The violent demise of the Middle East’s longest-ruling leader — who came to office in September 1969, just a few months after Richard Nixon — stands well outside the mainstream of the region’s politics, but then Moammar Gaddafi always did.
Gaddafi (for the record, the correct spelling of his name is Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhāfi) began his rule at the tender age of 27, just as Pan-Arabist ideology was dying down; undeterred, long after others had given up on this fantasy, he remained a proponent of the notion of turning all Arabic countries into one gigantic whole. Eventually frustrated with Arabic-speakers, where the small population of Libya limited his influence, he turned south, where his outsize energy income gave him real clout in Africa.
