The last major stronghold of deposed Col. Muammar Qaddafi fell today just two months after Libyan rebels seized Tripoli, the seat of his government. Qaddafi himself captured and killed with the fighting, marking the end of a line for a eccentric and colorful character who was by turns vilified in the U.S. and cozied up to, depending on which way the winds blow.

No one exemplifies the extremes of favoring and denouncing Qaddafi like U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). Just 10 days after the first major national demonstrations — and violent reprisals from Qaddafi’s forces — McCain called on the Obama administration to arm the Libyan rebels. Today, with the news of Qaddafi’s demise, McCain issued a mild statement celebrating the dictator’s final fall saying, “The death of Muammar Qaddafi marks an end to the first phase of the Libyan revolution.”

But McCain was not always so clearly opposed to Qaddafi. In the mid-2000s, when the Iraq war began to fall apart and the Bush administration and its hawkish allies were looking for any silver lining, Qaddafi came in from the cold. Libya voluntarily gave up its weapons of mass destruction programs and Western companies poured money into the North African country’s abundant oil fields. By the late-2000s, the détente was in full swing, with visits to Libya by high-level U.S. politicians, including McCain. On his August 2009 visit there, McCain issued a now-infamous tweet:

And a YouTube video of AP footage broadcast on Libyan state-run television showed McCain and other senators on the trip greeting Qaddafi:

A diplomatic cable about the visit released by the transparency group WikiLeaks this year explained that in meetings with Qaddafi and his son Muatassim, Libya’s national security chief, McCain said he would help the Libyan government get non-lethal military equipment from the U.S. — something Congress had been resistant to. The cable reads:

5.(C) Senator McCain assured Muatassim that the United States wanted to provide Libya with the equipment it needs for its [a Libyan security program]. He stated that he understood Libya’s requests regarding the rehabilitation of its eight C130s [a transport plane] and pledged to see what he could do to move things forward in Congress. He encouraged Muatassim to keep in mind the long-term perspective of bilateral security engagement and to remember that small obstacles will emerge from time to time that can be overcome.

After ThinkProgress covered the cable, McCain told Foreign Policy that he had been “non-committal” on helping Qaddafi and that he “never did a single thing to follow up.” But the cable never even mentions the Libyan people or the well-known human rights abuses of Qaddafi’s brutal regime.

Nonetheless, the lengths McCain went to in order to portray himself to Qaddafi as an ally speaks for itself. Juxtaposed with his constant urging for U.S. escalation against Qaddafi since February, the 2009 visit demonstrates just how politics — and not principled opposition to tyranny — were able to guide McCain’s stances on Qaddafi and Libya.

This afternoon on Fox News, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), presumably thinking he was attacking President Obama, seemed to leave out one important element when discussing the NATO campaign against Muammar Qaddafi: the U.S. military. “Let’s give credit where credit is due,” Rubio said, adding, “It’s the French and the British that led on this fight. And probably even led on the strike that led to Qaddafi’s capture or to his death.”

While of course the U.S. military played a major role in the Libya air war, particularly at its outset, it turns out that it was most likely an American drone that initially attacked Qaddafi’s convoy just outside Surt which ultimately led to his capture. Reuters reports on the incident:

France said its aircraft struck military vehicles belonging to Gaddafi forces near Sirte at about 8:30 a.m. (0630 GMT) on Thursday, but said it was unsure whether the strikes had killed Gaddafi.

Some two miles west of Sirte, 15 pick-up trucks mounted with heavy machine guns lay burnt out, smashed and smouldering next to an electricity sub station some 20 metres from the main road.

They had clearly been hit by a force far beyond anything the motley army the former rebels has assembled during eight months of revolt to overthrow the once feared leader.

But there was no bomb crater, indicating the strike may have been carried out by a helicopter gunship, or that it had been strafed by a fighter jet.

That helicopter gunship then, was most likely an American drone, the AFP reports:

A U.S. defense official said Oct. 20 a U.S. Predator drone along with a French fighter jet had attacked a convoy of vehicles in Libya that Paris believed was carrying Moammar Gadhafi. [...]

