Foreign Confidential ™

True, the CPR (Clinton/Power/Rice) faction aims to use the deceptive "responsibility to protect"- civilians-from-slaughter rationale, which U.S. President Barack Obama cited in his Libyan intervention speech, as a precedent for future "humanitarian" interventions--including, in Power's case, an invasion of U.S. ally Israel in support of Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah--and for a U.S.-armed and financed UN world police force; but all this insanity is of secondary importance to the Libya mission's primary purpose.

Which is to manipulate political Islam--i.e. to install a so-called Islamist democracy that will be ruled by "moderate" Islamists instead of by Al Qaeda, the only Islamist group that the administration is presently not prepared to engage. Really. The overthrow of Khadafy, a deranged dictator and ex-terrorism sponsor who no longer posed any threat to the United States and its allies, is all about ... Islam. Political Islam, to be precise. Unbeknownst to most Americans, their Commander-in-Chief is competing with Al Qaeda commanders for leadership of "the Muslim world." He hopes to win the competition by delivering to Muslims what Al Qaeda has thus far not been able to deliver--namely, the overthrow of despised secular states across the Middle East, starting with the toppling of the pro-U.S. but apparently no longer useful to Washington Mubarak regime in Egypt, and the "liberation" of "Palestine" with Jerusalem as its capital (in a temporary two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict that would set the stage for a final solution--Israel's destruction or eventual disappearance).

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, similarly, hopes that he can out-Islamize the "extreme" Islamists--and prevent a Muslim uprising in France--by siding with the Islamist-influenced, if not Islamist-led, Libyan rebels. Lots of luck.

Incredibly, both Western leaders appear to have learned nothing from America's Cold War intervention in Afghanistan--which succeeded in hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union but also succeeded in unleashing and arming the global jihad in the first place--and Israel's terribly misguided support for Hamas in its earliest days, when the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Palestinian group was seen as a counterbalance to the secular, Left-leaning, Soviet-bloc-backed PLO. (Shortly before he was assassinated, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly referred to Israel's covert support for Hamas as Israel's "fatal error.") It has time and again been proved--the British, too, learned this the hard way during the Great Game of imperial rivalry--that the Islamist tiger will inevitably attack anyone who tries to ride it.

Put differently, just as leaving a country is harder than invading it, and running it is harder than bombing it, dismounting a wild beast is more dangerous than riding it.

Political Islam is far more dangerous than a wild beast. It is a manmade monster, like Nazism, that must be thoroughly defeated and destroyed--eliminated, not engaged.