The grisly scenes of Gadhafi’s body being dragged through the streets of Sirte, and the unseemly celebrations of the Libyan dictator’s death in the Western media, are enough to make any decent person wince. Yes, he was a brutal dictator, and I hold no brief for him or his works, but is this kind of savagery really what we want to see in the “new” Libya?
Whether or not we want it, it is coming: the crew in charge of that unfortunate nation is no better, and perhaps worse, than Gadhafi. The fate of the rebels’ former commander-in-chief, Abdul Fatah Younis, prefigures a revolution that eats its own, and the ferocity of that revolutionary fervor is hardly abated.
Gadhafi loyalists include the largest tribe in the country, and after the smoke clears and the new regime extends its grip over dissident pockets of resistance, nostalgia for the relatively peaceful days of Gadhafi’s reign is more than likely to set in. Worse, the arsenals of the Libyan military have been systematically looted, with missiles and other sophisticated weaponry falling into the hands of radical Islamist militias. These militias are not fringe elements in the Libyan revolution, but rather they are in charge, with one of their number taking the place of the slain Younis as head of the rebel “armed forces.”
Indeed, the rebels’ military leadership consists largely of members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which is still prominently featured on our official list of designated terrorist organizations. Now we are allied with them — under a new name, the “National Transitional Council” – and US taxpayer dollars are pouring into their coffers. That money will be used to consolidate the rebels’ rule, a regime that promises to be every bit as repressive as the one that preceded it – albeit friendly, at least at first, to its Western sponsors.
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