Gaddafi is dead. As are the West's secret and horrible deals with him

As much as I was a supporter of the protests in Libya, almost right away I started worrying about the lack of any well-articulated game plan from Obama.  Verbal jujitsus like "kinetic military action" made me worry even more.  

A critical question was always about the day after.

It is now the day after, and boy has Libya gotten off to a messy start!

The video below shows in quite some graphic detail how the "mad dog" was handled after his capture.  Andrew Sullivan writes about this lynching of Gaddafi, while linking to this video:

We now have solid video evidence that some resistance fighter tried to sodomize him with a stick or a knife in the moments after his capture. One recalls what was done to Mussolini and, indeed, how the execution of Saddam Hussein turned, at the last minute, into a Shiite revenge fantasy. It's an ugly, ugly thing - when dictators lose power. And not a great omen for a genuinely new start for Libya.

Gaddafi's torturous end perhaps was even better than what he and his regime did to many others.  But, in a civil society, even the cruel maniac is given a proper trial before sentenced to death--a proper one, unlike the show trial after Romanians threw out the Caeusescus.

Now, Obama and Sarkozy will have to wait and watch from the sidelines the consequences of their hasty involvement in a civil war in a country where two generations had experienced only a life under a dictator. 

If only Obama had come out strongly against Gaddafi from the first days of the protests--there was a chance that Gaddafi might have fled the country.  But, his dilly-dallying emboldened the delusional dictator.

David Riff writes that Western governments are perhaps relieved that Gaddafi is not alive; here is why:

Qaddafi was, quite simply, a man who knew too much. Taken alive, he would have almost certainly have been handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had indicted him -- along with his son, Saif al-Islam, and brother-in-law and military intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi (whereabouts unknown) -- for crimes against humanity in late June. Imagine the stir he would have made in The Hague. There, along with any number of fantasies and false accusations, he would almost certainly have revealed the extent of his intimate relations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the details of his government's collaboration with Western intelligence services in counterterrorism, with the European Union in limiting migration from Libyan shores, and in the granting of major contracts to big Western oil and construction firms.
He would have had much to tell, for this cooperation was extensive. In the war against the jihadis -- a war to which Qaddafi regularly claimed to be as committed to prosecuting as Washington, Paris, or London -- links between Libyan intelligence and the CIA were particularly strong, as an archive of secret documents unearthed by Human Rights Watch researchers has revealed. If anything, the CIA's British counterpart, MI6, was even more involved with the Qaddafi family.

Oh what a tangled web we weave!

even if Qaddafi was not targeted and, as Omran al-Oweib, the electrical engineer-turned-rebel leader who commanded the forces that finally caught up with Qaddafi in a tunnel just outside Sirte, continues to insist, really was killed in a crossfire, leaders like Sarkozy, Blair, Brown, and the Bush State Department must surely be sleeping better these last few nights. Whether they deserve to is another question entirely.