Gidaffi was by all accounts a 'good' man as he served his people well.
Now Libya is now without effective government, is descending into militarised strife. This is not the stuff that successful nations are built on. The massacre that the European powers tried to save the Libyan people from looks to me like it was in relative terms the better option for the country as a whole. The massacre European intervention intended to prevent now looks like becoming an ongoing event.
The European powers wanted to blaze a trail for democracy. Instead they have blazed a trail for another country to descend into spiritual darkness. IMO it is the hardened fighters who will eventually wrench power unto themselves.
Perhaps Europe believed that in addition to conjuring a free society based on respect for the individuals they would also usher in a world of economic opportunity. The problem here is that Europe can no longer afford to provide anything but meagre financial support to whatever unrepresentative regime emerges from the Libyan chaos. Europe is heading into an intractable financial crisis, of its own making, a decline that must surely also travel like rats on ships across the Mediterranean to infect an increasingly vulnerable Libya. Libya and the other economies of North Africa now face chilling European financial winds in five ways: decreased trade, tourism, worker’s remittances,foreign investment and plunging oil revenues. Libya will only be able to live on the milk of Gaddafi’s investments for so long.
The Libyan economy, will increasingly be on its own, will have negative economic growth this year and if it gets its political act together will enjoy only a mild rebound in 2013. In the mean time I expect it to suffer further unrest and unemployment and that the previously optimistic people will become with dismayed with their options. Abandoned financially by Europe and without sufficient resources of their own, facing a fractious militarised society, they will walk into the arms of Islamic fundamentalism as their only realistic option.
