How do you solve a problem like Muammar Gaddafi?

1.  Offer a safe haven for Libyan pilots ordered to bomb their country Even if not many took advantage of the offer, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi might be more reluctant to dispatch his air force if he thought he might lose it.

2. Impose financial and trade sanctions on Libya, and freeze assets of the Gaddafi family. In particular, military exchanges and weapons transfers should be cancelled. Sanctions would signal to those around Colonel Gaddafi that he is going down and they should not obey his orders.

3. Impose a no-fly zone to prevent the government from bombing or strafing its own people. This is what we did to prevent Saddam Hussein from attacking his Kurdish population. We can warn Libya that if military aircraft or ships are used against civilians, Libya’s military assets will later be destroyed.

4. Encourage the Arab League and African Union to continue to pressure Libya in connection with the killing of its people. Such efforts undermine colonel Gaddafi’s nationalist warnings that this is about foreign powers trying to re-colonise Libya.

5. Seek a referral by the United Nations Security Council to the International Criminal Court for the prosecution of colonel Gaddafi for crimes against humanity.
— Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times

What Gaddafi thinks
Gaddafi, strangely enough, still refuses to believe that his time has run out. When addressing the people of Tunisia days after Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali — another friend and colleague — was toppled from the presidency by a popular revolt in January, Gaddafi said that such things don’t happen in Libya “because people are the ones who govern!”

It was a classic case of a leader blinded by power, who has been around for too long, and who seemingly believes the many stories, or should we say lies, that he has fed his people for 42 unbearable years.

One of them is that he is not president of Libya, but “Big Brother Muammar”. Another is that Libya is a democracy that is run by the people, known as popular committees.

The 69-year-old Gaddafi also probably believed that after restoring his relations with the US, portraying himself as a strategic ally in the war on terror after 9-11, and silencing all opposition at home, it was impossible for an ‘Egypt scenario’ to be repeated in Libya. When it did, Gaddafi showed his true colours, this time, refusing to believe that it was ‘Game over Brother Muammar’.
— Sami Moubayed, The Nation

Al Qaeda as an excuse?
Colonel Gaddafi is fighting for the survival of his regime and he is doing it in the best way he knows how. He survived being placed on the Bush administration’s Axis of Evil by providing  Bush with a Lockerbie settlement, his weapons of mass destruction, and most important of all the choice between supporting him or introducing the Islamists in Libya, Bush chose him.

In this instance he used the same tact with Libyans by giving them a choice between him and a fragmented Libya open to Islamists, which would in turn push America and Europe to invade the country. Additionally he gave the European the option between supporting him as they have been doing or having a fragmented Libya that would emerge as a fertile ground for Islamists who would threaten Europe and the United States.

Neither scenario is valid because Libyans are Muslims but not Islamists and they are calling for democracy not a theocracy. Gaddafi has nothing to lose by to trying to pit each side against the other.
— Mansour-EL-Kikhia, from CNN.com

Gaddafi as Frankenstein’s monster
In western eyes, equality for monsters is a non-starter if they want to maintain global control. After all, they were created for the sole purpose of keeping the gas stations open and whatever other natural resources flowing to western shores unimpeded.
When the monster finally realises he will never be accepted as a full member of the real ruling class, many times, he’ll strike out against his keeper’s interest with blind anger. In the case of Gaddafi, he has threatened to go house-to-house killing anyone he thinks opposes his rule. If that were the extent of his terror, perhaps the west could make allowances, but should he pull a Saddam Hussein, torching his oil fields, that would constitute the ultimate tragedy.

Here is where the western nations begin to fear the monsters they have created. Like a horribly neglected child or an abused pit-bull pup, monsters don’t stay small forever. They grow; they get more powerful; they become unstable and defiant.

This twisted fate of western governments is one of its own making and to hope a crazed, out of control monster like Muammar al-Gaddafi would take Mary Shelly’s benevolent monster’s way out is highly unlikely.

From the blog DailyKos