So, apparently the rebels have won. Clayface…errrr…Gaddafi may or may not have been removed from power…maybe. Because apparently it’s just too damn hard to keep tabs on a guy who looks like this :
No way that anyone could possibly track a dude whose clothes (and face) make Mickey Rourke go “DAMN!” well enough to know if he’s still in charge or not.
Anyway, the rebels are probably in charge. So yay for us, I guess, for providing them with guns and close air support, without which they wouldn’t have gotten very far (even against old tanks, pickup trucks don’t typically provide much in the way of effective opposition). So good for us, right?
Or is it? The truth of the matter is that we still don’t have the slightest clue. We still don’t know exactly who these guys are. We don’t know what they want. We don’t know what sorts of laws they want to enact. We don’t know what sort of government they want to put in place.
Nobody argues that Gaddafi was bad, but a great big mysterious question mark isn’t inherently better. It’s just a question mark. And so are the Libyan rebels.
Remember the fabled ‘Northern Alliance’ in Afghanistan? Sure, they were a great help against the Taliban, because that provided a universal enemy that they all wanted to shoot at. However, things changed once the Taliban were gone. That ‘alliance’ was actually a group of guys with extremely different ideas for what should follow. Not many of them liked each other. Most of them didn’t so much disagree with the Taliban as just wish they were the ones doing the dominating. And now no government projects any sort of power anywhere in the country because those ‘brave allies’ have them outgunned in nearly every province. But they were a convenient ‘friend’ at the time.
Why am I getting a sense of deja vu? How many times do we need to learn the same lesson before things finally sink in?
And we continue to show ridiculous hypocrisy in the region. We blow up Gaddafi while waving a stern finger in the face of Syria. And we completely ignore Bahrain slaughtering protesters by the thousand because our ‘good friends’ the Saudis (you know, the nation probably doing more to foment extremism than any other country on Earth) were sending in tanks to help with the killing. Wouldn’t want to embarrass them, after all!
How many people would take odds against the West being involved again in Libya in the next 10 years to go after the people we just essentially handed power to? I sure as Hell wouldn’t bet against it.
