Some good news from Libya

Although I find it very hard to say anything nice about American foreign policy during the Bush years, one of the few bright spots has been Libya.

Today, the ever rotating cast at PSDBlog point us to this story of One laptop per Libyan child. This is a great victory for Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project. The former MIT Prof has been actively pushing this laptop as a way for developing nations to put technology in the hands of all their youth. Hopefully Mr. Gaddafi is serious about using his oil revenues to help Chad, Niger and Rwanda purchase the $100 laptop as none of those countries have the same resources as Libya.

That Libya can now be seen as almost the anti-Venezuela -- building up infrastructure, compensating victims of the Pan Am 103/Lockerbie bombing, and slowly re-opening a closed society -- should serve as a signal to our leaders (and Tom Friedman) that diplomacy can and often does work better than coercion and violence!

For more on the "Real Libya Model" and what it means for American Policy in North Korea and Iran, check out this recent
Michael Hirsh article from Newsweek International.