Maybe I’m just pessimistic or something but I’m a bit worried about this whole Libyan thing.  When the no-fly zone enforcement started I had a feeling it could end badly. On the face of it, events seem to be working out well with Gaddafi apparently on the way out as long as you try to ignore the number of dead bodies it took to get this far and can take all the misinformation with a pinch of salt.

It is really two things that I am worrying about.  The first and more immediate one is that the Colonel will end up doing something colossal and desperate, going out in a blaze of gory glory The other worry is a bit more subtle: that Libya will end up with somebody not much better and it will all have been for nothing.

It seems to me that whenever there is a hunger for change the emphasis is weighted far too heavily on what people want a change from and not enough thought goes into what they want to change to. The feeling that ‘anything has to be better than what we’ve got now’ must be a common one. Just having democracy doesn’t necessarily guarantee success either – look at Zimbabwe where they gained independence and almost immediately voted in Mugabe who has been there ever since. When the dust settles, who knows what will happen.

It even rings a bit true for us here, where the floating voters decide every 5, 10 or 15 years that the UK should change ruling party based almost entirely on a dislike of whoever is in charge rather than what the other lot are saying. Is it the human condition to want change for the sake of it without paying close attention to what we are changing to?