Predictions grow that Gadhafi will fall, but what will follow?

There are no simple answers to what ails the Middle East and Northern Africa, where dictators are under siege from domestic rebels and under political and military pressure from western nations.

No doubt, when the government of Moammar Gadhafi falls — which appears imminent at this writing — the initial reaction will be one of jubilation in Libya and some combination of happiness and relief from most of the rest of the world. But that initial reaction will not reflect all the possibilities that lie ahead

The United States has an unhappy history with dictators in almost every hemisphere, supporting some that who were viewed as friends, undercutting those that were viewed as enemies. And, sometimes, a friend (think Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, circa the ’80s) evolved into an enemy. In the case of Gadhafi, he was clearly an enemy when his agents brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 270 people, many of them Americans headed home for Christmas. But 18 years later Condoleezza Rice, then George W. Bush’s secretary of State, announced that the U.S. was restoring full diplomatic relations with Libya, in part in recognition of Gadhafi’s decision in 2003 to dismantle weapons of mass destruction and renounce terrorism, as well as Libya’s “excellent cooperation in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001.”

In February, President Barack Obama’s secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, called on Gadhafi to step down. And in recent months, the United States has joined the NATO effort of bombing Libyan military targets, providing cover for the rebels and weakening Gadhafi’s defenses.

Predicted fall

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Libya’s former deputy ambassador to the U.N. says he expects that the entire country will be in rebel hands within 72 hours.

Ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi, who with other diplomats has continued to work at the Libyan mission since disavowing Gadhafi in February, said a new rebel government will count on the international community for help in rebuilding the country and constructing new democratic institutions.

Libya appears to be in the middle of a process that places it ahead of Syria, where growing public dissent is being met with brutal repression by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Egypt, where a popular uprising toppled president Hosni Mubarak.

And all three of those countries are a long way from anyone being able to predict their future. Will they will emerge as democracies — and more importantly from a U.S. perspective — will the democracies the hold a favorable view of the West? The naive assumption that any democracy was an improvement over anything else was dispelled when the radical Islamic movement Hamas won a majority in the 2006 elections for the Palestinian parliament.

Even at a time of economic difficulty in Europe and the United States, the NATO countries are going to have to find a way of meeting Dabbashi’s expectations of aid. Because if they don’t, someone else will. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.