What makes you think Libya was a "win"?

Will Anyone Answer?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT of OpinionJournal

Allowing Libyan tyrant Moammar Gadhafi to make a mockery of U.S. policy is not a good idea, especially not when the Bush administration has been talking Gadhafi up for the past 18 months as one of our newest allies in the war on terror and an example to other enemy regimes of how to win America's respect and goodwill.

Gadhafi has lots to snicker about right now, at our expense--as the U.S. continues to give him a free pass over manhandling Libya's most prominent democratic dissident, Fathi Eljahmi. The 64-year-old Mr. Eljahmi has a habit of speaking up for freedom in Libya every time he gets a chance. For this, he has spent most of the past four years in a series of prisons or--in the more polite lingo applied to his current caged condition--the state security detention facilities of Gadhafi's Great Socialist People's Libyan Jamahiriya.

It may be in some ways unfair to focus on Mr. Eljahmi, for he is just one of an untold but significant number of Libyans who have suffered imprisonment or death for defying the despotism of Gadhafi, who since seizing power in a 1969 coup has tyrannized Libya for the past 36 years.
Some of Gadhafi's critics have vanished into places such as Abu Salim prison, near Tripoli--where state authorities massacred hundreds of inmates during a prison revolt in 1996, and where Mr. Eljahmi served time in 2002-03. Many have been harassed or beaten up, or simply disappeared. At the moment, Libya's dissident diaspora is sending around stories of the murder of a Libyan journalist, 32-year-old Daif Al Ghazal, whose bruised and stabbed body was found June 2 in the city of Benghazi, according to the Paris-based monitoring group Reporters Without Borders. Mr. Al Ghazal, after working for years for a pro-Gadhafi newspaper (no other kind is permitted in Libya) had begun writing articles critical of corruption within the Libyan regime, published on an Arabic London-based Web site, libya-alyoum.com ("Libya Today").

We have not won a shooting war since 1945. That was also the last year we fought one like we meant it.