The unknown 'rebels' of Libya

This week, word that the U.S. government may soon begin arming opposition fighters in Libya hit the airwaves, not only inspiring an impassioned debate but also further fueling American anxieties about military involvement overseas.

It also raised long-standing questions about whom to help, how and why.

Supplying arms to one or the other side of a conflict taking place entirely within the borders of another sovereign nation isn't a decision to be taken lightly. And it raises questions about how foreign policy should be envisioned and conducted today. Certainly, we want to avoid the type of Cold War-era politics that landed us in bed with partners we didn't truly know and couldn't actually trust. When any enemy of communism or the Soviet empire was a friend of the United States, we became friends with the Taliban and the Contras.

As President Barack Obama seemed to imply in his speech to the nation Monday, the United States must be careful not to lump all dictators together. Indeed, Moammar Gadhafi and the particular violence of his regime shares little with Saddam Hussein -- let alone with Laurent Gbagbo, whose refusal to leave his illegitimate presidency has once again sunk the Ivory Coast into civil war.

In the same way, we must be careful to avoid conflating all groups that stand in opposition to cruel and oppressive regimes.

The portrayal of Libya's opposition fighters in mainstream media has been nothing if not vague. Media outlets across the political and social spectrum universally refer to these armed fighters with the troubling term "rebels." "Rebel" may well be the correct term for someone fighting against a regime. But the unshakable connotation is that these people are a pre-modern and unknowable group.

Just this week, The New York Times published a news article -- not an editorial or an op-ed -- in which the opposition fighters were referred to as "a ragtag band of rebels," evoking images of the fictional Ewoks of "Star Wars" and the Na'vi of "Avatar." Photos of the Libyan conflict consistently feature bearded men wearing head scarves, shouting and brandishing aging semiautomatic weapons. But in the New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson suggests that the "rebels" are protesters -- students, unemployed youth, dissidents and others -- recently joined by religious fundamentalists, oil field workers and former soldiers.

Still, little about the opposition forces appears to be known, and most media coverage of the Libyan conflict, while comprehensive and detailed, cannot help readers discern how this group is different from current protesters in Bahrain and Syria -- not to mention fighters in any of the many other countries embroiled in turmoil and bloodshed. All we know is that, unlike its North African counterparts Tunisia and Egypt, Libya has been left with little in the way of established opposition groups, civil society groups or strong state institutions after 41 years of oppressive dictatorial rule.

The current opposition leadership has been in place for less than two weeks. Media coverage is necessarily restricted because Libya has been a closed society for so long. Intelligence experts have said that they do not know who the "rebels" are, how they relate to each other or how their leadership functions. This is clearly not a simple case of stereotypical media narratives.

But with little information about what the opposition fighters stand for or how they will erect a stable government in the wake of dictatorship, how can the United States decide whether or how enthusiastically to support them? We are a democracy in which policy decisions rely on the interaction and support of an informed citizenry. But -- even in this era of endless information -- the decision to go to this war continues to be shrouded in confusion.