In Libya, Delusion Makes a Last Stand Scott Nelson for the New York Times FURY Despite the repressive regime, protesters in Benghazi, Libya, set fire to a book with an image of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. TRIPOLI, Libya - The chess match last week between Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and a visitor from the remote steppe of southern Russia who had traveled to Tripoli to promote chess in Libyan schools was a case of the oddest of couples, at the oddest of times. With NATO bombs and missiles pounding the Libyan capital and Colonel Qaddafi venting on Libya's airwaves only days before that he would choose "death before surrender," it captured something quintessential about the Libyan leader and the oddball qualities he has displayed in decades of repressive one-man rule. With his days in power now surely numbered - by popular revolt, by the NATO attacks and by escalating defections from his elite - Colonel Qaddafi seems fated to end up as little more than a footnote among the dictators of our age. Libya is a country of only 6.5 million people, oil-rich but still in many ways dirt-poor. If it has punched above its weight in the 40 years of Qaddafi rule, it is largely because of his pattern, discarded only in recent years, of promoting terrorism abroad. The pattern included the colonel's early embrace of Carlos the Jackal, the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal and the I.R.A., as well as the bombing of Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Still, to see Colonel Qaddafi in his oversize sunglasses laboring clumsily over a chessboard with Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation and a fervent believer in cosmic aliens, and then beaming as he was offered a diplomatic draw, was to be reminded of other moments of illusionist denial by autocratic rulers at moments of the most desperate chaos beyond their palace gates: Nero, fiddling in Rome; Stalin, reportedly locked in seclusion in the days after Hitler's tanks invaded; Mao Zedong carousing with concubines as Red Guard zealots convulsed China with their puritanical brand of Maoist egalitarianism. To sojourn in Tripoli is to travel deep into a world of illusionism and deceit. This is a world where much of the evidence available to an outsider suggests that Colonel Qaddafi, the "Brother Leader" and "Revolutionary Guide," has led his followers into a narrowing cul-de-sac; where few if any with access to the colonel, by their own accounts, seem ready even to whisper that the game may be up; a world where a battalion of official spokesmen, inured to a lifetime of wrenching reality into the shapes commanded by propaganda, seem intent on turning truth on its head - a world, in short, where a leader beset by a murderous civil war thinks it normal to spend his Sunday afternoon playing chess. For all that, the Qaddafi dictatorship is unusual for its lack of rigor and efficiency. In Libya, at least in the two-thirds of the country not yet lost to the rebels, a dictatorship that has all the standard instruments of suppression and fear seems in some measure to have lost the power to command the fealty of its citizens. This seems true not just in areas controlled by the rebels, and not alone in the areas of Tripoli like Tajura, Souk al-Juma and Feshloom that were fountainheads of the uprising's early weeks and where an active underground survived the sustained use of live fire against protesters in February and early March. Now it seems broadly true among the population at large. Over several weeks in Tripoli, it has been commonplace to encounter, at random, Libyans ready to speak openly of their contempt for Colonel Qaddafi, and enthusiastically about NATO's ability to bomb targets associated with the most sensitive strongholds of the government. To be sure, there were others, in many places, who offered a ritual defense of him, and a loathing of the rebels. But the much more common response - in bookshops and cafes, in hospitals and hotels, and in the mosques and souks that crowd the winding alleyways of the old Ottoman heart of Tripoli down by the city's ancient port - was to hail the day when the Libyan leader would be consigned to what Trotsky called the dustbin of history. There was, for example, an educated, English-speaking young man, Muhammad (not his real name, for his own protection), who met this reporter as he sauntered along an alleyway in the Medina, not far from the hole-in-the-wall store where he sells vegetables while hoping for a better job. Smoking a cigarette, he reacted dismissively as a pickup truck packed with pro-Qaddafi demonstrators drove past on one of the few drivable passageways through the district, shouting the Libyan leader's name, waving placards bearing his image and hoisting automatic rifles in the air. "They pay them 10 dinars a day to do that," he said. It means nothing. Asked what outcome he would favor, he smiled. "Like Martin Luther King, I have a dream, a dream for Libya," he said. Victory is coming. With Qaddafi gone, everything will be O.K. Correction: July 3, 2011 Because of an editing error, an article in Week in Review on June 19 on the political mood in Libya misstated the surname of the president of the World Chess Federation, against whom Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi recently played in Tripoli. He is Kirsan N. Ilyumzhinov, not Ilyinov. The article also misidentified a game being played in a souk where Libyans openly expressed eagerness for change. It was backgammon, not baccarat.