“Muammar Gaddafi is not a president to resign, he does not even have a parliament to dissolve,” said Gaddafi in his most recent rant on television.

Of course, Gaddafi is not the President of Libya; his title is the “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahirya.”

On February 15, 2011, following the example of their brethren in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and elsewhere, the Libyan people began mass demonstrations against their “Brotherly Leader” who also happens to be the longest serving autocrat in the Middle East. Using foreign mercenaries and simultaneously denying the existence of the protests and blaming them on al Qaeda, Gaddafi has the blood of over one thousand people—by a very conservative estimate—on his hands.

As Lenin, who was probably the greatest revolutionary of all time, framed it: what is to be done?

So far, the entire world from the President of Iran to the President of the United States has condemned Gaddafi; the UN Security Council has passed a resolution sanctioning the Libyan government and imposing a travel ban and arms embargo; and numerous European states have frozen Mr. Gaddafi’s assets.

One prominent and widely followed Egyptian cleric even issued a fatwa legitimizing the assassination of Gaddafi.

With the Libyan Revolution leading toward the ouster of this senile and psychopathic despot—who denied the fact that people were revolting against him, or the fact that people even dislike him—the West should intervene by arming the rebels.

Of course, interventionism, even if done on the most humanitarian grounds, is very controversial. European statesmen had to be almost forced into action by the Clinton Administration when Muslims were being slaughtered in Bosnia.

While Libya is not Bosnia, or the other analogous situations of Egypt, Iran or Lebanon, the civil war emerging there will permanently alter the political landscape of the Middle East.

Already, there is talk of a no-fly zone in Washington and London; however, doing this would effectively be an act of war, since any planes violating the no-fly zone would be shot down, as they were during the United States’ armed truce with Saddam Hussein during the 1990s.

Using a legitimate and legitimizing international body like the United Nations Security Council, coupled with a military concert of countries through NATO—but also ones in the Arab world and Asia—the United States should lead an effort to fund and arm opposition groups, and as a last resort, come to their aid should Gaddafi resort to state immolation.

The first case for intervention is a moral one. It is incumbent upon the world—in the name of universal human rights—to stop the massacre happening in Libya.

How many more people need to die before intervention becomes not a choice but a necessity? One hundred? One thousand?

If pacifism is the chosen course, we may find ourselves drawing parallels between Libya and Sudan—or any other massacre in which the West stood by and watched, and was then roundly criticized for not intervening “because we had no interest in doing so.”

The second case for intervention is a strategic one. Gaddafi has long been a destabilizing force in the Middle East with few friends. As Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, rightly pointed out, it was the great irony of history that Gaddafi, who once called for a “Middle East without Israel” would now watch—hopefully behind the bars of a prison—a “Libya without Gaddafi.” Gaddafi is the embodiment of a threat to world peace: he attempted to obtain a nuclear bomb, assassinated as many as 25 critics of his around the world in the 1980s, was a close friend to the racist kleptocrat of Uganda, Idi Amin, helped finance the mass murder of Palestinians in 1970, applauded the murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and perhaps most egregiously of all, was revealed last month by the ex-Minister of Justice Mustafa Mohamed Abud Al Jeleil for personally ordering the bombing of protesters.

The third case for intervention is an economic one. Should Gaddafi continue to exacerbate the situation in his country by a combination of force, denial and megalomania, the oil markets will continue to destabilize, pushing oil prices higher and possibly sinking the world economy back into recession.

The world, and especially Arabs attempting to move up in a stagnated economy, cannot afford to lose trillions of dollars of economic activity because a dictator of 42 years wishes to keep the country under his personal possession, only to be given to his equally humiliating sons.

With the world watching and with the ghost of Lenin and the memory of revolution in the air, we should not stand aside and watch events unfolding with our hands tied behind our back, but ask: what is to be done now?