MAIL ONLINE: With Col Muammar Gaddafi’s troops turning their guns on their own people, reportedly causing hundreds of fatalities, it is clear that the Libyan dictator is nastier and more ruthless than any other Arab despot in the region. That is saying something.Gaddafi has long been in a class of his own, once rivalled only by the now deceased Saddam Hussein of Iraq, whom it took a war to remove. Among many atrocities for which the Libyan leader has been responsible was the alleged massacre of more than 1,200 prisoners at Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in a single month in 1996.
The man is a monster, and mad and corrupt as well. Yet, starting in 2004, Labour set out to appease him and make deals with him. There was socialising with Gaddafi’s bizarre son, Saif al-Islam. Most serious of all, the last government worked to secure the early release of the ‘Lockerbie bomber’, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who had been convicted of murdering 270 people in 1988.
How on earth did this happen? How was it that a government which preached an ‘ethical foreign policy’ in 1997 – and which went to war against Saddam under the banner of democracy – ended up not just doing business with this tyrant but cutting sordid deals with him, and selling him water cannons and armoured cars which he is using against his own people? Read on and comment >>> Stephen Glover | Tuesday, February 22, 2011
