There’s been a lot of soul-searching in the West over the past few days about the warmth of its recent rapprochement with Colonel Gaddafi. In 2006, Gaddafi ended his “pariah” status by agreeing to give up some of his weapons programs and signing on to the “war on terror”. Now we find, funnily enough, that he remained a madman all along.

No doubt there’s plenty of cause for embarrassment here. Several leaders, among them Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy and (of course) Silvio Berlusconi, welcomed Gaddafi into the fold in a way that was cringeworthy even then and now seems morally shocking. (Foreign Policy has a nice gallery.) At the very least, Gaddafi was given a legitimacy that he patently did not deserve.

But the world is full of unpleasant governments that we nonetheless have to deal with in some fashion. Although there were economic motives at work as well, it seems to me that the embrace of Libya was largely driven by relief. The idea of weapons of mass destruction in Gaddafi’s hands was truly frightening; if the price of removing that threat was a few embarrassing moments on camera, it was probably worth paying.

And the subsequent remorse, such is at is, is still highly selective.

Toadying to Gaddafi, after all, was never on the scale that the West extends to, for example, China and Saudi Arabia. Yet does anyone seriously think those governments are not be capable of brutality on Gaddafi’s scale if their rule is threatened?

Whether the diplomatic thaw actually helped Gaddafi in his quest to hold onto power is another question. It’s not obvious that it did, although the presence of increased numbers of Westerners in Libya is now being suggested as a reason for the relatively tepid American response to the violence so far.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that the relative opening-up of Libya’s economy has helped to undermine the regime (William Easterly suggested this yesterday). People revolt not so much from utter hopelessness, but when they have some sense of better possibilities being available.

And of course it was not only the west that was involved in Libya. While my friend Guy Rundle the other day  was focused on the silence on the right, Gaddafi in his day had rather more friends on the left. Some of them, such as Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, are sticking to him even now.

As Franklin Roosevelt might have said, he’s not our son-of-a-bitch, he’s theirs.

If Gaddafi had really become an American ally, there would be very different sorts of pressure available. A noteworthy feature of the last month’s upheavals has been the difference between countries with close ties to the US, such as Egypt and Bahrain, and those without. The former have been relatively restrained in their use of force; the latter, Iran and Libya among them, can shed blood much more recklessly.

That doesn’t make America’s network of alliances an entirely benevolent phenomenon. As Tom Malinowski wrote earlier this week, “To say that deep military-military engagement is essential to having influence — and an unvarnished good from the standpoint of promoting human rights — is preposterous.”

Western military involvement has been harmful in many ways, not least in providing regimes with hardware that can be used against their own people — a point David Cameron still seems incapable of understanding.

But it remains true that when the chips are down, having a government that responds to American pressure can be a lot of help to a population.