Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed dismay recently that violence and Islamic radicalism are on the rise in nations that supposedly threw off oppressive rule in uprisings the past several months that came to be known collectively as the "Arab Spring."
"Transitions can be derailed and detoured to new autocracies," she said on a visit to the North African country of Tunisia.
In the abstract, of course, it is a good thing that nations such as Egypt and Libya are no longer ruled by despots such as Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gadhafi. But there were serious indications in the midst of the rebellions against those dictators that extremists were likely to seize power once the tyrants were gone. Now, tragically, that appears to be the direction in which some of the nations that were part of the Arab Spring are in fact headed.
Libya has descended into bloody chaos, with marauding rebels committing torture and revenge killings against Libyans who were aligned with -- or who are thought to have been aligned with -- Gadhafi. Radical Muslims are in contention for power there.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, a power struggle is going on between the heavy-handed military and the radical Muslim Brotherhood, a group that was linked to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Whoever ultimately gains the upper hand in Libya and Egypt, it seems unlikely that individual liberty and basic respect for human rights will be high on the countries' political agendas.
We condemn the continuing oppression in those nations, but we cannot say it wasn't sadly predictable.