The U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the unmanned Predator aircraft had struck “the same convoy” but could not confirm that Gadhafi was in one of the vehicles.

A French official said Qaddafi’s convoy “was stopped from progressing as it sought to flee Sirte but was not destroyed by the French intervention.”

So if Rubio won’t give the U.S. any credit in NATO’s Libya campaign, at least perhaps he’ll acknowledge he was wrong in thinking American assets had nothing to do with Qaddafi’s capture?

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has had no shortage of criticisms for Obama administration’s handling of NATO air support for Libyan rebels. But with news this morning of Muammar Qaddafi’s death, Graham offered a new set of criticisms for the administration’s policy of working with a NATO coalition in Libya. Graham, appearing on Fox News, said:

One of the problems I have with “leading from behind” is that when a day like this comes, we don’t have the infrastructure in place that we could have. I’m glad it ended the way it did. It took longer than it should have. If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed. Let’s get in on the ground. There is a lot of money to be made in the future in Libya. Lot of oil to be produced. Let’s get on the ground and help the Libyan people establish a democracy and a functioning economy based on free market principles.

Watch it:

TPM’s Brian Beutler reports that Graham is eager to build infrastructure in Libya, even while opposing a bill to improve infrastructure in the U.S.

Just last week, the administration announced it was planning to dispatch dozens of former military personnel to Libya to track down surface-to-air missile stockpiles but that doesn’t seem to be where Graham is focusing his concern. Instead, Graham says “leading from behind” — a go-to criticism for congressional hawks who wanted a greater U.S. military involvement in Libya — is now preventing the U.S. from moving quickly enough to profit from a post-Qaddafi Libya. The Senator is quick to point out that plenty of profits can be made from Libya.

Graham is accurate in his assessment that Libya has a lot of oil and potentially could make a lot of money for U.S. and other western oil companies. But the crudeness of observation and the clear ties between “get[ting] in on the ground,” “lot of oil to be produced,” and helping Libya establish “a functioning economy based on free market principles” make it sound like Graham’s eagerness for U.S. boots on the ground has more to do with economic interests than with securing a democratic and stable country for Libya’s citizens.

With Libya’s National Transitional Council in control in Tripoli and former dictator Muammar Qaddafi now dead, it seems that President Obama’s so-called “leading from behind” strategy worked out pretty well. Conservatives mocked the president for letting NATO allies be the face of the Libya campaign and claimed it wouldn’t work. But now, the best attack his right-wing critics can come up with is claiming the war could’ve ended sooner if Obama had committed more American resources.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) picked up on this theme on Fox News today but took it a bit further, refusing to give the United States any credit in NATO’s efforts in Libya:

RUBIO: I’m not here to point fingers. I’m glad it worked out. Ultimately it’s about the freedom and liberty of the Libyan people but let’s give credit where credit is due, it’s the French and the British that led on this fight. And probably even led on the strike that led to Qaddafi’s capture or to his death.

Watch the clip:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who also criticizes Obama for not winning the war sooner, praised the British and French on CNN today too, but at least gave the president some credit. “The administration deserves credit but I especially appreciate the leadership of the British and French in carrying out this success,” he said.

But presumably, the president allowed the British and French to be out front on the Libya war because Arabs might be a little queasy about Americans fighting wars in the Middle East (see Iraq).

But the reality is the U.S. military played a very large role in the conflict, initially leading the air campaign before handing over to NATO, then mainly providing refueling tankers and surveillance aircraft. But since then, U.S. planes participated in approximately one quarter of the NATO missions, flying, as of late August, more than 5,000 of the nearly 20,000 NATO sorties in the Libya war (which was actually more than the British).

But Rubio apparently doesn’t want to “give credit where credit is due” to the United States military.

Our guest blogger is Elon Green, a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.

Earlier this year, Mitt Romney was criticized for omitting a passage from the paperback edition of his book, No Apology. The passage about health care reform suggested that Massachusetts’ reforms could be replicated nationwide.

