But the loyalist regime is broken and now the question is what happens. Will NATO nations contribute troops to stabilize Libya?
At least Libya shouldn't become another Iraq. For one reason, al Qaeda is unlikely to appear in force because we broke them in Iraq when they invaded Iraq and made it their primary battlefield.
Second, with rebel-friendly governments in both Tunisia and Egypt, Libya won't face the prospect of foreign supported insurgencies as Iraq endured when Syria and Iran tried to foment a civil war between Shias and Sunnis.
And third, and perhaps most important, Libya's new government won't have to deal with America's anti-war left and media constantly sniping at the new government and trying to undermine the new government and end our support for the new government. That will be big. Only a few gadflies will complain that Libyans haven't really been liberated from a horrible dictator.
And seriously, it will help that Libya is relatively small in population with the capacity to ramp up oil exports faster than what existed in Iraq which had to accomplish that task in the face of bombing attacks that forced 4 steps back for every 5 taken forward.
Libya may never become a democracy. But they have a shot at it. And as far as I'm concerned, it isn't bad to dump a dictator and prevent him from dying peacefully in his sleep. It is especially good since President Obama committed our prestige to the demand that Khaddafi had to go.
I'll be very interested to hear the story about how the western rebels were organized and supplied to the point where they led the advance that finally broke the backs of the loyalists. Qatar and the UAE reportedly were big in equipping them. France was seen air dropping a small amount of arms. What else did they do? What went through Tunisia to arm them? This will be seen as the key to the rebel victory, I think.
We shall see. But this is a victory for the West and for the Arab people. What other oppressed people will take heart from this success?
UPDATE: Oh, and in addition to the formation of a rebel army good enough to take advantage of NATO air power was the transformation of the NATO campaign from a parallel air campaign separated from what the rebels were doing to more traditional air support as rebels and Western special forces directed air power more to support the rebels on the battlefield:
The officials also said that coordination between NATO and the rebels, and among the loosely organized rebel groups themselves, had become more sophisticated and lethal in recent weeks, even though NATO’s mandate has been merely to protect civilians, not to take sides in the conflict.
Thus one of my major complaints about the NATO air-only offensive gradually became obsolete
UPDATE: One author who wants to avoid the mistakes of Iraq in Libya gets Iraq totally wrong:
We have legitimate interests in seeing a stable Libya and North Africa, but first and foremost we must discipline ourselves to remember that the establishment of that better future is a matter for the Libyans themselves. We can support and encourage but we should not go where we are not invited – surely our memories of Iraq are not that short?
Apparently, his memory of Iraq is that short. The problem wasn't that we didn't leave the matter of a better future to Iraqis, but that foreigners (al Qaeda, Syria, Iran, and the wider Sunni world that didn't like a Shia-majority government in Iraq) decided that Iraqis shouldn't have that opportunity to forge their own future. Only our willingness to fight and die with Iraqis at our side (and an able assist from the British for a while as well as other allies who sacrificed in appreciated but much smaller amounts) allowed Iraqis to do just that. Leaving it to the Iraqis alone would have been sending a sheep to the slaughter as the wolves circled the crippled, post-Saddam Iraq.
UPDATE: Oh, and after 5 months of intervention, I assume our post-war plan is simply awesome.
