Quote Originally Posted by CrufflerSteve View Post
This article is by a reporter who has been in Libya several times and did a lot of reporting with the rebels during the civil war.

http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/b...embassy-attack

Her reading is that they are mostly pro-US and very anti-Islamist but it is hard to deal with with the hard code nutjobs since:
"..most of the Qaddafi-era police have not returned to work, the new internal security forces are still embryonic, and there is effectively no Libyan army at the moment."

Extremists can do very well when there is no central authority to squash them.

Steve
They said that about Egypt too...

I am skeptical. I view Islam today at barely past medieval Christianity - they need a seminal thinker such as Aquinas to drag them bodily out of their very backwards view of the world. Such Muslims exist, but I think we have learned through painful experience that they are a minority, and mostly live in the west already (why would you stay in the mideast if you were a modern-thinking Muslim?)

However, there is also the case of a small, ideologically consistent, determined minority triumphing over a fragmented majority that concedes a lot of moral idealism to that minority, which is what may have happened. If you study how the communists, though consistently a minority, consistently won fights to rule a country, you can get a sense of how a minority (a large minority, but still a minority) of Islamists can take over a country that really doesn't want them.

So, I dunno, is the bottom line.