Exactly.

I don't care about him dieing it is a PR victory, the battle was over him dead or not. Two things do annoy me though, first they brought him out alive and then let people mob him to death? Common really? The guy might have deserved the death penalty but that is not how things should be done. Secondly true to form idiots fire there guns in the air in celebration. When this has happened in other parts of the world people die every single time. Most recently 4 people died and 17 were injured in baghdad after some good old celebratory gunfire.

Maybe now people openly celebrating when someone dies will have there blood lust satisfied for a few days at least.

Yes, a person got executed and now several different countries will have years of rebuilding in front of them. What comes out of the rebuilding efforts, no one knows. I do think it is a safe guess that Egypt and Libya will have people a multitude of ideas of how to crawl out of the ashes into an "age of glory".

As you may have noticed, I'm a glass half-empty sort of person, meaning for the uninitiated, that I am pessimistic.

Well, if I am ever executed I'd like to die via jello shots from the belly of Angelina Jolie. But since I am not a tyrant, DAMN, is that what I have to do to get chicks, take over a country and become a dictator?

I'll stick with internet porn.

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OK, I am guessing that you do not know the history of the almighty jello shot. It is actually quite a tale.

Go back to the early 50's. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the place where hydrogen bombs were developed. Now for some reason, the security detail had an issue with booze and nukes in the same place. Mirthless idiots.

Well, the mathematician who developed the model for how neutrons propagate (it is literally called the drunkard's walk) figured out how to get booze past them. It seems that there is this little old woman in the town outside who makes the best jello. Yes, the guards were that dumb.

Now, while the guards were mirthless, the guy who invented the jello shot was a noted satrists in academic circles. Because this is the internet:

This has been a week that makes me ashamed to be British. The frontpages of our newspapers yesterday were the worst I've seen a long while. Why are we so obsessed with Gadaffi's dying moments and his dead, bloody body? Why are all these Libyans queuing up to this meat freezer to shout and swear at the body? This is vengeance...a very ugly side of human nature.

One stray thought that occurs to me is that transubstantiation-believing Christians (eg. Catholics) believe they literally eat the flesh and drink the blood of a man every Sunday at the celebration of the eucharist. It is only God's mercy, they say, that the body and the blood are magically disguised in the inoffensive form of a wafer.

I think the transitional government was by defination a government, perhaps not one which functioned to any high degree by a government all the same. They had the level of function required to wage war. They were around him, I believe it was the people they were using to fight Gadhafi which pulled him out of that hole.

Now If it was just some random angry guy then fine, I don't think anyone will be overly upset, that can happen even with a functioning government and there is very little anyone can do about it. The issue is if this transitional government which is claiming to be the government let it happen (by handing him over to angry people) or did it themselves, that is where it is a problem, and really it does look like they let it happen, I remember reports of his body being enveloped by a mob of people, how does he go from captured by forces fighting for this transitional government alive to dead and in a mob. It could be the work of one angry guy but if it wasn't then there is a problem. We know he didn't die from wounds he had when he was captured as he died from a shot to the head and since he was in the company of forces controled by the transitional government I think it is safe to say they killed him. Even then if they acted without being told to kill him its not really that big a deal but did they make that decision themselves? This is why an investigation is needed.

Reminds me too much of Saddam. An otherwise happy moment reduced to butchery, fear, and disgust. Nothing to celebrate here. The ball was dropped. And Ghadaffi was already irrelevant anyway.

I don't reserve my criticism for the East. It's mostly the fault of the West (especially Britain, France, Spain, and the US) that the middle east is in the shambles it is.

I still have the right to condemn this as wrong. And I'm exercising it.

I agree with most of what you said, but not in having compassion and ignoring an issue like this. The fastest way they'll learn it was wrong is by widespread condemnation. Excusing it for any reason is akin to telling them it was ok, and giving lease to it happening again. It wasn't ok. And if they keep it up they're as bad as he was, meaning toppling him had no effect except to change the specific individuals prospering under the new regime. Meaning nothing of note happened at all.

 The lives of Libyans will be significantly worse, not better. Libya had probably the highest standard of living in Africa, subsidized housing, education and food; universal health-care, high life expectancy and a crime rate comparable to Japan's. 

I'm not happy about the way he was killed, but it isn't like this was a professional operation through a well run and well equipped police force or something.

This was a bunch of angry civilians running around with guns.  I'm surprised he was shot him in the head, rather than beaten to death by the mob that found him.

I am torn on it's display. I most certainly do not want the west to go back to the public executions of the past. But this does send a warning to ALL the theocrats and fascist states that if you monopolize power and resources this could happen to you.

I don't care what kind of government you set up, if you get to the point of only caring about your circle of friends and end up with a "let them eat cake" attitude, the "outsiders" will revolt when they get a chance.

Power cannot be stagnant or unchangable. The rise of the Soviet Union was a result of centeralized and monopolized wealth. The fall of the Soviet Union happened for the same reason, Instead of one class or one family having a monopoly it was one party.

