this makes no sense to me

“Death of a dictator: Questions remain

As Moammar Gadhafi is buried, there is still a huge amount of uncertainty about how the longtime Libyan leader met his death, what happened during the last battle in Sirte — and what it all means for the future of Libya.”

Both major aspects of this ongoing story make no sense to me– both the supposed “mystery” of how Qaddafi died, and the veneer of deep soul-searching going on about it. I think the situation is really quite simple.

1. Obviously, Qaddafi was executed. Watch any of that video, and it will become very clear what his last minutes were like. He was captured by the rebels and paraded through Sirte for a little while, abused and threatened and finally shot in the head. I don’t doubt that the rebel leadership might really have preferred a trial. But Qaddafi was captured after a fierce battle of some weeks. He was captured most likely by a group of violent hotheads with automatic weapons, and many had lost family members in Misrata or elsewhere, and some of them may even have been personally tortured by Qaddafi’s regime at some point. These same people were probably also worried about Qaddafi’s vampire-like survival ability over the decades, and at some point they simply decided to take the law into their own hands. I’m not sure where the big mystery is here. A big secret conspiracy behind it all? I don’t think such a theory is necessary to explain the likely events.

2. As for the supposed moral dilemma– well, yes, the way Qaddafi was treated at the end looked pretty deplorable to me. The way Mussolini was treated at the end was also inhumane, but I doubt we would have tracked down and charged the responsible partizani with crimes either. And here too, there’s just no way Libya is going to arrest and charge whoever shot Qaddafi, their national monster. Not everyone in the country, but enough people in the country, will be quite happy that he was summarily shot.

And furthermore, NATO would have been perfectly happy to have killed Qaddafi with an airstrike at any time in the past 7 months. I’m not saying that combat fatalities are the same thing as the deliberate killing of a prisoner-of-war (the former is war, the latter is a war crime), but let’s not get too sanctimonious about the out-of-control and angry Libyan rebels who almost surely did this, based on what we see the available video.

Summary executions are definitely a terrible idea, I’m just not sure what people expect the end result of this inquiry to be. If we arm a bunch of rebels to take out a supposed monster on our behalf, and then they take the assignment seriously and actually kill the supposed monster… we can say they should have given him up for trial, but why pretend to be surprised that things went as far as they did? This wasn’t exactly an organized army attack on Sirte with responsible officers and so forth, at least not as far as I can see from the video.

Nonetheless, this was no way to treat anyone, and I’m sorry I ever saw the video. Demanding the arrest of these guys would be analogous to demanding the arrest of the Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden. Is a trial the right thing in principle? Yes. But…

[ADDENDUM: Later headline: “Was Gadhafi’s killing a war crime?” Well, yes. You can’t just shoot a surrendered prisoner in the head, and everyone knows that. The question as I see it is– what next? Give a group of Libyan rebels a long prison sentence for this? I just don’t see it, wrong though it was, what they did.]