In many ways, this is the best time to watch events. The hopes of a better future are sky high in the glow of a dictator stripped of authority. Reality won't be as kind starting tomorrow. But the Libyans have hope of a better future. Rejoice in that hope and do what we can to shape the future. This is a place and time where "hope and change" have real meaning.
Khaddafi learned from Iraq that he'd rather be a dictator friendly to us rather than a dictator hostile to us.
Apparently, Khaddafi's people learned from Iraq that they'd rather have no dictator at all.
I worried that a Khaddafi win might be a firewall against the Arab Spring. Khaddafi lost.
Will the people of a country somewhere else draw inspiration from the rebel win? Will an autocrat get scared enough from today's events to truly reform or just clamp down harder to pre-empt a new wave?
So were all the rebels from the west? Did eastern rebels slip in to Tripoli for the final battle? Did Misrata forces participate?
And what of Sirte? The hometown of Khaddafi is likely to have loyalists. Will they continue to resist?
I'm relieved. It's good not to lose.
UPDATE: Ajami's commentary is worthwhile:
Who, today, does not thrill to the spectacle of freedom in Tripoli? ...
"The best day after a bad emperor is the first," the great Roman historian Tacitus observed. Doubtless, Libya after this hurricane will have to contend with enormous challenges. There are no viable institutions to sustain it, so determined was Gadhafi to leave the country barren of any meaningful public life.
There will remain the schism between the provinces of Tripolitania in the west and Cyrenaica in the east. Libyans will insist that these differences have been healed by a common history of torment at the hands of the despot. This could be a sincere sentiment, and may pull the Libyans through. But from the time this country was put together by the Western powers some six decades ago, that schism had a force all its own.
The joy of seeing a dictator flee must give way to the reality that is still below the surface that Khaddafi wrecked his country, and that it really isn't a country at all. Honestly, after five decades of insisting that borders set by former colonial powers can't be changed (ignoring Morocco's conquest of Western Sahara), Africa has seen the birth of South Sudan as a solution to constant civil war over the south's status.
Is the fall of Khaddafi a chance to correct the colonial record in Libya? East and West have oil resources. If redrawing borders can't work in Libya, where could it?
