There is an old saying in the Middle East that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. That thought came to my mind as I listened to President Obama trying to explain the intervention of America and its allies in Libya \u201d\u201d and I don\u2019t say that as criticism. I say it with empathy. This is really hard stuff, and it\u2019s just the beginning.<\/p>\n
When an entire region that has been living outside the biggest global trends of free politics and free markets for half a century suddenly, from the bottom up, decides to join history \u201d\u201d and each one of these states has a different ethnic, tribal, sectarian and political orientation and a loose coalition of Western and Arab states with mixed motives trying to figure out how to help them \u201d\u201d well, folks, you\u2019re going to end up with some very strange-looking policy animals. And Libya is just the first of many hard choices we\u2019re going to face in the \u201cnew\u201d\u009d Middle East<\/b>.<\/p>\n