From Oklahoma to Tobruk

By ROGER COHEN
NYT

LONDON — Watching Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi do his Caligula thing in the ruins of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and reading about his son’s St. Barts fests with Beyoncé, I confess that disgust yielded to nausea: enough is enough.

There are as many versions of current events in Libya as there are transliterations of the Colonel’s name but it’s already clear this is the Ceausescu chapter of the Arab spring. Qaddafi’s killing is not yet on the scale of Assad’s Hama massacre of 1982 or Saddam’s slaughter of the Shiites in 1991, but it’s up there.

There are moments when the argument for capital punishment becomes persuasive to me. This is one.

I don’t know what the nascent Benghazi-Tobruk Libyan Republic with its new-old flag stands for, apart from ending Qaddafi’s 42-year rule, and I’m not sure anyone does. I do know Arabs have had it with despots who treat their nations as personal fiefdoms and oil revenue as pocket money for their dynasties. This is about enfranchisement. It’s not about Islam, or pan-Arabism, or Socialism. It’s about acquiring rights grounded in institutions and law.

(More here.)