IT almost seemed as if their statements had been coordinated. Western intervention in Syria, declared President Bashar al-Assad, would precipitate an earthquake in the Middle East, choosing to ignore the fact that a seismic shift has already been under way in the region since the beginning of the year.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), meanwhile, declared that it had no intention of journeying down the road to Damascus — even though the Syrian dictatorship has been ruthless in its repression, which has accounted for an estimated 3,000 deaths and a vastly higher number of arrests.

Muammar Qadhafi's Libyan regime had been guilty of a lot less when it was decided to proceed against it militarily, with a United Nations Security Council resolution to impose a no-fly zone in order to protect civilian lives being loosely interpreted as providing sanction for western-imposed regime change by two of the largest ex-colonial powers and their chief neocolonial successor.

Two months after the regime had been toppled, a French warplane and a US Predator drone were still instrumental in facilitating the extremely sordid finale, when a convoy containing Qadhafi and one of his sons was apparently on its way out of Libya (reportedly with the assistance of South African mercenaries).

The subsequent hand-wringing over Qadhafi's final moments, when the demonstrably deluded ex-tyrant was tortured and arbitrarily executed, have hardly occasioned an official expression of qualms about Nato's blatantly partisan role in a civil war, where the mandate to protect civilian lives was on occasion turned on its head when western warplanes themselves produced civilian casualties, and wilfully ignored when the ex-rebels, by then entrenched in Tripoli, went on a murderous rampage in Sirte.

Although the National Transitional Council (NTC) has agreed to investigate Qadhafi's murder — after initially falsely claiming that he had been caught in crossfire — it has been reported that the identity of the man who put him out of his misery is common knowledge in Misrata, but that the new authorities wouldn't dare try to apprehend him for fear of unleashing factional violence within the ex-rebel coalition.

It is no doubt true that other ex-dictators have in the past suffered comparable consequences — the fate of Benito Mussolini towards the end of the Second World War and that of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife in 1989 have been cited as precedents.

Perhaps the closest analogy, though, is with the lynching of Najibullah following the Taliban's capture of Kabul. It has also been noted, not entirely without justification, that plenty of Qadhafi's opponents came to a sticky end in circumstances that weren't recorded on phone-cameras.

There can be little doubt, however, that the manner of his execution complicates Qadhafi's opponents' quest for the moral high ground even more than their crucial reliance on Nato forces to bring about regime change.

Notwithstanding the NTC's nomination of a new interim prime minister this week, it will continue to combat perceptions of puppetry. It is incidentally notable that the NTC wanted Nato, which suspended its military operations on the weekend, to continue with its sorties until the end of the year.

This suggests, above all, that the transitional council is uncertain about the level of its popular support. True, there has lately been little evidence of sympathy for Qadhafi — but to some extent that may well be an expression of the same sort of fear, albeit from a different source — that dampened the urge to revolt in Tripoli earlier this year.

For all that, the expressions of jubilation that greeted Qadhafi's demise suggest the powers that helped to bring it about are rather pleased with themselves — perhaps not least in the light of the extended debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

If they are so confident, though, of having acted sensibly and righteously in Libya, then why not proceed to do the same favour for the Syrians? Is it because Assad has more solid networks of international support, with Russia and China prepared to veto Security Council resolutions rather than merely abstain, as they did in the Libyan context?

It's less than a decade ago, though, that such a resolution was not deemed necessary before the launch of US-led aggression against Iraq.

That misadventure is expected to conclude at the end of the year. The shape of things to come in Iraq remains indeterminate, although it's likely Iran will assert greater influence over the nation's future than the US.

Last week's Tunisian elections sounded a considerably more sonorous note of hope than any such exercise in Iraq, despite the primacy of an Islamist party called an-Nahda — which, not surprisingly, is more willing to identify itself with Turkey's ruling AKP than with Hamas.

The trajectory of events in Egypt, on the other hand, provides deeper cause for concern, particularly in view of last month's massacre — by the supposedly interim regime's forces, mind you, rather than Islamists — of Coptic Christians.

The mercurial and unpredictable Qadhafi was considered untrustworthy even by the nations that sporadically collaborated with him — either as part of the so-called war on terror or in interests of exploiting his nation's natural resources.

That's one of the main reasons why no one was particularly sorry to go — with the exception of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, who helped to perpetuate a fallacy among sections of the left by elevating him to the status of an anti-imperialist icon. Assad, on the other hand, is seen as a guarantor of stability; even Syria's supposed arch-enemy Israel sees him “better the devil you know….”

That could, of course, change if his Alawite clan's grasp over Syria is further eroded. However, as things stand, when Barack Obama's reacted to Qadhafi's death by suggesting it should serve as a warning to all dictators, he might well have added: '...unless your name is Assad or Ali Abdullah Saleh, or you happen to be a thoroughly unrepresentative potentate presiding over a preponderance of oil wealth'.

Sometimes it's hard to decide what's worse: the American military role in the region or Washington's breathtaking hypocrisy.

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