[Yang Sung-chul] Steve Jobs and the demise of two cowardly dictators

Col. Moammar Gadhafi is dead at age 69. His demise has ended 42 years of brutal and erratic dictatorship in Libya. He and his cronies have left the country in ruins after eight months of civil strife. It may take years, if not decades, to launch a viable functioning democratic government, let alone to reconstruct and rehabilitate the nation.

In December 2003, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (1939-2006) was captured by U.S. forces in a dirt hole at a farmhouse near his hometown, Tikrit, as a fugitive.

Like the present Hosni Mubarak trial in an Egyptian court, Hussein in an iron cage was tried in an Iraqi court. In December 2006 he was executed by hanging in the public square on charges related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shiites.

When civil protests erupted in February, Gadhafi resisted defiantly. As the anti-Gadhafi forces tipped the balance with high-tech NATO airpower and intelligence support, Gadhafi, too, became a runaway. He was captured in a drain in his hometown of Sirte eight months later.

His end was gruesome. He was pulled out of a drainage pipe and killed. His corpse was left in a meat locker at a local shopping mall, stripped to the waist with the left side of his face splattered in blood.

It is a supreme irony that these two dictators kept impregnable hidden palaces of opulence all over their countries, but their last days were spent in underground holes like outlaws.

The similarities between the two dictators go deeper than just their horrible deaths. Gadhafi seized power in a 1969 bloodless military coup in Libya. Saddam Hussein, too, played a key role in the bloodless military coup in Iraq in 1968.

Gadhafi took the helm immediately after the coup. Hussein de facto ruled the country by gradually consolidating his power in the military and the Baath Party as deputy under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. He formally assumed the presidency 11 years later when al-Bakr was forced to step down in July of 1979.

Both Gadhafi and Hussein nationalized foreign holdings of oil interests in the early 1970s. Internally, they used the oil money primarily for prolonging their power and enriching their cronies and families.

Externally, Gadhafi led the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, plus Egypt, Syria and Tunisia to proclaim the Arab Oil Embargo in October 1973 which coincided with the outbreak of the Yom Kipper War. It precipitated the first global oil crisis. In the process Gadhafi hurt relations with the U.S. and other European states while befriending the then-Soviet Union.

The erratic and capricious behavior of the two dictators’ was well-known. Their denial of people’s basic civil rights and freedoms at their whim was also a cruel common legacy. The anti-American and anti-Western propaganda campaigns, coupled with direct and indirect support of domestic and international terrorism, also became the trademarks of their brutal dictatorships.

Gadhafi’s sponsoring of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 270 passengers stands out. So does Hussein’s chemical weapons attack on Halabja, a small Kurdish city in northern Iraq, taking some 5,000 lives during the final days of the Iran-Iraq War in the same year.

Fifteen days before the demise of Gadhafi, Steve Jobs, one of the global icons of the IT revolution, died of respiratory arrest/pancreatic cancer on Oct. 5. One may ask what the connection is between the late Steve Jobs, the guru of homo electronicus, and brutal dictators like Gadhafi and Hussein. Is it too far-fetched to connect Steve Jobs’ electronic gadgets with the blossoming of jasmine in the Arab Spring?

The clue is found in his commencement speech at Stanford University in June 2005. The first of his three stories is about connecting the dots. Even though he dropped out of Reed College after six months, he hung around the campus for 18 more months, slept on the floor in friends’ rooms and attended calligraphy and topography classes. He subsisted on the money he earned from returning coke bottles for the 5-cent deposits and on one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple by walking seven miles across town every Sunday night. Steve confessed that he had never imagined that 10 years later his ordeal on campus would all come back to him when he was designing the first Macintosh computer.

Steve’s Syrian biological father aside, there is no denying that the electronic gadgets he and other SNS gurus in high-tech industries invented stand as the nub of the Arab Spring. Two examples drive this point home.

On the day Gadhafi died, a U.S. predator drone helped to guide a French warplane to attack the military convoy as it tried to flee Sirte without knowing that Gadhafi was in it.

A day later on Oct. 21, Global Post began the news story with a question: How could anyone doubt that the infamous Libyan leader had fallen when at our laptop we were staring at a graphic cell-phone video of his bloodied face? Citizen journalism is hardly a new concept now but the bevy of videos available on Gadhafi and the speed with which they began circulating the Web on that day mark a significant shift.

If five out of the world’s nearly 7 billion people are using the gizmos (more Africans have mobiles than clean drinking water), the late Steve Jobs along with other SNS icons are indeed connecting dots with the ongoing political cataclysms in the Middle East and beyond.

What lessons can we draw from all this? Unrestrained power tends to create political monsters like Gadhafi in the Arab Street, as unscrupulous greed is bound to produce business sharks like Bernie Madoff on Wall Street. The high-tech cyber military operation is increasingly becoming routine. The connectivity between SNS and popular uprising is now unquestionable. Above all, brutal dictators everywhere will have many more sleepless nights. 

By Yang Sung-chul

Yang Sung-chul is presently adviser to the Kim Dae-jung Peace Foundation and the Korean Peninsula Peace Forum. ― Ed.