What if Libya Staged a Revolution and Nobody Came?
Why is the world ignoring the anti-Qaddafi protests?
By Najla Abdurrahman, Feb. 17

"Ironically, as hundreds of Libyans inside the country protested against the Qaddafi regime, Libyans outside the country were protesting the media's coverage of events...the reporting on Tuesday's [Feb. 15] impromptu protests in Benghazi and the lack of information available to international media outlets are indicative of a much larger problem that Libyans have struggled with for decades: the creation of a virtual vacuum of information by the Qaddafi regime's strict censorship policies, highly restrictive press laws, and uncompromising repression of even the slightest expression of dissent. This has created considerable obstacles for Libyans both inside and outside the country attempting to communicate their struggles to the world."

A Regime We Can Trust
How did the West get Qaddafi so wrong?
By Cameron Abadi, Feb. 22

Too Little, Not Yet Too Late
Western governments have options for helping the anti-Qaddafi protesters.
By Tom Malinowski, Feb. 22

Qaddafi's Last Stand?
The colonel's 40-year rule in photos.
Feb. 23

Madman. Bizarro. Tyrant. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi exemplifies them all. Foreign Policy tells the story of the Middle East's most eccentric strongman in photographs.

Explainer: How Do You Hire Mercenaries?
How did Qaddafi get his private African army?
By Joshua E. Keating, Feb. 23

Act. Now.
A call for international intervention in Libya.
By Hussein Ibish, Feb. 24

This Week at War: Qaddafi's Collapsible Military
The regular Libyan army was built to fail.
By Robert Haddick, Feb. 25

The End of the Arab Dream
Qaddafi's downfall will mark the end of the Arab world's disastrous half-century-long affair with utopian governing fantasies.
By James Traub, Feb. 25

"If Muammar al-Qaddafi falls, as seems increasingly likely, he will land with the rending crash of an immense, rigid object, like the statue of Saddam Hussein pulled down in Baghdad's Firdos Square. This is not because, despite his own delusions, Qaddafi mattered to the world remotely as much as Saddam did. Rather, it's because the Jamahiriya, or stateless society, he fostered in Libya constitutes the last of the revolutionary fantasies with which Arab leaders have mesmerized their citizens and justified their ruthless acts of repression since the establishment of the modern Arab world in the years after World War II."

The Whack-a-Mole Strategy
The U.S. administration is being forced to play catch-up.
By Aaron David Miller, Feb. 28

Explainer: Do No-Fly Zones Work?
The success rate of the West's favorite intervention tactic.
By Joshua E. Keating, Feb. 28

Roman Ruins
How Qaddafi hoodwinked Italy for decades.
By Maurizio Molinari, March 3

"At the beginning of his rule in 1969, Qaddafi's beef with Italy may have been justified. Like Britain and France elsewhere in Africa, Italy had occupied the country, sometimes brutally, beginning in 1911. ... Now, with his regime on edge, he is again blaming outsiders for Libya's ills. The protests, he said in a Feb. 22 address, were sparked by malevolent foreigners who were giving the demonstrators drugs. He accused the Italians -- along with the Americans -- of having delivered shoulder-launched rocket-propelled grenades to the rebel forces."

Pax Romana
Italy's disastrous colonial legacy in North Africa.
By Cameron Abadi, March 4

No-Go
The case against a no-fly zone.
By Micah Zenko, March 4

Harvard for Tyrants
How Qaddafi taught a generation of bad guys.
By Douglas Farah, March 4

"Flush with oil money, Qaddafi orchestrated a training campaign for those who became the most brutal warlords in much of Africa, a legacy that has left the region crippled and unstable today. Qaddafi's World Revolutionary Center (WRC) near Benghazi became, as scholar Stephen Ellis noted in his classic 2001 book The Mask of Anarchy, the "Harvard and Yale of a whole generation of African revolutionaries," many of them the continent's most notorious tyrants."

AFP/Getty Images

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