The strangest dictator: The odd world of Moammar Qaddafi.

Thirteen years ago this month, on October 20, 2011, Libyan dictator Moammar Al-Qaddafi (also spelled Gaddafi and Khadafy) was killed by rebels in the town of Sirte, in western Libya. This, the climactic act of the Libyan civil war, brought to an end 42 years of Qaddafi’s undisputed rule in that North African country, making his one of the longest reigns by a head of state in modern times. Qaddafi’s fascinating life is full of so many twists and turns that it would be impossible to profile it in a blog post. I’m indeed thinking about making a deep-dive video about Qaddafi on my YouTube channel, though whether I do so or not depends on if I can find a good biography of him that’s been written since 2011. If I do further research on him doubtless I will uncover many things that I don’t yet know about him and his long rule over Libya. But even a surface-level glance at this dictator’s life and career show that Qaddafi himself was a very strange and mysterious man, and the world he lived in was like none other inhabited by anyone on Earth.

Few people in the West know very much, or ever did, about Moammar Qaddafi. During the 1980s when President Ronald Reagan called him the “mad dog of the Middle East,” he was portrayed in the West mostly as a vaguely buffoonish character, a perhaps mentally unbalanced dictator who came as close as you can get to a real-life James Bond villain. The reality was much more complex. More than just a mad colonel who pranced about in silly uniforms, Qaddafi developed a bizarre and almost incoherent political philosophy and tried, with varying degrees of success, to rule Libya under it. Never burdened by modesty, Qaddafi also saw himself as something of a messiah not just in the Arab world, but across Africa and even globally. How he squared this messianic mission with sending out hit teams of terrorists to blow up nightclubs and 747s is something only he would have known.