That's true if you were pro-Qaddahfi, but not at all true if you weren't.

Where was his protection of political and religious and speech dissent? I am sorry, whatever you think he threw at the public to placate them, it must not have been good enough otherwise they wouldn't have rebeled.

Jefferson supported the French Revolution, he most certainly did not or would not have supported the dictatorship that followed.

Why is it if Gadaffi wasn't fascist, why did his minions try to prevent a woman raped by police from speaking to the media? In a civilized world, in an open society, if someone is lying, you don't prevent them from doing it, you allow them to lie and use the courts to sue them. She got hauled off without probable cause without proof that she had committed a crime. It was only the appeal of the international community that she got released. If she had made the same accusation 10 years ago, she'd be in prison or dead without due process.

Gadaffi had a monopoly. It doesn't matter if he feed everyone, he was still a dictator, just like Stalin. There is no such thing as a kind dictator.

They did not really have a system of laws or structured government, it was basically all at the whim of Gaddaffi.

He did what he personally thought was for the benefit of the people of Libya, and if that suited you as a citizen, that was fine.

But there was no allowance for dissent, if you disagreed with his ideas of how Libya should be run, in any detail, it could be big trouble for you if you tried to object - imprisonment, torture, whatever.

And it seems he got more eccentric as he aged.

There are strong indications that he and his family kept a rather significant part of the Oil wealth to themselves, even while using part of it to raise the general standard of living for the population, who had no say in how it was distributed.

A bit like 'Uncle Joe' Stalin. There were many people who were better off under his regime too, than what they had before, and there were still parts of the old Soviet Union where the 'peasants' mourned Stalin's departure.

If a group from outside your nation funded Christian fundamentalist in overthrowing your government is that the question you'd ask, if it was so great why did some people not like it?

You could call all those things fascism but then you'd just be using it as a pejorative and the term would be so generalized as to be nearly meaningless. I mean according to you communism would be fascism even though Italian fascists who defined the term described it as anti-communist.  

According to Benito Mussolini fascism is corporatism. It is a merger of corporate and state power. FDR defined it as when private power exceeds government power and private individuals or groups take ownership of the state. By those definitions Libya was not fascist. It was authoritarian and all fascist states are, but not all authoritarian states are fascist.

Your definition of fascism is so broad that if the majority of congress and the president belonged to the same political party that would be fascism. 

Before you two were asking if he were so great why would his people reject him. I could ask if he were so bad why did NATO need to destroy the entire country's infrastructure with air strikes and fund rebels to oust someone so unpopular. 

At least under Gaddafi women had equal rights. I guess they're better off now without that burden under sharia law.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/26/world/africa/libya-sharia/

There were over 8 thousand NATO air strikes targeting residential and government buildings, water infrastructure and the electricity grid using advanced ordinances including uranium coated munitions.

http://www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_2011_09/20110906_110906-oup-update.pdf

It has a lot to do with their country's infrastructure being destroyed. Will you look for some victory from me from the fact that something was left standing, because that's kind of pathetic?

Quite a lot was left standing.  Those 8,000 sorties weren't 8,000 passes with B-52s dropping giant gobs of bombs, like LBJ did to Vietnam during Rolling Thunder.  And the entire POINT of precision guided munitions is that they are ... precise.

Wars are a lot less nasty than they were just 60 or 70 years ago.  Be glad they had smart bombs.  If they had dumb gravity bombs all the infrastructure just might have been destroyed.

And you might want to make sure you're facing the correct direction on your bicycle -- back pedaling can be dangerous.

Sigh.

Please, turn around on your bicycle seat and pedal in the correct direction.

For the most part, the damage was either caused by Qaddafi, or was limited to those parts of the country where Qaddafi was the strongest.  There are open ports, cities with just as much running water and electricity as before, etc.  The TNC and NATO worked together to avoid completely destroying the country -- your claim -- as well as preventing Qaddafi from destroying what NATO wasn't targeting.

NOW I see why you were pedaling backwards -- you needed to go move the goalposts!

Your premise is that if the rebels had so much support, why did NATO have to destroy the entire country.  Well, NATO didn't destroy the entire country.  The UN mandate was to protect the rebels and civilian population from Qaddafi's army.  The NTC =and= NATO worked together.  The NTC has fire control people on the ground and helped to call in air strikes.  It wasn't like NATO said "Hey, let's go drop a f*ck load of bombs all over the place!"

Remember -- the NTC =wanted= NATO in the air.  They =thanked= NATO for being up there.

Gauche is right, it would be silly to argue that right now the lives of the majority of Libyans are better than they were before the war, but that is the very nature of war. The country now has the potential to improve again, possibly exceed where it was before the war in a couple of decades if things go very well, they might, they also might not. You cannot predict how things are going to turn out yet. But a whole lot of good potential is today even if things go right. This is why I say until they get that democracy and the right choices are made everything that has happened has been for nothing and a huge waste. And even if things go the right way and the country recovers this whole mess has been one big tragedy, not the glorious victory many people seem to think it is.