Killing Qaddafi would go too far

There are however great risks and enormous moral issues inherent in the use of assassination as an adjunct to foreign policy and to put it in simple language; shouldn’t the world’s leading democracies be better than this?

Can it really be beyond the wit of the West’s political leaders to find an intellectually acceptable alternative to a descent into the gutter along with the terrorist, the criminal and the corrupt dictator?

If this alternative view is treated with derision by the media and widely dismissed as naive or unrealistic and bound to end in failure, then it must of course be pointed out that those targeted will undoubtedly and indeed quite properly reserve the right to retaliate in kind.