Comical Ali he isn't. Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, was a preposterous master of bombast, who could say, two days before the fall of Baghdad, that US troops were committing suicide in their hundreds at the city gates.
His Libyan counterpart, Moussa Ibrahim, is rather different, a professional, in many ways on the Western PR model.
His off-camera efforts to discredit Eman al Obeidi, the woman who accused Libyan security forces of rape, was hardly pretty. But would a Western government spokesman, transplanted into the surreal circumstances of this dictatorship, have behaved differently?
It's easy to see why he has inflamed exiled dissidents with his endless presentation of the regime's case on Western television, or that his constant claims that areas were stable or under Gaddafi's control when they palpably weren't, seemed increasingly detached from reality. But what choice did he have if he was to remain in post? A PR man can only work with what he has.
With his excellent English and long experience of the UK as a PhD student, he could presumably have defected to the West long ago. Ibrahim's problem was not his presentation but his loyalty.
