(first published 1st November 2012)
As the dust begins to settle on the troubled country of Libya the dark secrets of the Gaddafi regime are fast being excavated. The all too inevitable and sinister accounts of torture and rape that surface after the fall of all totalitarian regimes has also been accompanied by the obscene and perverted truths about the private life of Colonel Gaddafi. The images of the regime’s discrete and oh so tasteful gold clad palaces have given us an insight into the fantasy world that invariably develops within dictatorships. And an interesting highlight amongst the information pouring out of Tripoli about the deceased dictator has been his supposed infatuation and crush on the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice.
However it has been another one of the Colonel’s love affairs that has been the favourite expose of the media, as the now notorious photos of Tony Blair embracing Gaddafi in his Bedouin tent personify for many western corruption and collaboration with Middle Eastern despots and the hypocrisy and insincerity of our former prime minister. However if subscribers to such a view could be invited to put such visceral analysis aside for one moment and asked to evaluate the fine details of the deals struck by Blair behind those infamous photographs, then a more interesting and, dare it be said, admirable incite comes to light.
If we cast our minds back to December of 2003 and remember the extraordinary declaration made by the Libyan regime that it would renounce and dismantle its illegal and clandestine nuclear and chemical weapons programs along with its ballistic missile capabilities then we can start to gain a more informed knowledge of Libya’s relationship with the west. It was in the shadow of the fall of a fellow Arab tyrant for his failure to comply with the non-proliferation treaty that Libya’s dictator decided that breaking international law had its consequences. Notably Gaddafi decided to go to Mr Blair and President Bush to relinquish his stockpile of WMD and not to Kofi Annan, Jacque Chirac or Gerhard Schroder. Information gained from both the former Iraqi regime and the Libyan regime also led to the dismantling of the A.Q.Khan network which had supplied many of the regions dictatorships with illicit material. And in exchange for this little know triumph in the field of international arms control diplomatic relations were renewed with Libya and noted Bedouin tent photo-ops convened. Undoubtedly a small price to pay.
The discussed disarmament was all the more significant for those who remembered it when in February 2011 the Libyan people joined with parts of the army to rise up and overthrow their dictator in the bloody civil war which has only just come to an end. The haunting question that has to be asked is if Gaddafi had not been forced to relinquish his WMD in 2003 would we have seen a repeat of the horrors that we saw in 1991 after the first gulf war when Saddam Hussein gassed a similar rebellion into submission with truly horrific consequences. And secondly if Benghazi had been drenched in VX nerve gas and other such devices then would the international community have had the ability to intervene if Gaddafi possessed the chemical or nuclear deterrence combined with a ballistic missile capability which he was developing before 2003. Luckily such images will remain as counterfactuals but only thanks to those much despised figures Tony Blair and George Bush who made sure that Gaddafi’s WMD was in Oakridge Tennessee in 2011 and not falling on Benghazi. So with all this in mind shouldn’t our former prime minister receive some token of recognition or will it be left to historians to recognise him as a leader who was not afraid to recognise that the truly great moral questions facing the world are not black and white but instead uninviting shades of grey.
You decide
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