Most people seem to think that Gaddafi’s long ‘speech’ last night set a new record for oratorical appallingness:

"I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents … I will die as a martyr at the end," he said.

"Muammar Gaddafi is the leader of the revolution, I am not a president to step down … This is my country. Muammar is not a president to leave his post."

"I have not yet ordered the use of force, not yet ordered one bullet to be fired … when I do, everything will burn."

At times the camera panned out to show a towering gold-coloured monument in front of the building, showing a fist crushing a fighter jet with an American flag on it – a view that also gave the strange image of Gaddafi speaking alone from behind a podium in the building’s dilapidated lobby, with no audience in front of him.

Max Atkinson is on the case.

Yet there surely is something to be said from a practical negotiating point of view in openly admitting that you are crazy and will do whatever it takes to prevail.

It clears the ground of the usual cost/benefit-style calculations, and instead compels everyone else to operate on totally unpredictable psychological and political territory of Uncertainty.

This has an unsettling effect on ‘normal’ people. You buy time as they back off: "What are we dealing with here? Hmm … let’s just pause and re-consider…"  

Much the same effect is achieved by Islamist and other suicide bombers. They project an unsettling willingness to die in the process of killing a group of other people for the only purpose of showing the determination of their irrationality, and the irrationality of their determination.

What’s there to negotiate about with such people? Nothing. See also this gentleman. 

So the only option is either to kill them, or wait for them to kill you? If, that is, you don’t simply surrender in the face of their implacable Will?

Let’s hope that enough Libyans conclude that they do not want their country to be led by this sort of nihilistic rubbish any more.

Libya can do better than this. It can’t do worse.