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.

It's as if Iraq and Afghanistan never happened. This time it's different, say the politicians, knowing the media's ingrained memory loss can be relied on to serve their interests.

The success of the rebels in Libya contains a tragic defeat. The original emancipatory impulse of February 17 lies, for now, among the corpses of "Africans" in Tripoli.

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.

It does the Arab uprisings a disservice to glorify NATO's mission in Libya. A "humanitarian intervention" was the hook; but securing assets and resources was, as usual, the real goal. 

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.

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.

There are real and important differences between the attack on Iraq and NATO's war in Libya: what they have in common is the manipulation used to justify them and demonise critics. 

Gadaffi's tyrannical regime has been brought down by foreign intervention. But, asks Patrick Cockburn, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, will a war thought to be over burst into flames again, with foreign allies seen as foreign occupiers?

The old rulers will not be missed if and when they depart. The decisive issues – genuinely democratic and popular regimes across the Arab world, the exclusion of great power interference in the region -- and justice for the Palestinian people -- remain in the balance.

If this is how the rebels behave today, when it is much in their interests to make a show of unity, how will they act once they are installed in power in Tripoli? But NATO's sole policy is to do just that.

With 85 civilians killed in the latest NATO air attack, most of them women and children, NATO cannot hide any longer that it has turned its UN mandate to "protect civilians" into a war of terror bombing that is killing them.

David Cameron was a leader under domestic pressure and craving a foreign policy coup. At a time when the war in Afghanistan was wretched, Libya seemed a quick win.

How are things going in Libya and Afghanistan? Staring humiliation in the face, government ministers and Conservative MPs can't even agree among themselves, but too late to stop the killing now.

Foreign governments are rushing to recognise the mysterious self-appointed group in Benghazi as leaders of Libya in the hope of commercial concessions and a carve-up of the oilfields, says Patrick Cockburn.