When it comes to Gaddafi, get real
RICHARD SAYS: CAN we please have a reality check on the death of Colonel Gaddafi?
For starters, he wasn’t executed - he was first humiliated and then lynched. Saddam Hussein was executed after due process and pointless trial but I don’t remember his hanging at the hands of bomber-jacketed hard men who abused him as he stood on the scaffold having much dignity either.
Gaddafi’s horrible last minutes were ugly and unlawful but typical of the genre - a dictator’s death. When tyrants like him are finally toppled, the end is almost always brutal, bloody and out-of-hand. We’re dealing in monsters and a people thirsting for revenge not justice. Think Mussolini. Think Ceacescu. Even democratic governments aren’t averse to a bit of revenge. Think Bin Laden.
The transitional leadership in Libya have grumpily agreed to investigate what happened. I don’t blame them for being grumpy. It’s glaringly obvious what happened. Gaddafi was captured and killed by irregulars, not professional soldiers. Their level of training and standards of discipline were virtually non-existent. What did anyone expect to happen to Gaddafi if he fell into the hands of a rabble army at the height of a pitched battle? That they’d read him his rights?
Even democratic governments aren’t averse to a bit of revenge. Think Osama Bin Laden.
In any case, only minutes before he was despatched, a combination of British, French and American air-power had tried to achieve the exact same end with rockets and bombs. If they’d succeeded, wouldn’t that have been even more cold-blooded? Death by remote control?
Yes, Gaddafi was murdered in cold blood. We don’t need an inquiry to tell us that. But what are we going to do about it? Drag his killers to the Hague? Insist the Libyan authorities prosecute and imprison them? Oh, please.
A ghastly chapter has come to its gruesome and entirely predictable close. Let the dead bury the dead.