As Gaddafi falls, the bells toll for Assad

"Zenga Zenga daar daar" was the subversive YouTube video made by Noy Alooshe sending up the bizarre Libyan dictator, Moamar Gaddafi. To the jiving sound of Shakira, Alooshe re-engineered the exaggerated body movements of a crazy Colonel Gaddafi media conference given in the early stages of the revolt against his brutal regime. More than four million people across the Middle East, mainly younger people, have now seen this send-up of Gaddafi. Its popularity indicated widespread contempt and a lack of fear for his regime.

And it is this lack of fear that has now proved fatal to another Arab dictator. Wherever Gaddafi is, dead or alive, in Zimbabwe or Algeria, his brutal regime is now at an end.

The mysterious Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) has all but defeated the man who controlled Libya for 42 years. Former US Ambassador to Morocco, Marc Ginsberg argues in his article 'Tripoli Minus Gaddafi' (The Huffington Post), that Libya in the post-Gaddafi era, with the 140-plus tribes that make up the nation, could easily slide into civil conflict. While the NTC are united in the push to oust Gaddafi, there is a real concern that the alliance between various factions will fray post-Gaddafi. After all the control of 3 per cent of the world's oil is at stake. The NTC consists of a combustible mixture of democrats from Libya's secular society tribes and hard-line Islamists who were based in Benghazi. Some of the Benghazi gang were once (and still may be) affiliated with members of the extremist Libyan Fighting Group - a franchise of Al Qaeda and its Algerian offshoot; the Armed Islamic Group (...)