Now that Col. Muammar Qaddafi has been killed by his own people, Romney may want to consider redacting another section of his book which claimed that Obama was trying to coddle Qaddafi:

Upon hearing news of Qaddafi’s death today, Romney snidely remarked, “It’s about time.” As ABC’s Jake Tapper notes, Romney has been “all over the Libyan map” with his constantly changing positions, but “the one consistency has been criticism of President Obama.”

GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain may not be able to name the leaders of foreign countries, but that doesn’t mean leaders of foreign countries don’t know who Cain is.

The New York Times reports that in a meeting between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Karzai raised comments made by Cain proudly professing ignorance about Uzbekistan and mocking the country’s name. Cain said a few weeks ago he didn’t know the “president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” then categorized the Central Asian country — a crucial supply route in the U.S.-led war to support Karzai’s government in Afghanistan — as “small and insignificant.”

The Times reports that in Karzai’s meeting with Clinton:

Mr. Karzai was asking Mrs. Clinton about remarks Mr. Cain made recently in a television interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. [...]

“He’s a former pizza company owner,” she said to Mr. Karzai.

“Is he that?” He replied, speaking in English.

“Oh, yes. He started something called Godfather’s pizza,” she said.

“Yes, I see, I see,” Mr. Karzai said.

Mrs. Clinton then turned to the American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, and went on, laughingly. “The president was saying he saw a news clip about how Mr. Cain had said I don’t even know the names of all these presidents of all these countries, you know, like whatever …”

“All the ’stans whatever,” Mr. Karzai interjected, referring to the countries of Central and Southern Asia, including his.

“All the ’stans places,” Mrs. Clinton repeated.

Mr. Karzai did not seem to take offense, displaying what appeared to be an astute understanding of campaigning in a democratic country. “That wasn’t right,” he said, “but anyway, that’s how politics are.”

Cain later laughed off his Uzbekistan comment, bizarrely blaming liberal African-American commenters Harry Belafonte and Cornel West for not “want(ing) a lot of people to wake up, especially black people.”

After a series of gaffes like the “Ubeki-beki-beki-stan-stan” comment, Cain’s faced scathing criticism about his foreign policy bona fides. But he still insists that he’s “not as foreign policy dumb as they think,” and that really he is just lying in wait to — at some undetermined time in the future — wow everyone with knowledge from his months of studying crucial international issues.

But if his statements are so outlandish that even foreign leaders are picking up on them and declaring, “That wasn’t right,” a potential future President Cain may already be causing relationships with U.S. allies to deteriorate.

Amid the talk during Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate about negotiating with terrorists like al Qaeda, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) dropped a doozy on his fellow candidates: “Are you all willing to condemn Ronald Reagan for exchanging weapons for hostages out of Iran? We all know that was done.” One of the candidates, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), quickly stepped up to defend the Gipper:

SANTORUM: That’s not — Iran was a sovereign country. It was not a terrorist organization, number one.

[...] They’re — they’re — they’re a sovereign country…

PAUL: He negotiated for hostages.

SANTORUM: There’s — there’s a role — we negotiated for hostages with the Soviet Union. We’ve negotiated with hostages, depending on the scale. But there’s a difference between releasing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in response to a terrorist demand… then — then negotiating with other countries, where we may have an interest, and that is certainly a proper role for the United States, too.

But just the following night on Fox News, Santorum was singing a different tune. Asked by Bret Baier what President Santorum’s Iran policy would be, the former senator concluded:

This government will not and cannot be negotiated with. They are radical Islamists. They are theocrats. They are mullahs who believe it is their destiny to fulfill the prophets and the 12th Imam’s vision of having global control of the world for radical Shia Islam.

Watch the video:

In the past, Santorum has called Iran “evil” and “Islamic fascists,” and in the same speech celebrated Reagan calling the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” At the debate Tuesday, he supported talking to both Iran and the Soviet Union as “proper” when there was a U.S. “interest” at stake. But when he wasn’t put in a position to defend Reagan’s actions, he leaned toward a more ideological position that precludes any talking irrespective of national interests.