France24 LiveBlog Feed From Libya

What appears to be developing is a full-blown civil war.

As much as OS's old heart aches for them all, he hopes the US has better sense than to commit any sort of ground forces to the fray. We have this terrible habit of stepping in, and finding ourselves still there some twenty years later, resented by all sides.

Humanitarian aid to succor the suffering? Certainly, in the great American tradition.

Choosing sides in a civil war? Never a good idea. It is impossible to have the wisdom to know with whom to side, especially in a culture so removed from our assumptions.

We're better off, OS drones on again, drilling-developing-consuming-selling our own oil, gas, coal and nuclear. It would save countless lives around the world, much more inexpensively than flying plane-loads of Marines into the next civil war in some tragically failed oil-exporting part of the world.