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Salaam-alaikum, devoted fighters of the holy war good friends of freedom and peace who watch the Libyan events on TV with eyes wide open and with a shaking lower lip!

"The other Arabs stay merry and calm in their countries, and they are laughing at us for destroying our own country".

I would"ve lold hard if I wasn"t raging with fury the equivalent of two supernovae right now. Above are the words of Gaddafi"s son Seif al-Islam (the "Sword" of Islam, duh), part of his TV speech yesterday. If anyone was still doubting in the seriousness of what"s happening in Libya, they"d better just look at the Sword"s latest statements, "the modern face of the Gaddafi regime". Each of them displayed the regime"s schizophrenia in its entire glory. The regime which is trying to extinguish the flames of discontent... with blood.

The shockwave from Tunisia and Egypt is shaking Libya too - one of the most repressive regimes in the entire Arab world. Benghazi, Al Bayda and Tripoli were ignited one after the other, the protests are spreading fast, whole chunks of the country are out of Gaddafi"s control... His response? Shooting at protestors with snipers, sending foreign mercenaries to slaughter them, and now even using fighter jets to massacre mourning people who are on their way to the cemetery (well, one or two of those pilots already defected to Malta).

The events are developing really fast, and given the heavy information blackout in the country (neither western nor Arab media have access to most places in Libya), for days no one could confirm how serious the situation was in Gaddafi"s "family domain". But the fact is, Seif al-Islam"s warning is true: the country is at the brink of the bloodiest civil war that Africa has seen since Congo. And given his desperate tone on that TV speech, there"s no doubt now that the regime is truly pressed against the wall.

There are many reasons to believe that this time the blow on Gaddafi will be fatal. He"s been the longest surviving Arab dictator in modern history, but he"s not eternal either. No one is eternal. The question is in what manner you"d step down when the time comes.

And unfortunately Gaddafi doesn"t look likely to do it the Mubarak way. There"s just too much at stake in Libya (well, mostly oil). But he WILL go, one way or another. All signs are pointing toward a downfall.

1. First, the tone of Seif"s speech. In his lengthy address which was the first time the regime was speaking to its people, with the typical Gaddafi pathos he announced that "Libya is not Egypt and Libya is not Tunisia" and that the tribal culture there would split the country into clans who"ll be fighting over oil. "And who will feed you?" he asked rhetorically, and he threatened with a collapse of education, health-care and other services which his father"s regime is supplying. Let"s just remind that this is the same health-care system which let hundreds of Libyan kids get infected with the HIV virus in the Benghazi hospital and then blamed it all on a bunch of Bulgarian medics who at some point were called "Mossad conspirators". That"s how paranoically schizophrenic the regime has become.

Further in his speech, the Sword of Islam included incoherent threats that the riots would bring colonialism back, that the Islamists would come to power, and rants that there were "drugged kids and unemployed criminals among the protestors". And finally with an almost whimpering voice he gave huge promises about a total reform of the regime, the establishment of a "second Republic" (apparently, chaired by himself), which would meet all the demands of the opposition - if you could just please let us stay in power, please. Well guess what. Too little, too late, big boy!

All this speaks of a regime which is seeing all its levers of control slipping away faster than it could possibly imagine. Seif al-Islam, the face of the modern part of the regime, who has always looked well prepared and well spoken in his public appearances, and who for a time even looked sympathetic to most foreigners (being the good cop in this good-cop-bad-cop game, and all), now suddenly looks strikingly similar to Hosni Mubarak in his desperate attempts to mitigate the rising anger and keep his ass unscathed.

2. Second, the spreading pattern of the protests. Benghazi, the traditional fortress of the opposition, looks irretrievably fallen under the control of the protestors, along with Al Bayda (there is/was a live broadcast from the streets of Benghazi, put on the web by some local activists). But the bigger problem for Gaddafi is the biggest tribal clan in the country, Warfallah, which already announced it supports the revolution, along with the second biggest tribe Touareg. This turns the revolution from a local event into a national thing, and last night and today morning even in Tripoli, which was considered Gaddafi"s bastion, there are government buildings burning, including the parliament and some police stations.

3. Third, the regime began losing its diplomatic envoys abroad. First the Libyan ambassadors to India and China resigned in protest against the crackdown on the demonstrators, and the biggest humiliation for the proud Gaddafi came when the Libyan ambassador to the Arab League (which Libya is currently presiding) also resigned, stating that "Gaddafi is finished, because he has lost the people". I guess Gaddafi"s weight in the League is history now, and he used it as his primary forum for his endless lectures about his visions for the future.

