Quotes of the Day

The warning couldn't have been clearer. Libya's water-supply network, a multibillion-dollar project that pipes clean water from underground reserves in the south to some 4.5 million residents along the coast, is at risk. If an air strike hits one of the 3,000 manholes along the pipeline, says Abdul Majid Qa'oud, Agricultural Minister and chairman of the Great Manmade River People's Committee, the whole system will break down. "It will be a humanitarian disaster," he says.

That such an extensive pipeline network — when it was completed, Muammar Gaddafi boasted that it was the eighth wonder of the world, with enough concrete to pave a road all the way to India — should have no emergency backup system beggars belief. A media tour of the network's control center was an indication of a regime desperately seeking ways to prove its relevance to a captive press corps grown weary of being spoon-fed propaganda on organized excursions.

Signs that Gaddafi's regime is rapidly losing popularity in the capital are plentiful and obvious, even to journalists imprisoned in the luxurious confines of a well-orchestrated p.r. machine. In a move that will hearten dissidents, Italy has taken the strongest stance yet against the regime. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told Reuters in Rome on Monday, April 4, that a divided Libya was not acceptable and that the rebel council was the only legitimate interlocutor.

And while state TV broadcasts recorded scenes of jubilant pro-Gaddafi crowds on a loop, their real-time incarnations tell a different story. The throngs of supporters who used to greet the journalists' bus upon its arrival at the hotel have disappeared, and the rallies of the regime faithful have diminished. One bystander at Sunday's anti-U.N. protest in Tripoli suggested a little too loudly that the young men stomping on President Obama's photo were being paid — 150 dinars a day, he had heard.

Mahmoud Ali, a Finance Ministry employee standing nearby, rebutted the comment, saying that the rally was purely spontaneous. Dressed in a tuxedo, he proudly stated that his wife had ironed his shirt the night before in anticipation of his appearing in front of the national and international media. When the contradiction was pointed out, he allowed that he had been ordered in a phone call the night before to attend. Nevertheless, he said, he supported the regime. Not so everyone. "I am sick of all this," said another bystander. "I have had enough of the regime."

Whispers on the sidelines of manufactured pro-Gaddafi rallies, when taken together, equate a roar. But an army of whisperers is not enough to topple a regime that has the full might of a military willing to turn its weapons on its own people. "We could stand up against the regime," says one Tripoli resident. "But they would take us down like birds."

As the front lines of the battle between the eastern rebels and Gaddafi's forces yo-yo across Libya, the possibility of a diplomatic solution has breathed hope into what was starting to look like an interminable stalemate.

According to news reports, a senior Libyan official is in Greece to talk about a potential solution, though Frattini has deemed the proposal "not credible." Still, it shows that the regime may be sweating a little more than it cares to let on. A representative of Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam has recently returned from London, where he presented a proposal that would see the son take power from the father in an eventual transition to some kind of representative government.

But some observers don't see how it could work. The rebels' transitional government holds that Gaddafi and his sons have to go. Watchers in Tripoli say Gaddafi would never accept such a deal. "The only way Gaddafi is going to leave power is in a sarcophagus," says one, who, like all other Tripoli residents against the regime, has insisted on anonymity. Still, he says, the situation is untenable.

As I spoke with shopkeepers during a recent, unscripted shopping trip to a middle-class Tripoli neighborhood, home to beneficiaries of Gaddafi largesse, many gave their leader a thumbs-up. Business is good, said one man at a cosmetics shop. His only complaint was that his air shipments of Italian and French beauty supplies have stopped because of the no-fly zone. Now he has to route them overland via Tunisia, a feat made more difficult by the lack of fuel.

At gas stations across the capital, lines stretch hundreds of cars long. Gasoline, which used to be cheaper than bottled water, is in increasingly short supply. Most of the oil fields and refineries are in the east. And many of the oil-tanker drivers, whose jobs are largely reserved for immigrant workers, have fled. In the agricultural areas on the outskirts of the city, produce lies rotting in the fields. The prices of basic food items have skyrocketed, prompting one young resident to say it is only a matter of time before people in Tripoli stand up in protest — not necessarily against the regime, but simply out of anger and frustration. "This false peace will not last," he says. "There is nothing to do here for the young. We have no movies, no bars and no clubs. So what do you do? Petrol is cheap, so you fill up your car, get some bootlegger whiskey and drive around. If the young can't do this, they will come to the streets."

And that, says the young Tripoli resident, would be a very dangerous situation. For several weeks, the government had a policy of arming citizen-protection squads. Anyone with a national ID, he says, could ask for a weapon from the pro-Gaddafi Revolutionary Corps. According to him, thousands of Kalashnikovs were handed out, and the result is a young, volatile and armed populace. "So if people come to the streets, it will be bad," he says. "They will be armed. And the security forces are armed."

So far, it has not come to that. More than anything, the capital's population appears to be settling in for a long wait. "We feed on rumors of success in the east," says the man who feared being hunted down by the military if he spoke out. "We know they may not be true, but they give us hope."

Yet news from the front is hardly reassuring. Heated battles in the town of Misratah underscore the difficulties faced by rebel forces. Despite their determination and the assistance of allied air strikes, they are outmatched by a well-armed and professional military. And at the pipeline-control station, Qa'oud inadvertently revealed another possible weapon in the government's arsenal: different parts of the water grid can be turned off at will by the central command. So far it has not turned off the spigots to the east — doing so might squeeze the rebels into submission, but it would also earn Gaddafi more ire from the international community. But if an air strike hits one of those 3,000 manholes and the network to the east is put out of commission, well, the international community was warned, wasn't it?

• Aryn Baker / Tripoli
• As Gaddafi's regime desperately tries to prove that it still has the support of the majority, the disillusionment of the people in the streets of Tripoli tells a different story