The end game in Libya

What happened

Jubilant rebel fighters swept into the Libyan capital, Tripoli, this week, storming Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi’s fortress-like compound and taking control of much of the city. “Today my people have freedom,” said fighter Bassem Abdel, as rebels and residents ransacked the Libyan leader’s headquarters, grabbing guns and mementos of his 42-year dictatorship. But their victory was by no means complete. In neighborhoods across the capital, loyalist militiamen continued to put up stiff resistance. At least two major regime strongholds—the towns of Sirte and Sabha—remained in Qaddafi’s hands. And as The Week went to press, the whereabouts of the dictator and his family were still unknown. In a radio speech, Qaddafi said he had staged a “tactical” withdrawal from the Bab al-Aziziya compound, and called on loyal tribesmen to cleanse the capital of “traitors, infidels, and rats.”

Governments across the West and the Middle East exulted in the liberation of Tripoli, which came after six months of NATO and U.S. bombing and other military assistance to the ragtag rebel forces. “The Qaddafi regime is coming to an end, and the future of Libya is in the hands of its people,” President Obama said. He urged the rebel leadership, the Transitional National Council, to pursue a peaceful, inclusive transition to democracy, and released $1.5 billion in frozen Libyan funds to help the alliance restore electricity and water in the war-torn country.

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What the editorials said

This victory over another Mideast tyrant “vindicates Obama’s approach,” said the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger. The Right has slammed the president for taking “a back seat in NATO’s bombing campaign”—led by Britain and France—and for seeking U.N. approval for the operation. But Obama’s reliance on international consensus “tipped the scale to a rebel victory, without leaving Americans on the hook for all the unknowable consequences.” But his back-seat approach had negative consequences, too, said The Wall Street Journal. “If America had led forcefully from the beginning,” Qaddafi could have been toppled months ago. The prolonged conflict cost many Libyans their lives.

Obama may have made some mistakes, said The Washington Post, but his decision to intervene—attacked on both the Left and Right—may now pay great dividends. If Libya now moves toward democracy, Syrian despot Bashar al-Assad will be further isolated, and “the momentum will help democrats in Tunisia and Egypt who are trying to shape their post-dictatorship world.” And young Libyans now have hope for freedom and prosperity, “instead of joining terrorist groups out of frustration and anger.”

What the columnists said

Chalk one up for the Obama doctrine, said Ben Smith in Politico.com. Before he took office, the president argued that the United States should “lead while talking and walking more softly” and allow its allies to take a starring role in foreign operations. Libya proves the merits of this strategy. If Obama had ignored Libya, Qaddafi would have likely crushed the rebellion, while full U.S. involvement could have cost 10 times as much—and led to American casualties.

But what comes next? asked William Bennett in CNN.com. We still don’t know who the rebels are, and “there is credible evidence that true democrats constitute only a minority of the opposition.” Many are hard-core Islamists. Indeed, we might have just opened a Pandora’s box, said Stanley Kurtz in NationalReview.com. This deeply divided society could “descend into the anarchy of tribal war and Islamist insurgence.” Al Qaida–aligned rebels may have already taken advantage of the chaos in Tripoli, and “seized Qaddafi’s storehouse of heat-seeking missiles, perfect for shooting down civilian airliners.”

“The next few months in Libya are not going to be easy,” said Brian Whitaker in the London Guardian. But we’re unlikely to see a repeat of the chaos that followed Saddam Hussein’s fall. Libya’s population is almost entirely Sunni Muslim, and it has large oil revenues and a $70 billion sovereign wealth fund that could speed development. Nothing is certain, of course. But we should “hope for the best, stop predicting the worst, and prepare for something in between.”