42 years of dictatorship are crumbling within days and the similarity to Egypt is striking. The army is rebelling, the security forces obviously cannot manage the situation, and meanwhile the dictator"s heir-apparent is throwing incoherent accusations and nasty threats into the air. And the difference from Egypt and Tunisia and the similarity to Yemen is that there"s too much tribal division and too much weapons floating around the place, and this is a prerequisite for a massive bloodbath.

There"s already the first separatist "state" in Al Bayda, the East Libyan Caliphate, and Benghazi is threatening to follow it and establish the Republic of Cyrenaica or whatever the hell they"d like to call it. It all looks more and more like a failed state, the Somalian way. But on steroids. Oil being the steroids. Except this is happening right under Europe"s face, and Europe is still reluctant to get their asses moving and do something... eh, I mean SAY something that sounds even remotely resolute. Typical powdered Brussels poodles.

Even if Gaddafi is doomed, the regime won"t give up just like that, without a fight "to the very last bullet" as Seif said. On behalf of his father, he directly threatened to drown his country in a sea of blood. That, in front of the whole nation on the national TV. Indeed, it"s not just words. Witnesses in Benghazi report about indiscriminate automatic gunfire on the demonstrators, including a point-blank heavy machine-gun fire on a crowd which was passing beside the HQ of the Revolutionary Guard on their way to the cemetery, where they were going to bury their friends and relatives who had been slaughtered a bit earlier by Gaddafi"s mercenaries. Al Jazeera reports about at least 300 killed in Benghazi alone. There are confirmations that air strikes with fighter jets commenced against demonstrators in Tripoli, Benghazi and other Libyan towns. The foreigners in Al Bayda are held in the local mosque by the rebels as hostages, their fate remaining unclear. All in all, what everyone feared would happen in Tunisia and Egypt, is now happening in Libya.

And it"s no surprise. But everyone had kept their eyes wide shut and their heads buried deep in the sand all the time for Gaddafi"s blood-thirsty grip on power, because it suited them perfectly. Because he has something that everyone covets - oil. And he was willing to give it, in exchange for legitimacy of his regime. And we all swallowed the hook, along with the fishing rod.

Yes, we"re ALL responsible for these deaths! I"m not saying the "international community" or whatever you"d like to call that bunch of hypocrites out there should"ve bombed the crap out of Gaddafi, the Bush-style. Nope. But I"m saying the world was complicit in what was coming to Libya because it turned a blind eye, and instead of isolating this regime further and pushing with all possible means for its reformation or downfall (the way it"s done to Iran), we all chose to play by the tune of the parroty clown. And now we"re picking the rotten fruits from this Realpolitik that we all played with Libya.

The developing tragedy is putting some hard questions especially to Europe and the US. Washington, Brussels and others have all hurried to react in one way or another - some with a harsher tone, others in a more "diplomatic" manner, but this is obviously not the adequate kind of reaction toward a regime which is shooting with machine guns on street protestors. When in 2009 the Iranian authorities subdued the Green Movement in a similar fashion, the world"s choice of conduct was more than easy. Iran is a rogue state anyway, Axis-of-Evil material; there had been sanctions imposed on it, so they were just tightened some more. Done deal.

But not Libya. Libya is different. In the recent years it was increasingly looked at as a partner. After Gaddafi scrapped his WMD programs and paid some compensations for the Lockerbie plane bombing and eventually released the innocent Bulgarian medics, he started to get everything he desired. Tony Blair instantly flew to Libya to promise British investments, Sarkozy wasn"t late to follow promising French investments and support, the US restored diplomatic relations with Gaddafi, and Italy literally embraced him because of his willingness to cooperate in accepting back the illegal immigrants who kept flocking onto the Italian shores. For the last two years various US and UK firms delivered modern weapons worth 300 million dollars to Libya, and the sniper shooters who are now knocking down people in the streets from the rooftops are using snipers produced in the UK and night-vision gadgets produced in the US. France even promoted its super expensive Rafale fighter jets, the ones which are now shooting at crowds in the squares.

All of this may be looking utterly hypocrite now. But it"s also ironic. BP is forced to withdraw its personnel from Libya, the Italian government is compelled to keep silent if it doesn"t want to see Italy flooded with thousands of refugees, and all European countries who have citizens in Libya (including mine) have to weigh their words with extreme care for the sake of their citizens" safety. Libya is a big and complex country with lots of problems, but whatever they may be, keeping Gaddafi on top now wouldn"t make them easier to solve later.

It looks Europe and America are suddenly faced with the reality that few voices had been warning about for years: that colonel Gaddafi is still the same brutal dictator who"s willing to send murderers overseas, who"s destroying his opposition with guns and who"d then throw the blame on everybody else but himself, as he did in the case of theBenghazi Six. Given how much he cares about his public image, Libya looks doomed to still more violence and bloodbath before he falls. And until then, the EU, the US, and the ordinary Libyans themselves will remain locked in this trap.