On March 7 I wrote:
The "western" media is reporting the crisis in Libya as something similar to what happened in Egypt and Tunisia. But this is not a modern youth movement protesting against a dictatorship, this is a developing civil war between tribal entities – not exactly a novelty in Libya.…
Five month late the so called paper of the record finally acknowledges these facts:
While the rebels have sought to maintain a clean image and to portray themselves as fighting to establish a secular democracy, several recent acts of revenge have cast their ranks in a less favorable light. They have also raised the possibility that any rebel victory over Colonel Qaddafi could disintegrate into the sort of tribal tensions that have plagued Libya for centuries.
In recent weeks, rebel fighters in Libya’s western mountains and around the coastal city of Misurata have lashed out at civilians because their tribes supported Colonel Qaddafi, looting mountain villages and emptying a civilian neighborhood.
I was accused of arguing from a feeling of "cultural superiority" when I wrote that March piece about Libyan tribes. Maybe I was, though I don't think so, but at least I was right.
My piece finished with this:
With "western" intervention the situation on the ground would quickly deteriorate. This would cost a lot more lives than any situation in which the Libyan people fight this out by and for themselves.
The New York Times finishes with a somewhat similar sense:
Members of the tribes close to Colonel Qaddafi — like his own tribe, the Qaddafa, or the larger Maghraha, and small tribes associated with them — may face the greatest danger from “tribal revenge,” George Joffe, a Libya expert at the University of Cambridge, wrote in another e-mail. “And, of course, the longer this struggle continues, the more likely and bitter that will become.”
It is time to stop any support for any side of this conflict. Let the Libyans fight it out for themselves. That would, in the end, be a much less bloody affair than onside support for this or that tribe.