My op-ed in Foreign Policy, Qaddafi’s Legacy: Only in his death is the Libyan leader’s radical vision of a decentralized republic becoming a reality.In the end, for all Qaddafi's pretensions of ideological revolution and professed commitment to ruling on behalf of a people who loved him, his regime had become an old-fashioned family dictatorship, with key security posts doled out to his sons and trusted loyalists. Now that he's dead, Libyans have been given a double-edged sword: a chance to create a new political order from scratch.The great irony of the 2011 Libyan revolution is that this spontaneous formation of local committees, drawing on traditional bonds of solidarity, is what Qaddafi preached in his Green Book but never implemented. His quote "Committees Everywhere" can still be seen on billboards across the country. However, the Brother Leader never envisioned that a true people's democracy would have come about not as a result of his hypocritical exhortations but rather in determined opposition to them. Time will tell if the Libyans can keep it.
Qaddafi’s Legacy