LIBYAN PICTURE GETS DARKER AND DARKER – AT 10:30 A.M. ET:  The rebels in Libya continue to get pushed back.  Yesterday the Arab League, itself a group of nations run by dictators, asked the UN to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.  Gee, wait a second.  Weren't we told by "experts" that the Arabs would resent any outside involvement?  Maybe there's a misprint here. 

We have no doubt that the UN will swing into action and plunge itself headlong into negotiations, studies, intensive discussions and multilateral talks. 

Meanwhile, the president of the United States was at the Gridiron Club dinner last night, doing stand-up.  Must be great reading for the rebels in Libya.  A million yuks.

Reporting from Libya, The New York Times's Anthony Shadid makes this observation:

Everyone here seems to have a gun these days, in a lawlessness tempered only by revolutionary ebullience. Young men at the front parade with the swagger that a rocket-propelled grenade launcher grants but hint privately that they will try to emigrate if they fail. Anti-American sentiments build, as rebels complain of Western inaction. And the hint of radicalization — religious or something more nihilist — gathers as the momentum in the three-week conflict clearly shifts to the forces of one of the world’s most bizarre leaders.

What's this?  Anti-American sentiment is building because of Western failure to help?  Whether you favor American intervention or not – and there are powerful arguments both ways – we should take that sentence seriously.  There is a body of thought that holds that two forces with different ideas can never unite because of their ideological differences.  That is nonsense, and ahistorical.  Opposites form alliances all the time.  Witness our alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II.  The rebels in Libya may not love everything about us, or the European countries.  They certainly resent the colonial era.  But they want to succeed...and they want to live.  And people yearning for success and life make deals for their own survival.  Churchill said he'd have made a pact with the Devil to defeat Nazi Germany.

We often quote Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University here.  He is one of most solid of Mideast analysts, and he predicted that America would eventually pay a price for its inaction.  I think he's right.  When you're seen as weak, or uninvolved, and when your side loses, you do pay a price.

March 13, 2011