Libya

It’s strange how, after so many months, the regime imploded so quickly:

“Abdel-Hakim Shugafa, a 26-year-old rebel fighter, said he was stunned by how easy it was. He saw only about 20 minutes of gunbattles as he and his fellow fighters pushed into the capital at nightfall.”

Syria may be soon, and I’d really like to see the Iranian regime disappear as well, though that unfortunately does not seem imminent.

The strange thing about the Qaddafi and Assad regimes, as opposed to the Mubarak regime, is that there is a fairly sweeping consensus about wanting the first two gone. Obama and McCain both want it. al-Qaeda wants it. Hamas wants it. Every Palestinian I know in Cairo wants it. Every Egyptian taxi driver wants it. All my secular Left Arab friends want it. All my deeply religious Arab friends want it too. It’s pretty rare for all those people to be on the same page about anything.