So, not such a futile exercise after all, then. Of course, it isn’t over until it’s over, but Libya is free – free at least of the Gaddafi terror, if not of the danger of counter-coup or chronic instability.
Those of us who urged on the Anglo-French initiative which succeeded in pulling a reluctant US president and an ambivalent Nato into support for this revolution have some right to feel vindicated. What was so widely predicted only weeks ago – the “inevitable” humiliation of the West being forced to accept a seemingly immovable dictator and a country either engaged in indefinite civil war or having to be (in the great colonial tradition) partitioned – has evaporated with bizarre suddenness.
