Unlike Iraq, there is now at least a semblance of a government in waiting in the Libyan Interim National Council – certainly more legitimate than the Chalabi-led Iraqi National Congress that the Pentagon flew into Iraq. ~Greg Scoblete

That’s partly true, but let’s examine this idea that the Libyan Interim National Council/National Transitional Council is more legitimate. It is more legitimate in the sense that there are several governments that now recognize it as the Libyan government (the number is all the way up to eight), but by that standard it is less legitimate than the Gaddafi regime. It is more legitimate than Chalabi and the INC in that the members of the TNC were not brought in by a foreign invading force and were responsible for forming their council entirely on their own, but it is not obviously any more representative of Libyans than the early INC was of Iraqis and might even be less so. What we have in the TNC leadership is a group of mainly former regime officials and military officers that have assumed the mantle of anti-Gaddafi oppositon, and they claim to speak on behalf of Libya, but they are at most an emergency interim committee that wields what little power it has because it has filled the vacuum created by the rebellion.

The sobering thing to consider is that there has been far less planning and preparation for the post-Gaddafi Libya that the intervening governments say that they want than there was planning for a transition in Iraq. At least before the invasion of Iraq, the State Department had made some effort to come up with post-Hussein transition plans, which Pentagon planners and occupation officials dutifully ignored. There does not appear to be anything comparable going on in any of the NATO foreign ministries right now for officials to ignore later on. Supporters of the Iraq invasion were supremely overconfident and unreasonably optimistic about the prospects of transforming Iraq’s political system, and Americans and Iraqis have been paying the price for their arrogance ever since, but compared to Libya Iraq was a far better candidate for a transition from authoritarianism to some form of consultative or representative government. That doesn’t mean that it was a good candidate or that imposing political transformation on Iraq was wise, but that the same kind of transition in Libya will be vastly more difficult. There is absolutely no interest on the part of any of the intervening governments in the “responsibility to rebuild,” and much less to work with in Libya in terms of human capital and institutions. That hardly bodes well for the future of Libya.