Max Atkinson has been inviting readers to submit draft speeches for Doomed Dictators.

Here are the seven entries, with three distinguished judges having to work out who wins.

Of course it all depends quite how doomed the dictator thinks he (and it is usually a ‘he’) thinks he is.

If he thinks it’s all over, it doesn’t matter much what he says. Options range from a final defiant snarl to a soaring plea for forgiveness, delivered in rousing terms before the feverish dash to his private jet and the hope that there’s enough fuel to get him to Venezuela.

If, however, he thinks that there’s a good chance he’s still in business (either by negotiating a deal with protesters or by pretending to offer a deal while crushing them) he needs to project a completely different message: firmness coupled with a willingness to talk. Above all, Strength.

Hence Gaddafi is now doing well, summoning assorted Western journalists to multiply out his ramblings while doing what he can to use heavy violence to quell protests. His message is straight from the Milosevic textbook:

I am strong enough. Only I can be the solution to the problem I created. Remember – you can’t beat me

In this sense the fact that the International Criminal Court is on the case arguably helps him, a point made by Dan Hannan in this businesslike list of reasons for ‘the West’ not intervening:

Incidentally, allowing Libyans to succeed on their own means allowing them to try their former leaders according to their own norms. We should drop the idea of hauling Gaddafi before the ICC – a court which symbolises almost everything that is wrong with the current global order

The point here is that bringing into play the ICC card seems attractive to Western diplomats striving at the UN to show that they are ‘doing something’.

But it offers Gaddafi a whole new area of pseudo-heroic Me Against the World struggle. I don’t agree with everything in this Guardian CiF piece by Nesrine Malik from a year ago about the ICC/Sudan, but the general point is holding up well:

The ICC has no mechanism of enforcement, so support for its rulings is only likely to be for moral rather than pragmatic reasons

The Sudanese President has brushed aside the ICC’s proceedings, with much support from other African/Arab states who could not care less about his behaviour and fall in behind any anti-imperialist rhetoric. Could not the same things happen with Gaddafi if he brazens it out? This rival view from Mark Goldberg looks to me like wishful thinking:

But mark my words, if he is still alive, Qaddafi will be sitting in the dock in the Hague within the year.

So why am I so confident that this ICC action means Qaddafi will end up in The Hague?  As opposed to the other time that a head of state has come under investigation by the ICC (Sudan’s Omar Bashir) this time around,  there is full unanimity in the Security Council–and basically, the entire international community minus Venezuela–that Qaddafi has lost all legitimacy as ruler of Libya. 

Remember, the ICC cannot execute its own warrants. It requires the cooperation of its member states and international community at large to deliver the accused to a courtroom in the Hague.

If ever he steps foot outside of Libya, he’ll likely be arrested.  And if rebels capture him, well, there is a courtroom chair waiting with his name on it.

Fine. But I suspect that the fact that there was so much support for the UN resolution on Gaddafi was all about a panicked recation by the world’s dictatorships that if he went they might be suddenly threatened too. They scrambled to dump on Gaddafi to scrape together some scraps of mutual legitimacy.

What if Gaddafi hangs on, even by massacring large numbers of Libyans or with Libya becoming semi-divided?

Business as usual will quickly assert itself.

His ‘strength’ will be admired if not openly praised by other dictators, the more so if the West have sat and watched him get away with it on across the ditch from Europe and carried the cost of managing all the refugee flows. Suckers!

Plus you can be sure that the tighter the asset freezes and other actions by Western governments bite on Libya, the slower lots of other countries will be to implement them if they actually do implement them – there’s plenty of Libyan oil money be made out of not enforcing UNSC resolutions. Who out there cares if the Libyan people are collateral damage while that money gets made? If they are too weak to bring down Gaddafi, he has shown himself to be a Great Leader indeed!

So there’s more to writing a Doomed Dictator speech than meets the eye.

The only good Doomed Dictator speech is one which projects strength and leadership while trailing the hint of concessions on the dictator’s terms and thereby tries to buy time – you never know what might happen (but keep the engines on the jet nice and warm, just in case) 

So the winner is ..?