Gadhafi's Last Stand?

The violence in Libya this week is horrifying, but don't forget all the other crimes Gadhafi's committed during his bloody 40-year career as an international terrorist.

It’s hard to say anything about the Libyan people currently giving their lives to defeat Moammar Gadhafi’s murderous regime except to praise them for their "unfathomable bravery" which the Globe and Mail’s editors do with some eloquence today.

In the National Post, Matt Gurney says that the fact that Gadhafi is bombing civilians in his own capital is surely a sign that he is about to be deposed. “If the only thing standing between Gadhafi and the mobs is an air force required to bomb civilians, he should flee now,” he writes. “He’ll run out of ammunition and willing pilots before the crowds run out of angry young men.”

The Post’s Peter Goodspeed reminds those of us with short memories that Gadhafi’s atrocities are not limited to violence he’s unleashed against his own citizens. “To understand the horrors being visited on Libyans today, you just have to remember that, before Osama bin Laden, Col. Gaddafi was the world’s super terrorist,” he writes. Gadhafi’s record is indeed lengthy and terrifying: funding the PLO’s Black September Movement, hiring Carlos “the Jackal” to kidnap OPEC ministers, supporting the regimes of Uganda’s Idi Amin and Sierra Leone’s Charles Taylor, and the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. Suffice it to say, Libyans won’t be the only ones sleeping easier if Gadhafi goes.

Meanwhile in Egypt …

The Globe’s Lysiane Gagnon says the widespread use of the word “revolution” to describe what happened in Egypt is inaccurate, and that so far all we’ve seen is a revolt that achieved the limited goal of ousting Hosni Mubarak. Power remains where it has for decades, in the hands of the military, and only future events can determine if we’ve witnessed the beginning of an authentic revolution.

Although Egypt in 2011 has been compared to a lot of other countries, not many have made the analogy Sun Media’s Peter Worthington does when he predicts the nation could become the next Pakistan, where the army has traded power with civilian governments since 1947, to chaotic effect. Worthington could be right, but let’s hope not. One Pakistan is more than enough.