As I write this, Colonel Ghaddafi is holed up in his compound, a sad and lonely old man with dodgy plastic surgery and an inappropriate hair-transplant, musing on how he has reached this endgame. It's only a few years ago that he was embracing the West, and being embraced by Blair, but now his own people have turned against him, and the wrath of the West rains down on his head. To the Arabs, he was somebody who regularly cocked a snoop at America, and something of an idiosyncratic hero to many. To others, he was a mad dog, volatile and uncontrollable. He provided arms for terrorists, sanctioned the Lockerbie bombing and generally got under the skin of everybody, including his fellow Arab leaders. Now he has nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide, and his underlings are deserting him in droves. It's impossible to feel sorry for such a tyrant, and I suspect that in the end, he won't be taken alive - a show trial would prove to be too embarrassing to the West - so expect him to meet his maker in much the same way as Osama Bin Laden, under a hail of bullets and a burial at sea.