I feel badly for Benjamin Barber; I really do. Described by Foreign Policy as "a longtime advisor to Saif al-Qaddafi" (the despot's dauphin), Barber, president of a think tank called CivWorld, was one of the public intellectuals who were paid oodles of dough to validate a barbaric waxwork, er, sorry, who "were working under contract with the Monitor Group consulting firm to interact with Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi on issues of democracy and civil society and to help his son Saif implement democratic reforms and author a more representative constitution for Libya."
As FP remarks, deathlessly, "It's all gone horribly wrong."
Hey, no kidding.
Still, Barber is certain he and his fellow deep thinkers were on the right track in Libya, and, in an in depth interview, defends their track record in light of Junior's (FP, amusingly, calls him "Libya's Michael Corleone") "remarkable about face."
Sometimes the smartest people can be really dumb (especially when there are lots of enticing oil shekels floating about).
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