The Committee to Nuke Elysium

From a counterterrorism point of view, a more serious danger is that the civil war will continue without end. Bin Laden has proved adept at exploiting civil wars and strife. In Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq, among other countries, al-Qaida and like-minded groups initially worked with local fighters motivated primarily to throw out outsiders or redress other local grievances. Slowly but surely they made the struggle more global, casting it as a fight against the United States and making the jihadist component of the resistance larger. Given the strong Libyan representation in al-Qaida and the historic role jihadists played in the anti-Qaddafi struggle, al-Qaida might try to bend this conflict to its will. So Qaddafi’s swift end is all the more necessary.