HE could have run away, like Mubarak, Baby Doc and Idi Amin. But, as befits the ground commander he was when he toppled the king and kicked out the American, British and French oil companies, Colonel Qaddafi died from gunfire, straight in the face, after he was stripped of his golden gun.

A cowardly act from those who had the courage to fight him and catch him, from the people who had taken people power to its logical extension: from chanting to fighting, as Filipinos and Eastern Europeans never did.

He looked bewildered. Why were the people he liberated 40 years ago from a morally and mentally degenerate monarchy and its foreign masters mistreating him? But that Libyan generation had passed away. The Libyans knocking him about had known only his face. Familiarity overcomes fear and breeds contempt, which is an invitation to murder.

Timing is everything. Know when to come and when to go—as soon as possible.

Cincinnatus did not return to his plow after saving his country so much as ran back to his farm to avoid the inevitable ingratitude of his countrymen.

Relatives of the victims of the Lockerbie bombing, kin of the comparatively few prisoners of conscience who died at the hands of his secret police—far fewer than have died at the hands of democracies that specialize in torture—rightly rejoiced. His belated apology could not bring back their loved-ones.

But those who remember the handsome Libyan captain who seized power at 27 years of age and could stand, by that achievement, at the side of Nasser, the greatest Arab since Saladin, could not but feel a twinge of regret, like David at the death of Saul. The bible got it right again. How are the mighty fallen.

This is what happens when you overstay your welcome in power. It can happen as soon as two years in power. First, people laugh and then they despise and that turns to hate. It will certainly happen after 13 years; it is unavoidable after 20; it is way overdue at 40 years.

Qaddafi was not a man of contradictions but of reverse tendencies, like Marshal Petain, the hero and then the heel of France, who beat the Germans at Verdun and served them in Vichy. “Old age is a shipwreck,” said De Gaulle who saved him from execution as a collaborator.

Wise when he was young, Qaddafi avoided direct confrontation with Israel and the West, preferring to fight for Islam on the far side of the world by arming the Muslim insurgency in the Philippines.

He became foolish in old age when he bombed, and bragged about taking down, the Pan American flight over Lockerbie, Scotland.

For this, quite rightly, he could no more be forgiven nor forgotten than the surface-to-air missile strike of an Iran Air flight full of women and children by the USS Vincennes over the Persian Gulf, or the air-to-air strike of a Korean Airlines flight by North Korean fighters over the Sea of Japan, or the taking down of the twin towers by two skyjacked planes by Bin Laden. Never kill innocents. It leaves a truly bad taste in the mouth and an unquenchable desire for justice.

Kill soldiers in combat but never in captivity; sink ships, shoot planes, bomb shelters but not if they have civilians. It is the only law of war that everyone takes to heart, and takes in his own hands.

He covered his chest with a salad of decorations, none of which were won in battle except against his own countrymen’s freedom. There were flashes of sense that were also folly. He castigated and reduced the army when it lost the war in Chad and lost the only defense of a dictator in a showdown with his enemies. He had crossed the line between the sublime and the ridiculous and reveled in his new location.

He deserved more than the cold meat locker where his body, and that of his son, are being kept, to be gawked at by the people who worshipped and feared him, the people whose country he put on the map for good and bad.

The son of the deposed king, who should have no part in the new government for saying it, said the first order of business is to turn over the country’s oil back to the foreigners. That alone should have merited Qaddafi a state funeral. Anyway, he is dead and can harm no one. But his countrymen should remember him that he was young once…and brave.