What about the people who suffer under this murderous dictator?

Colonel Gaddafi has ruled with iron fists, hangman's ropes, guns and all the other apparatus of torture

We are told that the world is no longer a safe place for murderous tyrants. The war against Saddam was a message to the torturers and killers: your days are numbered. In the Middle East in particular, according to the theory, a new age of democracy will be opened up. It is much too early to say whether that positive scenario will unfold in Iraq or neighbouring Iran or Syria. However, a major part of the post facto justification for the war was the idea that we are exporting what might be called a militant belief in the primacy of human rights. If I can borrow the words of John Milton, the Middle East is truly "a region of sorrow" in this regard.

Saddam may be in custody but the abuse of the individual by powerful states continues unabated across the Middle East. Indeed, some of our best friends are torturers. So too our enemies, and those who might be in the process of becoming our friends. Take the latest Middle Eastern leader to come in from the cold, a man we once bombed but who has now decided to make his peace with Washington and London. Colonel Gaddafi is surely glowing with pride this week. His one-time rival for the title of most bellicose Arab leader is mouldering away in prison cell while Gaddafi may soon be welcomed back into the community of nations. Saddam will face trial for his abuse of human rights in Iraq while Gaddafi could soon be planning when to make his first official visit to Europe.

It couldn't have worked out better for him. Not when you think of the charge sheet against Libya. "Over the past three decades Libya's human rights record has been appalling," says Human Rights Watch. This statement came in response to the rather extraordinary decision to appoint Libya to the UN's Committee on Human Rights.

Since 1969 Colonel Gaddafi has ruled Libya with iron fists, electric shock machines, hangman's ropes, guns and all the other apparatus of torture. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture reported in 1999 that among the abuses practised by the Libyan secret police was "car torture", where individuals were kept sitting on a chair in a tiny box-like room for weeks on end. Weeks. Think about that.

I am not making an exact comparison with Saddam. He raised the bar high for the rest of the dictator class. With the possible exception of the late President Assad of Syria, Saddam was in a league of his own. The mass murder by gas of the Kurds and the wholesale killing of the Shia were truly epic crimes. Colonel Gaddafi hasn't had to resort to such extravagantly murderous adventures. There is no rebellious ethnic group like the Kurds or the Shia to challenge his grip on power. Nor has he faced organised Islamic resistance of the kind which threatened Assad's regime in the early 1980s.

But the colonel hasn't taken any chances. To make sure nobody even thinks of stepping out of line he keeps up a regime of targeted terror against any who might conceivably be regarded an enemy of the state. Take the reported case of Mohammed Izbedq who went to the headquarters of a Revolutionary Committee (Gaddafi's instrument of local control) to see why his son hadn't been released along with 62 other prisoners. Mr Izbedq pushed his luck. Asking such a question strained the quality of mercy among the secret policemen. The father of the detained son was himself taken into custody. He was tortured, then released, and died the same night.

The impetus for the diplomatic rapprochement with Libya was spurred by anxieties over weapons of mass destruction. Tripoli was much further down the road towards acquiring WMD than Saddam Hussein. We now know, thanks to the Malaysian police, that Pakistan's nuclear expert Abdul Qadeer Khan sent uranium to Libya "around 2001". This Dr Khan is the same one who was recently pardoned - without noticeable outrage from America - by the Pakistani government last week. The Malaysian police, who have been interrogating the middlemen in the deal, have also reported that Malaysian centrifuge parts were found on a ship bound for Libya last year.

Uranium. Centrifuge parts. Did we know all of this when the case for war was being made against Saddam? One can only imagine the reaction if we'd been able to show that Saddam had got hold of uranium. The implication of this information is that Libya represented the far greater threat.

We can but speculate as to the intentions of Tripoli in wanting to obtain such materials. But we have past form to help us in this regard. There is the bombing of the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie for which Libyans were arrested and one is now serving a long sentence. There is the bombing of UTA Flight 772 over Africa in 1998. Again Libyans were implicated. Nor should we forget the bombing of La Belle disco in Berlin back in 1986 when the local investigating authorities pointed the finger squarely at Libya.

What each of these atrocities represented was an appalling contempt for human rights. In all cases civilians were deliberately targeted. What has never been satisfactorily explained is where the chain of responsibility for each of these atrocities ended. Was Colonel Gaddafi's Libya the kind of place where intelligence agents could embark on freelance killing sprees without the man at the top being told? Particularly when they were atrocities that could bring retribution down on the head of the dictator? I think we should be told. But there must be serious doubt now that we ever will be.

The rapprochement with Libya has been explained in the context of the aftermath of the conflict in Iraq. The regime in Tripoli looked at what happened to Saddam and saw the writing on the wall. Colonel Gaddafi knew that if not this year then sometime very soon Washington would have him in its sights. On the other side neither the Americans nor the British wanted another Middle Eastern war. The British had been working for several years to bring Tripoli towards the point of sanity. So Washington and London decided to make peace. Given how far down the road Tripoli had gone towards making devastating weapons, a deal of this kind made sense to the politicians and their advisers.

But it is here that the language of human rights and democracy intrudes. It is fair to ask, in making this deal with the regime in Tripoli, what have we demanded in return. The first and most immediate benefit is the end of a weapons programme which would have threatened the human rights of Colonel Gaddafi's neighbours and left the rest of us living in fear. The prospect of Libya handing over some of its weapons technology to terrorist groups was genuinely terrifying.

So there is no doubt that a proper national interest has been served. But we are left asking about the people of Libya themselves. Are they to be left at the mercy of a regime which stands condemned by major human rights groups? If we now care so passionately about the rights of the Iraqis, where is our concern for the people of Libya? I don't pretend that there are easy answers or options. I only despair that this question is not even being asked.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent