It's more about
realpolitik; look at the way 'Uncle Joe' was
our faithful ally [with the millions he was slaughtering happily
overlooked by the UK govt.] until his ambitions grew beyond
what we could politically stomach- post '46 he then became the
enemy.
Gadaffi [note spelling' although IMO a better transliteration
from the Arabic would be 'Khadafy'] is a borderline psychotic but
from what little I know of his early years he was a brave and
resourceful junior officer, but [as there tends to be with such
people] there's no doubting his high intelligence and low cunning.
The dual corruptions of power and ambition [as they usually tend
to do] seem to have rendered him more than a little insane.
There is considerable unbiased evidence that during the 80s and
90s he cracked-down on liberals with torture and murder, and I'm
still convinced that some of the Guantanamo kidnapped were
'interrogated' here, too.
That said, he has, in his rather mad way, liberalised the Libyan
economy and fashioned the state into something resembling quite
closely, say, the Singaporean tiger under Lee Kwan Yew. He seems
still to be remarkably popular with the 'electorate'- always a
subjective judgement in an unfree society, but people I have spoken
to who have been there recently say the sentiment appears to be
heartfelt- unlike our Labour govt., he introduced effective measures
to combat poverty.