In Scarface, Al Pacino’s Tony Montana interrupts date night with his wife in a fancy restaurant to lecture his fellow diners: “You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fucking fingers and say, ‘That’s the bad guy!’” indignantly, he tells them, “Say goodnight to the bad guy.” By the time the world finally said goodnight to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, he had been playing the role of bad guy on the global stage for more than 40 years. That includes a strange period, during the last eight years or so of his reign, when the same Western powers that had demonized him for so long decided to embrace him as a reformed good guy. At the same time that George W. Bush and Tony Blair were spreading the message that any approach to dealing with Saddam Hussein other than military annihilation was morally unacceptable, Blair paid an official visit to Gaddafi, legitimizing his regime.
That same week, according to the British TV documentary Mad Dog: Inside The Secret World Of Muammar Gaddafi, British intelligence forces abducted one of Gaddafi’s enemies and delivered the man to the dictator’s justice. (Sentenced to die, he was spared execution thanks to the 2011 uprising that ended with Gaddafi’s own death.) The film includes overheated voiceover narration—possibly by its director-producer, Christopher Olgiati, though there’s no official credit for whoever’s doing the talking. At one point, the narrator asks one of Gaddafi’s former associates why the U. S. and Britain were so ready to take a forgiving attitude toward the man generally believed to have been responsible for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. By then, the viewer knows that the narrator has a real propensity for leading questions to which everyone already knows the answer, and the answer to this one has been planted at the start of the program, when it’s reported that Libya’s oil reserves netted a billion dollars a week.