ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And Jackson Diehl, deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Post, has written about the pluses and minuses of all of them and he joins us now from vacation. Thanks for joining us.
JACKSON DIEHL: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: With Moammar Gadhafi's future uncertain, first, what are the models that the Arab Spring offers for what happens to the dictator?
DIEHL: And we've got Saleh of Yemen, who has been taken off to Saudi Arabia and hospitalized and seems to be under a kind of form of house arrest or detention by the Saudis in another country. And now, Gadhafi, who is missing in action so far.
SIEGEL: Well, if you could speak for the best interests of the Libyan people and could figure out what the best thing to do with Moammar Gadhafi would be, what would you choose?
DIEHL: The problem we have in Libya is that's not probably going to be possible because Gadhafi is under indictment by the international criminal court. So any country where he appears, other than Libya, is going to be under enormous pressure to put him on a plane to The Hague. And so, I think it's unlikely that Gadhafi will be able to find another country to take him, even if he could get out of the country at this point.
SIEGEL: There are conflicting impulses here. On the one hand, the billions that Gadhafi controlled, the new regime will want to get control of very quickly. On the other hand, there are old scores to settle and there are people whose parents and brothers were imprisoned by Gadhafi and want some sense of closure about the old regime.
DIEHL: Which is why I think that the best approach really is the one that the Latin American countries and South Africa followed in their turn, which is to have a thorough investigation of all crimes, to have a truth commission, to make reparations to victims, but on the whole to avoid prosecutions of the leaders and the former regime in the short term.
SIEGEL: Although as you wrote several weeks ago, even in some of those cases, what seemed to be the understanding of what came out of the investigation of the past broke down over time.
DIEHL: I think the problem you have now in Egypt, for example, is that the trial of Mubarak risks polarizing the country right before the first democratic election they've had almost ever. The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein contributed to the sectarian war in that country, because it came too quickly and was done too poorly. So I think the Libyans have to be very careful if they capture Gadhafi alive, about doing something that would simply undermine the more important task of building a democracy there.
SIEGEL: Well, Jackson Diehl, thanks a lot for talking with us.
DIEHL: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: So Jackson Diehl of The Washington Post. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.