Cote d'Ivoire?
Anyway, coups have gone out of fashion mostly. But you can still interfere in other ways. Remember when Hamas got elected.[/QUOTE]
Now it's all called "international humanitarian intervention", or "peacekeeping". And you can add Haiti to the list. And, eventually, Libya. And the protectorate of Kosovo. And the protectorates of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Etc.
The journalists these days are a joke.
"Heavy gunfire": a few guys with AK-47 shooting wildly in all directions
"Heavy casualties": more than one dead on either side
"Massive destruction": a few cars and houses burned
"Heavy shelling": a couple morons firing a few mortar rounds at a town
etc.
Have these idiots never heard of a real war? If a few dead constitutes heavy casualties, how would they call what happened on the Somme on Okinawa?
You've only noticed that now? Coverage has been a joke since day one.
Which is why the cooler heads in the provisionary rebel governments have been saying all along that the tribal system needs to at least change. Ghaddaffi played it as one of his strategies of divide and conquer. He might have done so skillfully enough to feck up the country for a long time. At least the possible nocive effects of tribalism seem to be realised by some Libyans.
You know, the funny thing is that the tribal system was all along the traditional system of Libya. What you are proposing is, basically, to bring it kicking and screaming into the 20th (21st?) century. Everywhere that happens, people fight it. It's the root cause for all the problems which the colonial ventures of the "weest" have met, in Africa, the Middle East, and now Central Asia.
You don't like those traditional societies, and I wouldn't like living in one, but many people who live in such societies like them. Even this rebellion has its roots on that system. Unfortunately, people in Europe seem to believe they have a right to
impose their social preferences on people in other countries.
Of course, when the Nazis conquered France and decided that traditional french society had to be replaced with some more modern nazi-inspired fascist society (it was modern at the time), they found some local allies but the rest of the french fought back and
that was fine with you wasn't it, Verbose? The germans didn't have a right to invade France and impose some different system of government and society on it, even if they were only backing local puppets willing to do the work for them. But it's all right to keep invading half of Africa over and over again, Or the Middle East, or Central Asia, and inflict them with a "modern" government by backing local "modern" puppets?
Rebels taking control of city, Gadaffi's security men surrendering, civilians celebrating on the street... It looks like a matter of hours or days!
