Fundamentally wrong...

Qaddafi is a bad man... always has been, always will be. He has ruled Libya with an iron fist for longer than anyone else in the last 200 years, and he has done so without any sort of mandate or election from any of his people. So, I'm not suggesting that working to remove him from power is "wrong". I never felt very good about the "warm and fuzzy" attitude of the Bush and Co. folks after Libya "turned off" its WMD programs in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq invasion... but an evil you know is sometimes better than an evil you don't. I never saw Qaddafi as a regional threat, outside of his ability to fund and train terror from his desert camps in the Libyan hinterland. I found this article in the Guardian... and I thought it rather telling. The author, a Libyan national, seems to feel that the rush to justify Obama's position against Qaddafi is hurting the protest position by making the effort seem an act of desperate, disunified and utterly helpless peasants... rather than the national movement that it really does seem to be. SoS Clinton has as much as said that the Libyan people are a scattered and ignorant populus up against the terror troops of Qaddafi's regime, and that without "Western" support, they cannot hope to survive, let alone win. Looking deeper than the headlines (which the author asks us all to do) shows that the rebels in Libya not only see themselves as "Libyans" first and foremost (putting to bed the notion that they are tribal warriors without order, rank or file), but have had some really huge successes against an army and air force that has worked, trained and equiped itself for exactly this sort of fighting for more than 30 years. It seems Qaddafi's experience as a revolutionary fighter has carried into how the army has trained since his rise to power. Small unit actions, street-to-street fighting, a large focus on crowd and civilian containment... all were huge factors in standard army training in Libya for decades. That's not the sort of training that lends itself to major land contests... that is the sort of training that protects a regime from exactly this sort of uprising. The State Department and the White House keep using terms like "Tripolitania" and "Cyrenaica" like they were actual ethnic centers in modern Libya... but in reality, they are no more applicable to the modern day than terms such as Gaul or Armorica are to France, or Noricum is to Austria. Out-dated geographical labels placed by Imperial Romans who not only never saw the land, but never intended to see the land they were describing. They are letters on the faces of maps in Western books, nothing more. Ask anyone coming from either of these regions what their nationality or ethnicity is... and the response will be "Libyan". It's bad enough that the mainstream media gets this wrong... there is no excuse for the administration to get it wrong, too. Support for the rebels is not out of the question, but I think that before I could willingly and whole-heartedly support such efforts, I'd have to know that this administration (or any that follow) understand that there is a trend emerging in these "popular uprisings" that is terribly disturbing... It is NOT the fundamentalist regimes that are falling to these uprisings... it is the secular or elected regimes that are falling. The nations most at risk (besides Egypt, Tunisia and Libya) are Turkey, Syria, Yemen, Jordan and the PA, which are all elected, secular governments. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE are all relatively quiet right now. The Ba'athists in Damascus are bad folks, too... but they are not the threat to global peace that places like Iran are, either. US (and all Western) support MUST hinge on the facts (certain and verifiable) that all efforts to build a government after a regime is removed are to focus on establishing representative governments that recognize the value of democratic processes and basic human rights... or no support will be given. THAT must be the center of any interventionist policy that any administration (current or future) plans to implement or follow. We must all know that such efforts will be long and rather slow in developing, but they must happen or any support will dry up like a puddle in the Sahara. I think that Libya is capable of this sort of effort, as is Tunisia and Egypt... but should a movement like the Muslim Brotherhood hyjack the effort and begin or attempt to begin a fundamentalist regime that not only ignores these basic human rights but actively tries to deny them, then such support as was offered previously will be turned against the very system it had been supporting.