Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

I think this is a pretty big indication that Moammar won’t be sending out Muharram postcards from Tripoli this year. Gadhafi himself still seems to be playing the title role in Where’s Waldo, but him sending his family out of the country would tend to indicates that his prospects for regaining power are (thankfully) bleak.

Unless a hard-core Jihadi government takes over in Libya (possible, but it seems unlikely), the fall of Gadhafi must rank as good news for America, for the Libyan people, and, yes, President Obama. Putting aside questions of whether Gadhafi could have been toppled earlier (quite likely), whether Libya was the worst remaining Arab dictatorship (it wasn’t; Iran and Syria (clearly), as well as Saudi Arabia (arguably) are worse troublemakers and oppressors of their own people), and whether toppling Middle East dictatorships is a proper use of American power (there were many justifications of America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 that weren’t applicable to Libya, but I can think of none that would apply to Libya that would not equally apply to Iraq), having Gadhafi gone is good news for everyone involved except the dictators own corrupt cronies (and the businessmen who profited from dealing with them), and there’s a significant chance that he wouldn’t have been toppled without the judicious application of American air power that Obama approved. It would be nice to see Gadhafi hung from a pole, or put on trial for crimes against his own people, but even having him merely deposed is a significant victory. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Tags: Iraq, Jihad, Libya, Moammar Gadhafi, Operation Iraqi Freedom

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2011 at 6:41 PM and is filed under Foreign Policy, Jihad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.