HAPPILY, THESE WARS HAVE GOTTEN SO EASY THAT EVEN THE UR CAN WIN THEM:

If we have the courage, more tyrants like Gaddafi will fall: Those who have argued that the Arabs aren't ready for democracy are being shown up as hypocrites. (Janet Daley, 27 Aug 2011, The Telegraph)

Those of us who urged on the Anglo-French initiative which succeeded in pulling a reluctant US president and an ambivalent Nato into support for this revolution have some right to feel vindicated. What was so widely predicted only weeks ago - the "inevitable" humiliation of the West being forced to accept a seemingly immovable dictator and a country either engaged in indefinite civil war or having to be (in the great colonial tradition) partitioned - has evaporated with bizarre suddenness.

There is still much sighing and elaborate despair from the other side - that is, the other side of our argument here in Britain, as opposed to the more robust disagreement on the ground in Libya. The voices which insisted that no good could come from this intervention - that this was none of our business, that we should learn the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan and stay away, or we would be trapped in a military quagmire with no exit - persist in their fatalism. It is relatively easy, they say, to displace one dictator and his henchmen (although it hadn't looked easy at all just days before it happened), but installing anything resembling stable democracy will be beyond any of our efforts.

The naysayers do not pull their punches: they make no attempt to conceal the frank racism or, if you prefer, post-colonial contempt for the peoples in question. These are not Europeans, they sneer. They cannot be expected to construct (even, presumably, with the help and guidance of the West) accountable governing institutions. The rule of law and the concept of government by the people and for the people are alien to the tribal culture of this region, with its inherited enmities and traditions of vengeance. These are Arabs, they say knowingly - and Arabs don't do democracy.

Follow @brothersjudd