That aside, I used to think Uncle Sam's word meant something - if we make peace with someone, we let bygones be bygones. We don't do that "unequal treaty" crap that the Chinese (of all ideological persuasions) use to abrogate treaties they don't like, such as they did when they took back Hong Kong and Macau at gunpoint, and attacked Vietnam, India and the Soviet Union over boundary issues previously settled by treaty. But now, out of the blue, we get something like this over Gaddafi - he gives up his nukes and makes peace, and we give him the shaft. It's a travesty.
On two threads, you're the only person I've noticed who has offered this good point.
I am not a Khaddafy fan, however, and still think he is responsible for the balance of the two death sentences that were never meted out to his underlings, and for his own guilty involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, and as well for the punishment yet to be measured out to the mullahs who originally commissioned the bombing as a revenge attack for the "Robocruiser"/Vincennes affair -- after they accepted our apologies and our reparations.
I'm not pretending to offer the last measure of justice or the last word in well-drawn statecraft, but merely to point out that there are unpaid bills still pending from Lockerbie.
Excellent analysis. We simply come off as bully and the bad guys learn this.
American foreign policy is a mess.