Why should we care about Libya?

I've never visited Libya, though it is not my fault. First of all you might ask why I would even go there. Well, if you are interested in ancient history as I am, there are numerous World Heritage sites there. I am also interested in World War II, and Libya is where Rommel (The Desert Fox) and Montgomery fought several key battles of the war (Tobruk, Benghazi). I am also interested in the Middle East generally and have visited most countries in the region, so Libya was definitely on my bucket list.

I was scheduled to fly from Cairo to Tripoli but the flight - and the tour - were cancelled as I sat in the airport hotel waiting for my ride to the terminal. I called the US embassy because the rumor was that Ghaddafi's son was denied a US visa so he retaliated by barring Americans traveling to Libya. Something as eccentric as that was not outside the realm of possibility for those who knew Ghaddafi. The duty officer called me back after talking to the US embassy in Tripoli to say there was no problem they were aware of. In fact, there were 30,000 Americans in Libya at that moment who had come to see the solar eclipse days earlier. So it turns out, Ghaddafi had nothing to do with my cancelled trip. It was the Libyan tour operator who decided to keep our money (I was traveling with six other people) and use it for something other than our trip. That's an example of how Quixotic doing business in Libya can be.

So why care about what's happening in Libya now? Ordinary citizens are revolting all over the Middle East, encouraged by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Every country in that region is ruled by autocrats trying to reign in their citizens who are fed up with the corruption, fear, unemployment and general stagnation resulting from autocracies in an age of free enterprise and democracy. The most violent revolt has been in Libya, where the mercurial Ghaddafi has no problem killing thousands of his own people to maintain power. In Tunisia and Egypt, their armies refused to fire on fellow citizens. That's not the case in Libya, where Ghaddafi maintains his fiefdom with billions in oil revenues, paying soldiers loyal only to the paycheck he provides. The bottom line is this -- if Ghaddafi succeeds in putting down this rebellion without the US or any other industrialized nation helping the rebels, it sends precisely the wrong message to people and governments in the neighboring autocracies -- if your people revolt and you do nothing, they will succeed. If you massacre your people, we and the rest of the world will do nothing and you will succeed.

If we do nothing in the face of these massacres, the rebels, having lost hope, will turn to fundamentalist groups for help in ridding them of their discredited leader. These groups, supported by Iran and other countries friendly to terrorists, will gladly supply weapons and bombs to get rid of Ghaddafi and other Arab autocrats. They will then turn Libya and other countries into little Irans, where we will have no influence and a heightened risk of terror within our own borders. The people of Libya know this is the risk. They would much prefer to be free of tyrannical regimes and prosper in western style capitalistic societies. But even a fundamentalist regime to them is preferable to their current regime and worth the risk.

So, fellow Americans, if you liked the Middle East under Ghaddafi-like dictators, you will love the Middle East filled with terrorist states bent on our destruction.