For all the negative rantings from President Bush's detractors, the War on Terror has resulted in yet another positive development for the entire world.  Colonel Moammar Ghaddafi, President of Libya, has announced that he is giving up his clandestine nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.  He announced that he will allow international weapons inspectors to verify all of this, unconditionally.  Furthermore, he renounced his country's long-time support of terrorism, and called upon other Arab nations to do the same.  He's been negotiating all of this with President Bush and PM Blair for the last nine months, in secret. (Yes! "Unilateral" action; no French, no UN! Won't Kofi be furious?)

What a pragmatist.  Ghaddafi is the first Middle East dictator to clearly see that all those things will not be tolerated by the rest of the world any longer, and that pretty words and promises will no longer suffice to appease the West.  Supporting terrorism and concealing illegal weapons are no longer a guarantee of power in the world. They are a guarantee of one's own destruction.

It turns out that Ghaddafi approached President Bush and Prime Minister Blair as our troops were entering Iraq.  After the last time he was on the wrong end of US weaponry, it seems, he learned how to read the writing on the wall.  Five days after seeing Saddam Hussein getting his head checked for lice on international television, Ghaddafi decided he just doesn't want that free medical exam the US Army would offer.  Smart man.

Let's hope other supporters of terrorism turn out to be as smart, or at least as pragmatic.

Note: I wrote about this at greater length in a new article for Useless Knowledge, an online magazine. It's called Libya: The First Domino Falls.