Surprise, surprise. French foreign minister says when it comes to Libya's oil and reconstruction it "seems fair and logical" for preference to be given to those who helped the rebels.

All the government's fine words about defending democracy and not selling arms to tyrants were just that - words. It is business as usual, including licences to sell shotguns and ammunition to Bahrain where the monarchy has brutally suppressed peaceful protests.

A newly published Downing Street letter from September 2002, five months before the Iraq invasion, confirms Blair planned to ignore the advice of his legal advisors and go to war knowing it was illegal.

America goes into Iraq and Afghanistan, turns them upside down, then says it would be irresponsible to leave them topsy-turvy, but as long as America stays there, these countries will remain messed up.

The British and French governments, whose trainers and advisers were the least covert of history's covert operations, will go on pretending the rebels were running their own war all along. But it was NATO's war and now the chips will be cashed in.

If Libya were to become a proxy state, and nothing more than an outpost of Western interests, it will descend into the same chaos that we have seen, over the past decade, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West's intervention in Libya is driven by a determination to regain control of the region following the overthrow of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt and the spreading of the Arab Spring.

Replacing old fashioned, conventional warfare with high-tech, stealthy drones, and death squads capable of inflicting death and destruction anywhere in the world, is becoming the hallmark of the "peace" president's foreign policy

Nato's intervention in Libya is a threat to the Arab revolution, says Seumas Milne, but the forces that have been unleashed in the region won't be turned back so easily.