Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know

“At the appropriate time, we will open the arms depots so all Libyans and tribes will be armed,” Muammar Qadhafi said in a public address on Friday. That Qadhafi has long pitted opposition tribes against each other is obvious. He has also been accused of deliberately keeping military and security forces fractured and weak, and therefore dependent on him.

“Unlike neighboring Egypt and Tunisia,” the New York Times wrote on Sunday, “Libya lacks the steadying hand of a military to buttress a collapsing government. It has no parliament, no trade unions, no political parties, no civil society, no nongovernmental agencies.” With the state oil company as the only strong ministry, the available options to transition Libya to a stable government are few.

While notorious for wiping out any trace of opposition, Qadhafi’s four decades of tyranny also included suppressing al Qaeda and other Islamist insurgencies.

Many fear that, should Qadhafi fall, the resulting power vacuum will result in another Afghanistan or Somalia, with al Qaeda or other radical groups running rampant.

Others worry the unity of the opposition tribes will turn into infighting once the regime falls. These fears have been exacerbated by Qadhafi’s long habit of deliberately setting the tribes against each other, even dragging century-old rivalries to the surface in his recent public speeches.

Either way, the seemingly inevitable chaos will likely create the perfect environment for jihadism to flourish.

“The primary danger,” Stratfor wrote last Tuesday, “is that Libya could potentially become a new jihadist haven, with Libyans who honed their skills in Iraq and Afghanistan employing them on the streets of their home country.”

Said one U.S. counterterrorism official: “We’ve been concerned from the start of the unrest that A.Q. and its affiliates will look for opportunities to exploit any disarray.” These affiliates include the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Even if an organized government manages to emerge on the other side of this revolution, it is likely to be an Islamist/nationalist hybrid. Notes the Times, “the strong nationalism that has run through all the recent uprisings is more likely to take on a religious tinge, experts believe, because it is a conservative society whose royal family once drew its authority in part from its spiritual role.”

As Stratfor says, “No matter what befalls the Libyan leader, however, it is clear that Libya faces a high likelihood of civil war.”

In the chaos and leadership vacuum that ensues, watch for radical Islam to come out on top.