After being on the run for nearly two months, Muammar el-Qaddafi was found in a sewer outlet in his hometown of Sirte. Confused, tired and weak, he was captured by jubilant rebel fighters who, for the first time in their lives, were not afraid of the man who had ruled over them for 42 years. Initial wire reports from the Associated Press and Reuters flashed that Qaddafi had been "captured," only to be immediately revised: Qaddafi had been killed.
In the weeks leading up to his death, world leaders and so-called "experts" on Libya claimed that Qaddafi no longer had legitimacy (which suggested that he had been legitimate at some point to begin with).
Yet until the revolution began to gain momentum in March, most countries were quite happy to let this enemy of democracy stay in power.
In 2008, Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, agreed to pay the equivalent of $5 billion to compensate for the "damage inflicted on Libya by Italy during the colonial era." At face value, this is a noble cause, until you remember that this sum was paid to a government that killed thousands of its own citizens, financed international terrorism, and committed its own fair share of terrorist acts (most notably orchestrating the bombing of the infamous PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland).
How could such a dictator be tolerated for so long? The more cynical among us will point to the black gold—Libya has the 10th-largest oil reserves in the world.
One would hope that the self-proclaimed "land of the free" would view a bloody dictatorship as an outrage. Instead, the relationship between the United States and a country that was neither too communist nor too capitalist; neither too pan-Arab nor too pan-African; neither too militaristic nor too peaceful was, to put it lightly, ambiguous. This is really nothing new. For far too long the West has pursued hypocritical policies when it comes to dealing with authoritarian regimes. Some countries, like Yugoslavia and Pinochet's Argentina, are ostracized, whereas others, like the Contras' Nicaragua and Qaddafi 's Libya, are tolerated.
Indeed, it required an uprising with enough momentum, and a population with much to lose but more to gain, for this dictatorship to fall. Now it is up to the National Transition Council, the interim government of this war-torn nation, to start the long process of reconstruction, rehabilitation, reconciliation, and renewal, as it begins to bring democracy to a country deprived of it for half a century.
Never forget that it was a combination of willful ignorance of human rights violations, post-colonial guilt, and hypocrisy on the part of the West that allowed this savage dictatorship to stay in power for so long. Thankfully, its rule has come to an end, albeit 42 years too late.