Hey folks, Libya's in the news again. It dropped off the screens after Barrak and Hill's Excellent Adventure turned out to be too embarrassing.

Libya is not, and never truly was, a nation as we understand modern nation-states. It was a group of widely separated tribes and ethnicities conquered by Italy and called Libya. Khadaffi knew this and carefully kept the balance of animosities intact to insure his own rule.

Haftar was one of Khadaffi's more competent generals. He was captured in Khadaffi's invasion of Chad and went into exile in the US. He returned to Libya when it looked like Khadaffi would be overthrown.

Libya broke into component pieces in the chaos of the Arab Spring. Libya's oil fields and oil port are in the east. Islamist radicals, ISIS in particular, seized these assets. They are Libya's only real source of revenue. And that's where Haftar comes in

With support from Egypt and some Gulf states, Haftar raised an army and conquered the eastern part of Libya. So he controls the source of Libya's revenues.

Meanwhile, back in Tripoli (in the western part of Libya), Western countries and the UN have tried several times to construct a complex power sharing coalition. Their main clout is they control the international banking system and (legal) international oil market. So Haftar controls Libya's oil but the UN controls how Libya gets paid for it.

Haftar wants none of this. He is relentlessly conquering the rest of Libya. He is not a George Washington or John Adams. I'm not sure they could survive in today's Libya. Let's see how the dust settles.

Quite frankly, I think the lesson of the Bush and Obama years is that even moderate Muslim dictators may be SOBs, but they're better than the chaos that follows.