Blood and Forty Years
The cleric’s account was the one detail that wouldn’t leave. He described watching a tank drive directly into a car with two people inside and crush it—not as a tactical decision, not as crowd control, just as a statement. They hadn’t done anything to anyone, he said. The tank simply went through them.
That was Libya in February 2011. Muammar Gaddafi had been in power for forty-two years. Tunisia had already fallen, then Egypt—both within weeks, both on live television, both resolving into something that felt, for a moment, like genuine possibility. The Arab Spring was still new enough that the phrase hadn’t soured yet. Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen: people in the streets, governments visibly frightened. And then Libya, where the calculus was entirely different.
Gaddafi’s son Khamis was commanding an elite unit doing the killing. Mercenaries had been flown in. Helicopters were firing on crowds from the air. The phone lines went first, then mobile networks, then internet access—the same sequence every time, as if there’s a manual somewhere that every threatened autocrat consults. Libya blamed Tunisia, Israel, Sudan, all conspiring together. The script writes itself when you’ve been in power long enough to believe your own citizens are a foreign plot.
What made it through the blackout was fragmentary: shaky footage shot on mobile phones, secondhand accounts, a number—more than two hundred dead—that felt both specific and impossible to verify. Some cities were reportedly in rebel hands already. Everything was moving faster than anyone could track.
Watching it from a distance, through screens and translated reports, the emotion wasn’t solidarity exactly. It was something quieter and less flattering—the awareness of having a front-row seat to something that mattered, with no ability to affect anything. Tunisia had shown the optimistic version. Libya was showing the other one: a man who had been in power so long that his subjects had become, in his mind, something closer to vermin. You don’t negotiate with vermin. You crush it, along with whoever happens to be in the car.
Whether what came after would be worth what was being spent on those streets wasn’t knowable in February 2011. That uncertainty—not the hope, not the outrage—is what I remember most clearly about those days.