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We may have to go “All Libya, All the time” here this week. We won’t, but it is tempting.

Dr. Steve Metz of SSI has a featured op-ed in The New Republic:

Libya’s Coming Insurgency 

….History offers a number of sign posts that an insurgency will occur. Unfortunately Libya has almost all of them. At this point the political objectives of the government and anti-government forces are irreconcilable. Each side wants total victory-either Qaddafi will retain total power or he will be gone. Both sides are intensely devoted to their cause; passions are high. Both have thousands of men with military training, all imbued with a traditional warrior ethos which Qaddafi himself has stoked. The country is awash with arms. Libya has extensive hinterlands with little or no government control that could serve as insurgent bases. Neighboring states are likely to provide insurgent sanctuary whether deliberately-as an act of policy-or inadvertently because a government is unable to control its territory. North Africa has a long history of insurgency, from the anti-colonial wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to more recent conflicts in Chad, Algeria, and Western Sahara. Where insurgency occurred in the past, it is more likely to occur in the future. All this means that there is no place on earth more likely to experience an insurgency in the next few years than Libya.

What is not clear is whether the coming insurgency will involve Qaddafi loyalists fighting against a new regime or anti-Qaddafi forces fighting to remove the old dictator and his patrons. In either case, a Libyan insurgency would be destructive. Because they take place within the population, insurgencies always fuel refugee problems and humanitarian crises. They provide an opportunity for extremists to hijack one or both sides. And insurgency in Libya would destabilize a region undergoing challenging political transitions

Read the rest here.

 Some Advice to Evil Dictators by Steven Elden

Amusing.

[by Charles Cameron ]

People want the man out of there — body and soul, it seems.

Sources: body and soul

These are genuine images with genuine headlines — from Vogue on February 25, 2011 and from the BBC back in September, 1999. The articles’ respective texts are informative, too…

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She’s a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her “the element of light in a country full of shadow zones.”

Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has invented a sleek James Bond-style car, which Libya says is the safest vehicle on earth. … The interior is replete with air bags, an inbuilt electronic defence system, and a collapsible bumper which protects passengers in head-on collisions.

For an astounding tour of “the fashion industry’s faux pas on global issues,” see The Zoolander Effect in today’s Foreign Policy.

“Any Libyan who lifts an arm shall be punished with death….Any Libyan who undermines the sovereign state will be punished with death.” “Those who commit crimes against the army shall be punished with death. Anybody who works for a foreign company that undermines the country will be punished with death.”

Twitter is absolutely amazing on reporting events on Libya the last few days. What they lose in passing on rumors the make up for by being hours or days ahead of MSM and USG reaction.

Col. Gaddafi, who looks these days like a cross between a has-been rock star in Celebrity Rehab and Ethel Merman in her dotage, is desperately trying to cling to power and has unleashed artillery, naval bombardment, warplanes, helicopter gunships and African mercs on his own people. No word if the honorable member of the UN Human Rights Panel has employed poison gas yet, but the Libyans appear to be holding their own in fierce fighting in Libya’s largest cities.

The USG response has been muted on Libya. This sober restraint may reflect the vulnerability of American oil industry workers trapped in the fighting as well as the discomfort of anticipation of the details of recent deals between Western corporations and former government officials and the Libyan regime coming to light if Gaddafi falls. Or alternatively, Gaddafi tearing lucrative agreements up if he remains in power.