Recent debate about the Middle East has been swinging back and forth like an England World Cup match.
Initially, as regimes fell is North Africa, the feeling was that it was all a bi embarrassing for the supporters of the Iraq War. The argument went that that the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions showed that eventually oppressed Arab people would rise up and enact their own regime change. If Bush & Blair had been a little more patient, Saddam would be gone by the hand of his own people, and a foreign policy disaster avoided.
Naturally, neo-cons suggested that it was only the introduction of that guiding light of Arab democracy, Iraq, that inspired the revolutions. And yes, it seems pretty likely that anyone would take a look at modern Iraq and think "why can't we be more like that - I was bored of having legs anyway".
But Muammer Gaddafi, as he so often does, has confounded things. Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak might not have been terribly nice people, and I'm glad I never invited them for tea and biscuits or sang for them, but Saddam Hussein they were not. It wasn't particularly reasonable to point them out and say "Hey, that could have been Iraq!" But the People's Colonel is giving us slightly more of a glimpse of how The Sadman would have behaved had his people flooded Baghdad with calls for change.
He would have killed quite a lot of them. As he did several times previously.
So now we end up, rather than learning the lessons of history and leaving people to sort things out, we have seemingly learned different lessons of history and realised that if we don't act all that will happen is that a lot of Libyans will die. But recognising what didn't work so well in Iraq we're keeping the our boys in Khaki out of the firing line, and instead essentially providing an airforce for the rebellion.
And we're all none the wiser - yet - as to whether we're doing the right thing. How the fuck are you supposed to tell?
