Shed no tears for Qaddafi

Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post

Muammar al-Qaddafi may have had “a rotten death,” said Charles Krauthammer, but he earned every minute of it. Grainy camera footage of the Libyan tyrant’s violent end at the hands of an angry mob of revolutionary soldiers has human-rights groups wringing their hands in moral condemnation. But Qaddafi had other options. Months ago, he was offered a chance to leave Libya and live out his days in asylum in Nicaragua or Saudi Arabia; he might even have negotiated for international amnesty for his crimes. Instead of that “nice fat retirement,” Qaddafi vowed to fight to the death, shelling and killing thousands of Libyans in a final display of egomaniacal madness. “He got what he chose.”

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For all the suffering the tyrant inflicted over decades, he suffered “perhaps an hour of torment” and a bullet to the head. “By any standard of cosmic justice, that’s mercy.” His end also serves as a visual object lesson for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and other dictators. If you choose to keep on butchering your citizens, the Qaddafi video showed them, one day you, too, will be “dragged from a stinking sewer pipe, abused, taunted, and shot.”