Deja vu. The fall of Mouammar Kadhafi shares many similarities with the fall of Saddam Hussein. Mouammar Kadhafi was “defeated” by the colonists (France, Italy, England, and the US), not by the Lybian rebels. Like a predator, the quartet hid behind weak and inexperienced fighters to claim the uprising is of the Lybian people against their leader. Here in the US, the focus is on gas prices, and how much they are going to fall, not the aftermath of Kadhafi’s fall and the risks of civil war. This is the moment when cold war nostalgics miss the old times, when the world was more peaceful, balanced between the most powerful powers (Russia and the US).

The rebels in Lybia are naive to think that the fall of Kadhafi will resolve all their divisions. We have seen inconsistencies in what the so-called rebels claim. The end of Mouammar Kadhafi means chaos and anarchy because Kadhafi is a strong man who knows well his people. The rebel movement in Lybia is a comedy, a group of puppets guided by the West. As the Wolof of Senegal say, “If you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.”