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The Witch Doctor President and Other Horrific Rulers

Khalid Elhassan December 25, 2019 32 min

22. The Batty Bedouin

Born into a poor Bedouin family, Muammar Gaddafi (1942 – 2011) rose to colonel in the Libyan army, before staging a coup and seizing power in 1969. He then made himself dictator, styling himself “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamihirya”. Gaddafi headed a blood-thirsty and insanely erratic regime that terrorized, cowed, and bewildered his countrymen for 42 years, until they finally had enough, and overthrew and killed him in 2011.

Called the “the mad dog of the Middle East” by Ronald Reagan, just before sending jets to bomb him, Gaddafi’s reign was marked by dramatic twists and turns. He morphed from socialism to Islamic fundamentalism; from sponsorship of terrorism to avid cooperation in the Global War on Terror; and from an Arab nationalist to deriding Arabs and turning to African nationalism instead.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.