Why carrots for Libya, but only sticks for Iraq?

The difference may be that Colonel Gaddafi is simply more adept and more far-sighted than Saddam Hussein

Libya's agreement with the US and Britain to dismantle its programme for developing weapons of mass destruction suggests that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was an even greater mistake than we already realised.

For Libya and Iraq share many similarities. Start with the nature of the governments. Both are or were tyrannies. Each has or had been ruled by a single ruthless dictator for many years. Both governments have or had the evil virus of paranoia in their bloodstreams. Neither has, or in the case of Iraq had, the slightest interest in democracy. So how has it come about that Saddam Hussein was classified as a monster who must be removed by force, while Colonel Gaddafi is a monster with whom we can do business?

In fact this deal denies the proposition that such rulers have no interest in making agreements with the Great Satan, the US, and his younger brother, the United Kingdom. This misapprehension was based on the notion that dictators must create fear among their populations, distrust of sinister foreign forces and a perpetual atmosphere of crisis if they are to survive. That is why, so the theory went, making agreements with the West to reduce tension is deeply unattractive to them.

Yet Colonel Gaddafi has evidently concluded that he can maintain his personal rule even while two foreign agencies, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, enter the country regularly. Their task will be to examine sites which are capable of uranium enrichment and the production of significant quantities of chemical agents whether for peaceful or military uses.

To which the response may be - well, Colonel Gaddafi has been cleverly dealing in appearances rather than reality. For the truth is that Libya possessed hardly any quantities of weapons of mass destruction anyway. Of course, as with every country in the world, it has chemical factories that can be switched into making chemical agents for military use, but that is all. Indeed Western intelligence officials have known for years that Libya has been experimenting with chemical weapons in underground sites. But they never considered them an imminent threat.

Is this, then, a second similarity between Libya and Iraq? For systematic searching of Iraq has revealed no evidence of the production of weapons of mass destruction at all. Now the investigation teams are being dismantled. They found nothing. In this respect the two countries appear to have been alike.

Both undoubtedly have been interested in the idea of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction. They have done quite a bit of development work. Moreover Iraq did use chemical weapons in the war with Iran, using technology that dates back to the First World War. In practice, however, both have found it impossible to construct an effective arsenal because of the West's employment of sanctions and, in Iraq's case, inspections by the UN. In short, Iraq was no more of a threat to the West's security than Libya, indeed perhaps even less. For Saddam's Iraq never carried out a terrorist attack on the West equivalent to Libya's blowing up of the Pan Am passenger airliner over Lockerbie in Scotland.

Then there is a further, highly significant similarity. Both countries have lots of oil. They own vast reserves that can be exploited only by using Western technology. This is what permitting Libya to "rejoin the international community" actually means. For the agreement presupposes that Western oil companies, led by groups such as Shell, Exxon and BP, will soon return to develop Libya's untapped oil. If the threat of the coalition's military force has been the stick in the negotiations, the carrot has been the creation of circumstances in which Libya's oil revenues can sharply increase. Of course, exactly the same incentive could have been made available to Saddam Hussein.

What, then, explains the difference in approach? The hawks will argue that without the coalition's willingness to go to war in Iraq, and swift military victory, Colonel Gaddafi would never have come to the negotiating table. Iraq has been a salutary lesson for the Middle East's dictators. The West always wins because it has superior resources and it has a habit, once aroused, of going further than realpolitik demands, in this case an insistence upon democracy. The humiliating circumstances of Saddam's capture usefully reinforced the message. That is one way of looking at it.

Or the difference may be this. Colonel Gaddafi is simply more intelligent, more adept and more far-sighted than Saddam Hussein. He could see how to cut a deal which left him in power, whereas Saddam could not work out how this might be achieved. As we now know, the combination of sanctions and weapons inspections was succeeding in removing Iraq's ability to harm Western interests. More time was all that the inspectors needed but were not able to obtain.

Why not? That still remains the question which George Bush and Tony Blair have to answer. For what purpose did soldiers and civilians die in Iraq? After Colonel Gaddafi's survival, even regime change becomes an unconvincing response.