Lluís Bassets on WMDs in Libya

At the end of October the new Libyan government discovered an arsenal of chemical weapons of mass destruction which Muammar al-Gaddafi had secretly hoarded. This underlines once more the differences in the way the West treated the dictators in Libya and Iraq, Lluís Bassets comments in his blog Del Alfiler al Elefante: "It was the detail that was missing to round off the comparison between the nonsense in Iraq and the success in Libya. It was nonsense from the start: demonising Saddam Hussein without any proof of the existence of a weapons stockpile, while conversely allowing Gaddafi to join the club of the honourable without adequate guarantees or inspections. ... The former had international inspectors in every nook and cranny without satisfactory results while the latter was allowed to do business with the most important representatives of Western capitalism without being subjected to any controls whatsoever. ... Everything that was done wrong in Iraq was done right in Libya: the UN resolution, the coalition with the participation of the Arab world, aerial support from Nato, the toppling of the dictator by the Libyans themselves. And what went wrong in Libya, for instance that Gaddafi was lynched, didn't exactly go right in Iraq."

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