If The African Union (AU) had allowed Muammar Qaddafi, Libya's clown of a leader, to chair the continental body for another year, as he apparently desired, the rest of the world would rightly have consigned it to the dustbin of comic diplomacy. Mr Qaddafi, now the world's longest-ruling dictator, with 41 years under his cartridge belt, has been re-embraced by some in the West as a reward for dropping his nuclear ambitions and because of his vast oil wealth. But for all his grandiose pretensions, he is a buffoon-and a particularly nasty one.
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