I've travelled extensively in the Middle East. I found Libya in a number of ways more 'free' than, for example, Saudi Arabia, or Kuwait, or Bahrain, or Jordan. True, that's not saying much, but to paint Gadaffi as an exceptionally and unusually, super-bad dictator, compared to these other regimes, is exaggeated and a distortion of the facts.

What made Gadaffi appear, at least in western eys, worse, was his anti-western rhetoric and his disdain for the other, western-backed tyrants in the region. It was ultimately this stance that led to his downfall, as the regional tyrants and the west seized a golden opportunity to topple him and gain control of Libya's oil and gas reserves once more, returning Libya to the pre-Gadaffi era, when Libya, though nominally independent, was really a western colony in all but name.

And this is what the people of Libya have to look forward to, not democracy, but something closer to the model of enlightened and stabil tyranny we prefer in our client states.

But will the ordinary Libyans accept their forced return into the western sphere of influence just like that, after so many years of independence? That will be an interesting question.