Academic

How curious that news being tweeted from reporters and rebels in Libya ?- overwhelmingly hostile to Qaddafi?s regime ?- still regularly includes links abbreviated with bit.ly.  That?s ?.ly? as in ?Libya.?  Presumably, Qaddafi isn?t eager to drive away any more foreign investment these days, though it?s peculiar to read about his atrociousness via his own handy web domain.

The headlines today report that Qaddafi loyalists have pushed the enthusiastic if inept rebels back once again, with Brega emerging as the frontline du jour.  All this foxtrotting back and forth along the coastal highway is remarkably reminiscent of Monty and Rommel?s tug-o-war seventy years ago -? the terrain seems to lend itself to outbursts of unsustainable gusto.  Or, under a more favorable reading of the latest rout, perhaps the rebels are merely enticing Qaddafi?s forces into exposed pursuit on a highway under NATO?s gunsights.

Being a child somewhere doesn?t, alas, teach mature insight, military or diplomatic.  I didn?t learn Arabic (beyond counting to ten).  I don?t know anything about competing tribal identities (though clearly the nomadic Berbers who sold dangerous-looking camel whips at itinerant suqs had little in common with the Arab Libyans who lived in Brega, but that?s a crude distinction common in most countries of the Magreb).  I didn?t even learn a good recipe for delicious Libyan shorba, the national spiced soup.  So my own position on U.S. policy is just as ill-informed and reflexive as most everybody else?s these days.

Many hands have been wrung about the U.S. engagement and what it may reveal about an incipient Obama doctrine.  My sense is that bombs are falling less because of Obama and more because of Qaddafi ?- he clearly ran afoul of the Saddam doctrine, which compels the United States to rain furious hell upon old antagonists foolish enough to expose themselves to UN censure without the prophylaxis of nuclear weapons.  (Note to acolytes of Mohamed Farrah Aidid: you?re on the list.)

Now that we have committed the Sixth Fleet -? which watched over my own evacuation from Libya -? I hope its engagement is quick and decisive.  Americans cannot be comfortable at the prospect of Qaddafi left alone atop a nation purged of dissent with little left to do in life but spend billions on his deep rolodex of mercenaries. 

More selfishly, if the situation does bog down into stalemate, I hope Brega will lie in liberated Libya.  The country was closed to Americans for the twenty-five years between the day my family was evacuated in 1981 and the rapprochement in 2006.  I think it?s fair to assume that any territory remaining in Qaddafi?s hands after this contretemps will be similarly inhospitable.  And I would like to be able to return someday to show my children evidence for those stories about Una Wilson being bitten by a pye dog and needing a month of rabies injections and how Grandma sifted flour for weevils.  (No need to sift Corn Flakes, as Klim floats them to the surface for easy removal.)