Six months ago, Gadaffi’s son Saif al-Islam was adored in the West as Libya’s best hope for a democratic transformation. Today it appears only a matter of time before ol’ Saif, having dodged the cruise missiles and bombs of his former benefactors only to be captured by rag-tag rebels, will appear before a court to face charges of crimes against humanity. None of this is to say that democracy and crimes against humanity are contradictory; even a cursory examination of three centuries of rule by terror by the democratic bourgeoisie dispels that notion. It is said instead to reinforce the old adage that politics makes for strange bedfellows.
Consider John Bolton for another example. The American right — of which Bolton is certainly a part — ceaselessly accuses Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim or Marxist (or even a secret KGB sleeper agent). Yet the right’s distaste for anything they perceive as Marxist (such as taxes or science) and Islam, to say nothing of fundamentalist Islam, hasn’t deterred Bolton and 200 American congressmen from “palling it up” with terrorists who claim to have synthesized so-called Marxism and Islamic fundamentalism into a coherent ideology. Basically, various U.S. conservatives, in their quest to weaken Iran’s theocratic thugs, have quite vocally supported the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, which is designated by the U.S. and others as a terrorist organization. Making the MEK an even unlikelier ally to a cold warrior like Bolton, the group got its start — after training in the USSR — by assassinating American officers and helping to occupy the American embassy in Tehran in ’79. Soon turning on the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, the group worked its way into the good graces of the American right by serving during the Iran-Iraq war as mercenaries for Saddam Hussein — himself an American mercenary. Despite being targets of coalition attacks during the Second Gulf War, which Bolton helped to bring about, Bolton has recently violated U.S. law by publicly advocating for a repeal of the group’s terrorist designation.
For more, check out the Wikipedia pages for John Bolton and the MEK.