MAIL ONLINE: Seven years ago Tony Blair shocked Britain and the U.S. by travelling to Libya and publicly shaking hands with the blood-soaked dictator Muammar Gaddafi.Even at the time, few could believe the then prime minister was cosying up to this ruthless tyrant who had been directly responsible for the deaths of so many innocent British and American people.
Today, as the scale of the massacres in eastern Libya is laid bare, that symbolic handshake and the sinister diplomatic machinations that followed it look even more contemptible.
Gaddafi had long proved his hatred of the West. He armed and funded the IRA, providing them with the Semtex used in bomb outrages from Brighton to Omagh. His envoy shot dead WPC Yvonne Fletcher at the Libyan embassy in London, and he directed the 1988 Lockerbie bombing.
Yet Mr Blair and his cabinet colleagues were prepared to overlook all of this, even helping secure the release of the Lockerbie bomber from a Scottish jail, for the sake of a few lucrative contracts to British oil and arms companies.
Doing business with tinpot dictators is a dirty and uncertain business and the more brutal Gaddafi’s suppression of his people gets, the worse Britain looks – not only to the rest of the civilised world but also to ordinary Libyans. Gaddafi might kill hundreds, maybe thousands of his opponents, but he can’t kill them all.
And if he is ousted, how will Britain explain to the next Libyan government why we sucked up to this monster? >>> Daily Mail Comment | Tuesday, February 22, 2011
