A month ago, I was sitting in a restaurant with Srdja Popovic, a democratic activist and leader of the revolution that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. We had met to discuss the revolutions ricocheting around the Middle East.
"It's been a bad year for bad guys," he said. In late 2010, he mused, no one would have possibly predicted that six months later, "Ben Ali and Mubarak would be out, Gadhafi and Saleh would be on their knees, and Assad would be seriously challenged. If you would have seen that in your crystal ball and then told people on TV, men in white coats would have come to take you away."
This past week, the dictator's club lost another member. When Libyan rebels stormed Moammar Gadhafi's compound and seat of power in Tripoli, he went from a bizarre, mercurial Arab tyrant to a fugitive of justice. Libya is the newest piece in the Arab Spring jigsaw puzzle, which when connected to Tunisia and Egypt has created a dictator-free zone across a growing stretch of North Africa.