No sooner had I put out the idea this morning that Gaddafi might do well not to blow Benghazi to bits but instead behave in a more guileful way than the cunning fellow proclaims a ceasefire!

I knew of course that he swings by this blog now and again, but the fact that he is paying such close attention is most impressive.

David Hearst in the Guardian writes well on this new situation:

It is the calculation of a man who, contrary to popular opinion is not mad, but behaving quite rationally. It is the move of a man who is trying to counter the threat of a foreign military intervention by splitting the coalition before it has really had time to gather in Paris on Saturday.

A ceasefire, if it holds, would partition the country, and allow Gaddafi to keep control of the most important part and the major oil ports which his forces have just won back. In one judo throw, Gaddafi has reversed the most powerful argument behind the resolution, preventing a massacre in Benghazi.

The Libyan rebels in Benghazi certainly wanted a respite from Gaddafi’s aircraft and heavy artillery, but hardly at the cost of abandoning their goal of liberating the whole of their country from a tyrant.

Read the whole thing.

Likewise with this new breathing-space, Mr Reasonable Gaddafi can hope to summon international mediators whose very presence in Tripoli will redefine the whole situation on his terms. And start to scatter the thought that if anyone is wickedly partitioning Libya it is the UN, not him.

All of which is simply Gaddafi pulling off the shelf his well-thumbed copy of Milosevic’s Axioms of Pschological Warfare.

He wants to jerk the issue away from the supposed rationality of finely calculated UN and other diplomatic fora on to darker psychological terrain of erraticness and unexpectedness, where he has extra Velocity and the ‘international community’ is bogged down by its own Mass.

The fact that Germany manoeuvred itself into grimacing and twitching on the sidelines in abstaining in New York is a classic example of the sort of divisions which such situations can prompt. The Guardian quotes Spiegel Online’s fine job of trying to fathom out how Berlin messed this one up so badly:

Some politicians within Merkel’s centre-right coalition are already warning that Germany could be drifting even further away from France, Britain and the US. Attitudes toward Germany will change as a result of the vote, says Ruprecht Polenz, a member of parliament for Merkel’s conservatives who heads up the Bundestag’s foreign affairs committee.

"I don’t think we’ve heard the last word on this," he said, pointing out that the EU had already announced its support for the resolution.

Not sure I follow that last point. How can the ‘EU’ support the UNSCR if Germany does not?

Whatever. Germany last night dealt a heavy blow to the idea of a united EU foreign policy. But that’s OK, as it allows those EU member states which want to stop war crimes to get on and do their best without wasting too much time trying to build a precarious consensus.

So, a new phase begins. Gaddafi throws down this challenge – to frustrate the rules by pretending to respect them!

The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.  

Schemers trying to control their worlds. We are not a schemer. We show schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are. You guys in the West were schemers. You had plans. Look where it got you… 

You know what we are, West? We’re a dog chasing cars. We wouldn’t know what to do if we caught one. 

Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. We are an agent of chaos.

And you know the thing about chaos, West? It’s fair.

Hmm. Doesn’t this sound (once again) … familiar?