Take heart, Libyans! The West is standing by!

Having held his tongue (keyboard, surely! Ed) for more than half a month, Walt will now tell you what's going to happen in Libya. The anti-Gadhafi revolutionaries are going to lose, at least in the short term. Now Walt will tell you why.

The Mad Colonel has firm control of the military and its plentiful weapons, stockpiled over the years for just such an occasion. The rebels have plenty of nuttin'. Have you seen them on TV? They're riding around in pickup trucks! (Nice red, black and green paint jobs, though.) Gadhafi is calling in air strikes while the rebels are bargaining with Omar's Rent-a-Cessna.

What the rebels need, evidently, is military support from Outside...meaning the West. And they're not going to get it. There's been lots of tut-tutting and cluck-clucking, and a few Western planes and troops have been inside the desert kingdom, but not a shot has been fired in anger from any Western gun.

Why are the western nations so reluctant to get involved? Let's talk about the Big Three.

The French have memories of a long and nasty civil war in Algeria, which ended in defeat for the French and the migration of 1000s of "pieds noirs" to metropolitan France, where they have bred like rabbits and generally made themselves a pain in the derrière to this day. So all the French have done, thus far, is to "recognize" the provisional government at Benghazi. "Allo, la Libye! La France vous reconnait!" Bonne chance avec ça.

The British also remember glorious battles in the wasteland that is Libya. Tobruk, El Alamein... Montgomery, dontcha know. Having been denied another go at the time of the Suez crisis, they would dearly love to do a repeat and have been the most strident in calling for a no-fly zone. But the Brits are already overstretched further east in Afghanistan, and they're running short of troops, arms and (especially) money. The spirit is willing but the pound is weak.

American hemming and hawing is harder to figure out. Walt figures the US reluctance has less to do with cowardice than with political correctness. Having American planes and American soldiers beating up still more dusty Arab towns... the optics just aren't right. And of course there's always the possibility of "mission creep". There'd be all that nasty talk about "another Vietnam" (or Iraq or Afghanistan. Ed.)

What other reason could there be? You don't believe that stuff about the President being a Muslim do you? Well? Do you?! Hussein Obama? Naaaahhh.

So the long and short of it is, we're going to see a repeat of Hungary, 1956, or the Prague spring of 1968. The West will be vociferous and unanimous in its condemnation of the crushing of the protest/rebellion/revolution/whatever, but will do nothing while the protesters/rebels/revolutionaries/whatever are being sent to the Muslim heaven.
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