It is gratifying that another Middle Eastern henchman appears about to get his just desserts, and that despite extensive U.S. involvement in the NATO mission not a single American life has been lost in the civil war. (How about them apples, Michele Bachmann? Time to retract your statement that President Obama “is not on our side” because the U.S. intervened? Of course you won’t.)
But let’s face it, defeating Qaddafi’s army will have been the easy part. The hard part will be getting the ragtag alliance of rebels to stash their differences and put Libya on track to becoming a democracy.
The end of the civil war arrived with a rush compared to the drawn-out and largely inconclusive city-by-city battles that had characterized the first six months of fighting as rebels swept into the capital city of Tripoli with a coordination sorely lacking early in the war that can be attributed to stepped-up American aerial surveillance. They initially were met with virtually no resistance, but ferocious fighting has been reported around the compound where Qaddafi may be hiding.
Since NATO entered the war in March, the U.S. and its allies have flown 7,500 sorties, attacking thousands of targets from individual weapons rocket launchers to major military headquarters and essentially destroyed the eyes and ears of Qaddafi’s command structure.
Let it not be forgotten that the U.S. and other Western nations — as well as British Petroleum and other energy companies — supported Qaddafi and like Mubarak in Egypt he survived as long as he did because of that unholy alliance. The trick now for the U.S. will be to not be drawn into the post-Qaddafi turmoil while materially supporting the rebels and insisting that any transitional government be all-inclusive.