Foreign adventures

Oh dear, it's all going pear-shaped. The Independent reports:

Rebels, from the Wars of the Roses up to the present civil war in Libya, usually try to postpone splitting into factions and murdering each other until after they have seized power and are in full control. However deep their divisions, they keep them secret from the outside world.

Not so the Libyan rebels. Members of their Transitional National Council (TNC) in Benghazi last month detained their military leader, General Abdel Fatah Younes, on suspicion of treachery, lured him away from his bodyguards and murdered him. This week the head of the TNC, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, sacked his whole government on the grounds that some were complicit in the killing. He was apparently forced to do so in order to quell the rage of the powerful Obeidi tribe to which Younes belonged.

I would have thought that, following Iraq and Afghanistan, we might have learned the lesson that plunging into foreign adventures was unlikely to bring about satisfactory regime change. Now we face the usual problem of how to get out without making things even worse.