It's dawning on me that perhaps the parallels to Vietnam are even stronger in Libya than

[LadyLeigh]

in Afghanistan or Iraq.

There is a more or less clear geographic division, with loyalists to a "communistic dictatorship" to the west and "democratic rebels" to the east who are engaged in a civil war. We are only involved because the whole country lies in the former power sphere of the French, who asked us to get involved. So we sided with the "democratic forces" and are now raining death and destruction on cities to ensure victory for democracy.

I doubt that democracy will be the outcome of this. A country that is at war with itself in such a way, with thousands of casualties, doesn't coast into democracy. Not after the "democratic rebels" decided that the capital needed to be "cracked" for them to be victorious, producing a humanitarian crisis, anyway. In a way its even worse than when a foreign invasion happens. Where is the model for such a democracy? Not Kosovo anyway, there we now have different countries. How are different factions supposed to come to the same table now? I think the best the National Transition Council can hope for is to become the next body to rule by force. The president seems like a nice enough guy on the surface of it, but he likely at some point will be faced with the decision between becoming the next dictator or ending up with a mystery-bullet in his head.

Meanwhile the rest of the "free world" recognizes the rebels as legitimate government, but strangely the African Union remains remarkably silent on the matter, even though it is all happening in their neighborhood. Could mean a lot of things, including that Gaddhafi has a lot more allies than we are led to believe.

[tabatha]

1. This article will help explain it.

http://arabnews.com/opinion/columns/article494931.ece