With Col. Moammar Gadhafi's regime in ruins and Gadhafi himself on the run, it is time to ponder just how he survived in power for so long. Greed for markets and money, it seems, often trumped the West's supposed concern for basic human rights.
Major Western countries compromised themselves over Libya for decades. After all, Gadhafi survived President Ronald Reagan's punitive 1986 bombing raid on his compound only because former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi and former Maltese Prime Minister Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici tipped him off.
Craxi, of course, later found refuge in the embrace of another recently fallen Arab dictator, Tunisia's Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, when he fled Italy to escape imprisonment in 1992. Bonnici, for his part, continued cementing his ties with the Libyan dictator until the very end, through his association with — wait for it — the Gadhafi Prize for Human Rights.