Well, That Answers It

The question, you wonder?

Here:

"Something about civil wars which make intervention more likely? Does war debilitate or divide populations in a way which is not present in regions experiencing mass or popular movements?...

Is that the window of opportunism?

Is it that the US military tends to be used in regions successfully destabilized into tragically Greek stasis? "

And the answer:

"Barack Obama signed a secret order authorising covert US government support for rebel forces seeking to oust Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, according to government officials.

 Mr Obama reportedly signed the order, known as a presidential "finding", within the last two or three weeks, four US government sources told Reuters. [...]The New York Times reported that the CIA has had clandestine operatives who have been gathering intelligence for air strikes and making contact with the rebels for several weeks."

Humanitarian interventionists will have a perfectly reasonable defense of CIA shenanigans, no doubt. It's all about saving the poor, defenseless, democracy loving rebels on the verge of slaughter, of course...

Tip o' the hat to Mr. Caruso at Distant Ocean.

Lovely Update Number One:

"The new leader of Libya's opposition military spent the past two decades in suburban Virginia but felt compelled — even in his late-60s — to return to the battlefield in his homeland, according to people who know him
.
Khalifa Hifter was once a top military officer for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, but after a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s, Hifter switched to the anti-Gadhafi opposition. In the early 1990s, he moved to suburban Virginia, where he established a life but maintained ties to anti-Gadhafi groups..."

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/26/111109/new-rebel-leader-spent-much-of.html

Lovely Update Number Two:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/mar2011/hift-m30.shtml

Background to # 2:

"A 2001 book, Manipulations africaines, published by Le Monde diplomatique, traces the CIA connection even further back, to 1987, reporting that Hifter, then a colonel in Gaddafi’s army, was captured fighting in Chad in a Libyan-backed rebellion against the US-backed government of Hissène Habré. He defected to the Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF), the principal anti-Gaddafi group, which had the backing of the American CIA. He organized his own militia, which operated in Chad until Habré was overthrown by a French-supported rival, Idriss Déby, in 1990.

According to this book, “the Haftar force, created and financed by the CIA in Chad, vanished into thin air with the help of the CIA shortly after the government was overthrown by Idriss Déby.” The book also cites a Congressional Research Service report of December 19, 1996 that the US government was providing financial and military aid to the LNSF and that a number of LNSF members were relocated to the United States."