Gaddafi: Going, Going...

One way or another, just like Mubarak, he's finished. He just hasn't gone yet.

Egypt's President was finished almost before the uprising began. The army used the cover of the crowds to achieve what they wanted anyway - a post-Mubarak era.

However, although Gaddafi is finished, unless he goes soon there's an outside chance that so is Libya.

The political centre of gravity in Libya may be Tripoli, but the economic centre is the Sirte Basin and above it the Gulf of Sirte, and it seems that most of that has already fallen to the uprising.

Last year Libya earned about $30bn from its energy exports. A lot of it came out of the Sirte Basin and 75% of the energy was exported via the Gulf of Sirte.

The country's riches lie in the far east, the far west and the centre. With the east and centre no longer under the control of the 'government', the oil workers fleeing, and the country split at least two ways, the nation state in its present form is no longer economically viable. Libya can be put back together again, but it will be an arduous job.

Outsiders still call the far east of Libya Cyrenaica, the name the Romans gave it. It still had the title when it was just a region of the Ottoman Empire. To this day the people there have little allegiance to Tripoli. If the country fell apart, the greater Cyrenaica region could declare itself a separate state.

That is one scenario, another is that Libya becomes a failed state projecting instability into the Mediterranean Basin. The latter could even have room for the Gaddafis in a post-apocalypse Mad Max Somalia on the Med.

A more positive outcome for those who are against Gaddafi would be that Tripoli falls and that somehow the ad hoc people's committees now forming across the country could ally with a Tripoli council, hold the country together, and plan for elections next year.

That would take the tribal leaders and the heads of the oil companies to compromise, and even if they did they would have to build a political system from the ground up because Gaddafi's 'Jamahiriya' is already consigned to the dustbin of history.