As the drip-drip-drip of the acid from the Hutton Inquiry strips away the trust and moral authority from Tony Blair, an event in Libya went relatively unnoticed last week.

Qadhafi's government accepted responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing which left 270 people dead, and paid 2.7 billion dollars in compensation to the relatives and heirs of the deceased. After years of denial and UN-imposed sanctions that have gutted the country's oil-based economy, Tripoli has finally accepted its guilt in the expectation that these crippling sanctions will now be lifted.

Although these two unrelated events have nothing in common, they do provide a vivid contrast between two systems. In London, the Hutton Inquiry is open to the public and every day newspapers and news programmes contain little but the minutiae of the day's proceedings together with all their nuances and implications for the Labour government. The event in Libya, although widely reported, has passed without any noticeable comment or condemnation either in the West or in the Islamic world.

In the West, people expect the kind of behaviour from Middle Eastern despots that Qadhafi has finally confessed to. In the Islamic world, we are firstly in denial, ascribing such atrocities to the CIA or Mossad, or justifying it on the basis of some real or perceived wrong. Although how the terrorist bombing of a passenger plane full of civilians can be defended is beyond me. And if the culprit does confess, then we brush such barbaric conduct under the carpet, referring to it as the country's 'internal problem'.

Qadhafi's 34 years in power is just one example of the tyranny that is in place in much of the Arab world, apart from some notable exceptions in the Gulf. Here, a handful of enlightened rulers have used their oil wealth wisely to make life better for their subjects. But in the rest of the region, the desert is not just geographical: the slightest stirring of democracy is ruthlessly suppressed.

In any democratic government, if a leader confessed to a crime like the Lockerbie bombing and then paid out billions in compensation from the state exchequer, his days would be numbered. A storm of protest would lead to his impeachment if he did not have the decency to resign first.

In Britain (and to a lesser extent in the United States), elected leaders are under fire for having misled the people about the threat Saddam Hussein posed. Leading their nations to war on possibly exaggerated and even contrived intelligence reports is unacceptable to all those who came on board the pro-war platform reluctantly when told that they and their children were under threat.

Tony Blair is today fighting for his political survival, and the fact that such a popular and gifted politician is now being skewered daily is a tribute to the democratic culture that is in place here. After all, Saddam Hussein is hardly a popular figure, and the events in Iraq are fairly remote. Nevertheless, the government is on the defensive as fresh revelations of deceit in high places are reported every day.

In most of the Muslim world, such a process would be unthinkable. In Pakistan, it took nearly 30 years for the Hamoodur Rahman report to be made public after it had been commissioned to inquire into the causes for the military defeat in East Pakistan. If we look at the history of conflicts over the last half century, we find that Muslim countries or groups were involved in them in a significant number. But no leader was ever asked to explain to his people why he led them into war.

This complete lack of accountability has played havoc with institutions and economies alike. We like to blame the West and organizations like the IMF and the World Bank for our backwardness, but ostrich-like, we do not see where the fault actually lies. In most cases, poverty and disease are the direct result of poor governance, not a lack of resources.

Take Libya as an example: here is an oil-rich country with a relatively small population. There is no reason why it should not today be one of the richest countries in the world. But because of the antics of its leader, it is not merely backward, but is a laughing stock. Over the years, there have been quite a few crackpot groups that have benefited from Qadhafi's largesse. He has supported secessionist movements around the world, thereby incurring the wrath of governments that were delighted to vote for sanctions once a Libyan connection was established in the Lockerbie bombing.

When commenting on the chaos in Iraq today, many observers are prone to say the country needs a 'strong leader', and that it is not yet ready for democracy. They extend this argument to Iraq's neighbours as well, forgetting that they are not 'ready for democracy' because they have never had any.

When we survey the political, economic and intellectual stagnation in most of the Muslim world, the one strand we see that is common to all of them is the lack of democracy. And when we look at the developed world, the presence of democracy is the common element in all these nations. We can either draw the obvious conclusion and do something about it, or continue on our path to irrelevance and oblivion.