http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/7332873/the-end-of-a-delusion.thtml
The sight of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi blood-stained and bewildered, pulled around by a crowd in the final moments of his life is not a sight that will cause much pity. For more than four decades he had none for those Libyans whom he repressed and killed — anymore than he had for the victims on Pan Am Flight 103, his other multiple acts of terrorism, or his pointless and bloody interventions across Africa.
Yet there is something pitiful about it: perhaps most obviously because watching his end is to watch the end of a delusion. Even more than Saddam Hussein crawling out of a hole in the ground and saying that he wanted to negotiate, the sight of Gaddafi coming out of a soil-pipe armed with a golden gun seems the perfect example of reality catching up with the autocrat. And though it is undeniable that first and foremost Gaddafi was bad quite simply because he was bad, this is a good moment to consider whether there was anything which the international community, and countries like this one, could have done better.
Anyone who was curious about Gaddafi could learn most of what they needed to know by trying to read his near-unreadable Green Book. It includes an extended digression away from the subject of agriculture in which Gaddafi comes to the conclusion that men do not menstruate, nor do they breastfeed children, and that this is a difference between men and women.
The Green Book is useful for understanding Gaddafi because it contains the characteristic that always sat alongside his brutality: his silliness. Even up to the end, that silliness was forever in danger of dominating international attitudes towards him. Who could forget the impromptu press conference earlier this year in which he denied that he had fled the country: leaning out of a golf-buggy, umbrella in hand? Or the rambling speeches at the UN which on one recent occasion led to a translator breaking-down, complaining particularly that it was unclear which parts of the speech Gaddafi meant to address to the hall and which were him talking to himself?
The silliness was legendary. But behind it, and far more important than it, was a deadly delusion. And here was the problem for the international community. At any time, throughout his four decades of dictatorship, Gaddafi always managed to find some leader somewhere, and on occasion several, willing to hail him as the great leader of his time, a continent-wide King or a Caliph, destined alternately to unite Africa or revive the Caliphate. Across Africa, and as far away as Pakistan, there were those who would acclaim him and regard him in the manner he clearly felt to be his due. What they wanted of course was the cash.
For the same reason Gaddafi also found some receptive audiences in the West — and never more-so than in recent years. The bloodshed of the last year has at least reminded people that Gaddafi was not merely a clown. But the pandering to Gaddafi’s whims cannot but have helped prolong his view of himself and so prolong the misery through which he put his people.
When the Blair government decided to restore relations with Libya they did it for decent reasons. But the manner and extent of the un-freezing of relations — the sending of dignitaries to meet him and so on — went far too far. When the international community sat through his rambling multi-hour-long speeches at the UN, and world leaders allowed him to pitch his tent on their lawns, the misconception that there were different rules for him — that he was a case apart — can only have hardened.
Perhaps one occasion should particularly epitomise this. Only last December, Gaddafi made a live video appearance in London at the London School of Economics (LSE). Students and academics at that institution (incidentally a bastion of academic attempts to boycott Israel) had a chance to ask some questions of Gaddafi. They behaved miserably.