There is a wonderful post by a blogger who says he is from Tripoli, and who calls himself Muhammad min Libja (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/01/libya-revolution-no-fly-zone entitled ‘Libya is united in popular revolution – please don’t intervene’.

What is happening in Libya is the result of 41 years of a cruel dictatorship which continued even when the country and its leadership were ostracised, but which continued even more, and even flourished when the world’s great countries decided to shut their eyes at what was really happening at ground level and tried their best to get business deals out of the dictatorship. The people down at ground level continued to be oppressed.

This is now the result of all that. Gaddafi says the people ‘love him’ – they have been showing it in a very different way. And he in turn has also been showing it in a different way to what we usually call love.

The great powers are now engaged in a dilemma – to intervene or not to intervene. Muhammad min Libja gives a straight answer: No interventions. The most he is ready to accept is enforcing a no-fly zone. This is a popular revolution: Please stay out.

Gaddafi himself gave more or less the same message when he warned of rivers of blood if there was an armed foreign intervention.

As Timothy Garton Ash said in yesterday’s Guardian, intervention, or rather a liberal intervention, has been given a bad name by the many botched editions of the past years. Interventions such as in Afghanistan and Iraq may have been given a liberal aim at the beginning, but the way in which they were carried out was not liberal at all. It is now increasingly clear that neither of these two interventions was really aiming to liberate the people, despite the torrents of words about Afghan women enclosed in the burqa.

These two botched and flawed interventions must not be allowed to make us forget the good that came of other armed interventions – in Bosnia (where it came too late to avoid massacres), in Sierra Leone and in Kosovo.

So there could still be an argument in favour of armed intervention in Libya if the worst comes to the worst.

The Libyans themselves, as evidenced by this single blog, are still telling the world not to interfere and to let them do the revolution by their own simple and inadequate means. So far, they have magnificently succeeded. At the price of thousands dead, they have got the dictator cornered in Tripoli, liberated the entire east of the country, reduced the dictator to rants on television to a mostly bored audience, persuaded parts or many of his army and police to cross over to the opposition, got the dictator to have to fly in mercenaries from outside the country to bomb, kill and maim those of the people who ‘love him’ who do not want to wave a green flag, and all this without his hundreds if not thousands of tanks being used, and all his air force being reduced to one solitary plane that let off two bombs at Brega.

The outside world is still considering all the aspects of enforcing a no-fly zone, not just the practical sides, but also the legal and theoretical ones.

Still, there is also much to say about non-military intervention. The world has not even began to consider these in earnest.

Such as offering humanitarian aid. Mr Garton Ash adds: “Starting with this almost universally accepted work of humanitarian aid agencies, there is then a whole range of forms of intervention – from economic carrots and sticks, through diplomatic pressure, all the way to often controversial forms of overt or covert assistance to independent media and opposition groups, training in forms of non-violent action, and so on. Many of the most genuinely liberal forms of intervention – those which help people help themselves to be free – are to be found somewhere along this spectrum, but well short of armed force. We used them far too little in the Middle East over the last 30 years.”

Nor should one minimise the practical importance of economic sanctions, if properly targeted, the freezing of funds held by the dictator and the ferreting out of the proxies who may be used, and even the International Criminal Court. To quote Mr Garton Ash again: “Building on the post-1945 tradition of human rights promotion and international humanitarian law, and working with and through the UN, this has brought us the International Criminal Court and the doctrine of a ‘responsibility to protect’, also endorsed by the UN. To be sure, it is rank hypocrisy for the US, Russia and China to threaten Gaddafi with being arraigned before an ICC whose authority they do not themselves accept. But that’s an argument for the US, Russia and China to join the ICC, not for that court to be abolished. If the threat of prosecution persuades some more of Gaddafi’s henchmen to defect, this must be a good thing.”