That said, we should be careful not to overstate the strategic benefits of President Obama's chosen course of action the past six months. Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell argues that the administration's strategy of "leading from behind" now "seems utterly vindicated." It is unclear why this would be so. If anything, it could be argued, as I did in March, that Obama's excessive caution made a bad situation even worse. If the U.S. and the international community had intervened sooner -- rather than at the very last moment when rebels were making their final stand -- Qaddafi would have fallen sooner and without such loss of life and destruction.

This, lest we forget, is how the rebels themselves saw the situation in March. They were literally begging the United States to take action. When their calls were met with silence, Iman Bughaigis, spokeswoman for the rebels, fumed that "[The West] has lost any credibility." In a veiled but obvious reference to the fence-sitters, she continued, "I am not crying out of weakness ... But we will never forget the people who stood with us and the people who betrayed us."

With the Obama administration dragging its feet, French foreign minister Alain Juppe conceded that it was perhaps too late for military intervention. In other words, what seems like such a success now was then very much in doubt. Even after NATO stepped in, the complaints continued; NATO could do more but wasn't, rebel officials argued, in part due to U.S. insistence on "letting others lead." There was also an (understandable) reticence on the part of the Obama administration and its allies to more pro-actively arm and train Libyan rebel forces. But such hesitation, however prudent, came at a cost.

Finally, it is worth nothing that one of the rationales for the Libya intervention -- that it would have a powerful demonstration effect across the Arab world -- is being vindicated (after being much maligned by Daniel Larison and others critics of the war). In the face of overwhelming repression in Syria and Bahrain and setbacks in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, Arabs needed a victory. There was a growing sense that the euphoria on February 11 -- the day Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak stepped down -- was rather premature. It was. But, now, all across the region, protesters and revolutionaries are once again emboldened, reminded that the unlikely is still possible. They are warning their own stubborn leaders -- Assad in Syria and Saleh in Yemen -- that they are next. Today, then, the region's revolutionaries face their own daunting struggles with more momentum and more hope. That is no small thing. Neither is the newfound freedom of millions of Libyans, who will now have the opportunity, for the first time, to rebuild their shattered nation on their own terms.