America’s confessional culture appears to be spreading. It’s not only Oprah guests who are making on-air confessions and seeking forgiveness. Murderous dictators are now coming clean. “Yes, we have weapons of mass destruction,” read the headline in one of Libya’s state-run newspapers. It was as if Libya had taken a journey of painful self-awareness and had seen the light. “Libya’s decision to reverse course is a positive development and a step in the right direction,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, playing the role of Dr. Phil.

Many conservatives we respect have also cheered Libya’s agreement to surrender its nuclear weapons programs, declaring a victory for the Bush Doctrine, the policy of military preemption. Others are calling on the Bush administration to lift its economic sanctions on Libya if the country’s dictator, Muammar Gadhafi, makes good on his promises, assuming that other rogue nations, such as Iran and North Korea, would be tempted to follow suit with their own confessions.

Those who are leaning on America to end Libya’s pariah status seem to have forgotten one of the most important ideas that came out of Mr. Bush’s speech before the National Endowment for Democracy last month. “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.”

Mr. Bush did not say in his speech that the elimination of nuclear weapons would make the world a safer place. Rather, he explained that the key to a more peaceful world is the elimination of dictators, those who are standing in the way of the spread of democracy and human rights. This logic explains why the world isn’t concerned with how many nuclear weapons America or Britain or France possess, but is deeply worried about the nuclear aspirations of North Korea and Iran, two anti-democratic countries with abysmal human rights records.

The flaw in the Libya logic was made clear by the way that Egyptian government officials immediately seized on the development to call on Israel to surrender its nuclear weapons. Israel is a free democracy and can be trusted to use its nukes only for self-defense. It’s totally unlike the case of Libya. Yet nothing from the Bush administration’s language explains why.

Letting Colonel Gadhafi off the hook signals that it is permissible for a country to carry out a heinous act of murder, as long as it promises afterward not to point dangerous weapons our way. The Libyan government, after all, has accepted responsibility for the 1988 Pan Am 103 bombing that killed 259 people.

In America, we punish murderers, such as the Washington, D.C.–area snipers, not simply to prevent them from killing again but because we aim for justice. Imagine if a murderer tried to go free simply by paying restitution to his victim’s family and promising not to kill again. No self-respecting district attorney would have it. Murder is a criminal matter, not merely a civil tort. Yet in Libya’s case, mass murder is now excused because the murderer has tried to build a nuclear weapon, then pledged to back off.

The most important aim with regard to Libya is the dismantling of its leadership and the establishment of a democratic government. The Bush administration’s decision to accept a negotiated settlement that leaves Colonel Gadhafi in power can only be understood as making any sense if it is merely a method of establishing an Iraq-like pretext for overthrowing the Libyan regime. If Colonel Gadhafi doesn’t cooperate with the inspection regime 100% of the way 100% of the time, he can expect to end up in a spider hole like Saddam Hussein. But the weapons inspections pretext is an awfully roundabout way of ousting a terrorist dictator who deserves ousting, as we had hoped the Bush team would have gathered from recent experience.

Far better to just explain it this way — the Libyan strongman is a dictator whose intelligence service downed an American plane and who was implicated in the killing of two GIs in the bombing of the La Belle nightclub in Berlin back in the 1980s. Any “surrender” in which he gives up his weapons programs but stays as tyrant in Tripoli is a deal that stops short of the punishment that justice requires.