted by Paul McGann about the latter period of Colonel Gaddafi’s rule. Here he rather pragmatically relinquishes his once cherished pariah status on the world stage and begins to reengage with Great Power politics from his perch in Triplotania. He felt threatened by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and other homegrown salafis who detested his crass, violently secular regime. Gaddafi felt he could conflate anti-regime sentiment at home with the wider terror wars that were consuming the global security polity during the early 2000s. He could at once further preserve his well calcified regime while hoping to enrich his government’s coffers via Libya’s then stalled energy sector However he had long since sown the seeds of his ultimate undoing that would take a decade and half to manifest in the notorious Abu Slim prison massacre.
