Mark Steyn on Idi Amin

Yet again from the Telegraph :

He never had a plan, he never had a point. So hundreds of thousands of Ugandans died for no particular reason, except that in the 1970s we were reluctant to do anything about anything in case a little local difficulty escalated into a proxy war between the big powers. And Amin's never been called to account for his bloody reign because he was shrewd enough to flee to the one rogue state no western nation ever puts any pressure on, even today.

Asked about his cannibal appetites, he liked to complain that human flesh was a little too salty. Hard to believe he'd have said that if he'd eaten bland, insipid Mr Callaghan instead of just metaphorically chewing him up and spitting him out on Sunny Jim's pitiful Kampala kowtow to get Denis Hills off the hook. Even in that pre-Thatcher, pre-Falklands era when anybody could cock a snook at the toothless British lion, the rise of Idi Amin remains a particularly extreme symbol of a great nation's paralysis. He came out of his coma a lot quicker than post-war Britain did.