He's Dead, deal with it.

Gaddafi is confirmed dead, now the western "chattering class" is demanding an inquiry in how he died. Sheesh it was a civil war with people who have fought long and hard, there was 40 years of pent up anger at this nutbar.what exactly do you expect?
Libya faces to many challenges to count, a divided population, diverse political & religious groups. what little government they have is stepping down. I can't say I blame the NTC, better to be remembered as a hero of the revolution than the people who failed in making a proper transition to a stable government.

The west needs to offer aid (with a set timeline) and political advice. Telling the Libyans that the aid runs out at X time means they need to get their house in order quickly, so we don't have a long drawn out bickering session like Iraq that paralysed their government for months.

Some of the strength that the Libyans have is a high literacy rate,  a fairly intact oil system and civil infrastructure. what they need is to call back the bureaucrats to get things running and then weed out the hardcore and forgive the low ranking regime supporters who don't have blood on their hands.

The cons facing them are many well armed and experienced armed groups, some of them with fundamental Islamic religious views who will not be keen to allow a secular state to form. Also the various tribes will be jostling for positions. Not so much an issue in the cites, but they will play a big role in the rural areas.

What happens next set the stage for the next generation of Libyans, they have the opportunity to succeed or fail utterly like the Iranian revolution. the West has won a fair bit of goodwill on the street with our support of the rebels, while we want to support a secular government there, we have to avoid meddling to much with their internal politics. what comes next is not likely to be clean and pretty, the next 6 months bears watching. I really hope they can achieve a better place, but I have my fears.

Egg on many faces

So Mubarak just resigned. The CIA chief said he would, but then he didn’t and now he has, in the meantime the blogosphere chewed into the CIA chief pretty good. I have avoided posting on the subject, because any predication can easily end up wrong in such a dynamic event without full access to the inner workings.
How will this play out? The army seems to be still in full control, but carefully allowing the people to vent. From my reading the army can control the supplies of vehicle gas, cooking gas and bread, which means they have significant control over the poor. Now can they offer just enough to take the steam out of the protests without a major clash or will the protesters try for whole works? So far the army has played their cards carefully allowing the Interior ministry and the police to be the focus of hate for the protests. However if the protesters threaten the “rice bowls” of the army, thing may get nasty in a hurry.
Whenever stuff happens over in the Middle East there are a few places I go to get perspective and as always Michael Totten delivers with his interview with Abbas Milani about the Iranian Revolt in 1979. I have to admit that based on my own encounters with radical Muslims and the history of the M.E. I fear the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). They may be small but they are organized, determined to rise in power and have the infrastructure to magnify their power well beyond their numbers. They will likely be able to tap into the sympathy of the poor more readily than the current drivers of the revolt. I think the goals of the MB is to grab a share of power and seat at the table. Once there they will work long term to take over the power centre’s within the country. I hope I am wrong, for the sake of the Egyptian people.

Michaels interview can be found here

Abbas Milani, like most educated Iranians, detested the Shah’s tyrannical regime that ruled over his homeland until it was overthrown in 1979 by a coalition of liberals, leftists, and Islamists. Unlike the vast majority of the liberals and leftists, however, Milani knew in advance what the Islamists were up to. The Shah had cast him into the dungeon at the notorious Evin Prison and for six months his cell mates were the ideological and physical brutes who later would found the Islamic Republic.

Today Milani is the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and a co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. His new book The Shah was published a few weeks ago by Palgrave MacMillan. I sat down with him in his office at the Hoover Institution to talk about what’s happening right now in Egypt.

I hope the future of Eygpt has more of this


But I can't help to remember that persecution on Coptics was the norm just weeks ago.