The question for Libyans, as they take their first momentous steps into the post-Gaddafi era, is whether they can now build a government and country worthy of their heroic struggle against one of the world’s worst tyrants.
For decades, conventional thinking about Arab nations, especially among the experts, argued that they were best ruled by ‘strongmen’, a western euphemism for pro-western dictators such as the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his former counterpart in Tunisia Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. According to this line of thought, Arabs don’t do democracy. They are too tribal and fractious for such enlightened politics. For western leaders, it has been a case of better the devil you know, and hang the consequences for the Arabs.
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