The people who defend the befriending of Gaddafi, such as Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, insist he promised he wouldn't use weapons such as tear gas "against his own people", which seems a liberal attitude towards someone you've derided as a madman for 30 years. Presumably Blair said to him: "Now I'm trusting you here, so if you DO open fire on thousands of protesters demanding a minimum wage, you'll not just be letting me down, you'll be letting yourself down."
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/mark-steel/mark-steel-i-know-lets-sell-weapons-to-a-lunatic-2236066.html
The Western leaders now condemning Colonel Gaddafi as a madman must be perplexed as to what's gone wrong with him, because up until a month ago they obviously thought he was perfectly sane and well-balanced – otherwise they wouldn't have sold him all those tanks. They must wonder if the stress of being a dictator has got to him, and if he'd had a fortnight off and started yoga all this trouble could have been avoided.
So maybe the best way to intervene is to send him a good shrink. Then they could make a report for the UN that went: "His desire to refer to his fellow Libyans as 'Cockroaches' who must be killed suggests the patient is experiencing the trauma of feeling he's a woman trapped in a Colonel's body. And the need to make speeches while under an umbrella is a classic symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, so maybe we shouldn't send him any tanks for at least three weeks, until he's better."
They should have been prepared for this, because they all said he was mad for 30 years, then suddenly decided he was rational about 10 years ago, by coincidence around the time he announced he'd back the West in the war on terror. To be fair, some of those who embraced him at this time are impressively unrepentant. For example, Peter Mandelson insists when Gaddafi renounced his desire for weapons of mass destruction we had to "bring him into the fold" with deals for oil and arms.
Because when a dictator tells you he no longer wants destructive weapons, what else can you do but welcome his change of heart, by selling him a desertful of destructive weapons? It's like wandering up to someone at Alcoholics Anonymous and saying: "Congratulations on finally renouncing drink. Now to celebrate let's go and get pissed."
