CROSSING TO SEIFTY:

Long quiescent, Libya starts to awaken (Michael Slackman, March 1, 2007, NY Times)

For more than three decades, Libya has been an experiment in one man's ideology. The experiment has left the state with few functioning institutions, no real legal system, inadequate schools and hospitals, and a population isolated and unprepared for modernity. That is the assessment of the government's own consultants.

Yet the leader of the country, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, will be holding a huge celebration Friday to mark the 30th anniversary of the system that has led Libya to its current crisis. So as efforts to change get under way, pushed by a small group of Libyan reformers, talk is restricted to economic change. The question on everyone's mind is how that can be effected without political change as well.

As a local businessman, Ahmen Shebani, put it, "Do you think we can create social and economic prosperity without political reform?"

Of course, the reform is being driven by just one man as well.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 1, 2007 5:55 PM