Liberal political theorist Benjamin Barber has an extraordinary, quasi-insider account of the situation in Libya that should not be missed. Barber has just resigned from the board of the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, run by Gaddafi’s son Saif. It’s tough to know how seriously to take the story Barber tells. Saif Gaddafi has advertised himself as a genuine liberal reformer. He apparently even has two books under contract with Oxford University Press on civil society and democratic reform in the developing world. Yet Saif has now thrown all this over to align with his father in what Barber describes as an essentially tribal battle hiding beneath the surface of Gaddafi’s rhetoric about a revolutionary people’s democracy. Maybe, as Barber would have it, this is a tragic resort to tribalism by Libya’s greatest liberal reformer. Or maybe Barber was taken in by Saif, who was never sincere about democracy to begin with. I’m not sure which interpretation would be worse from the standpoint of Western hopes for liberal reform in the Middle East. In any case, Barber’s account reveals the hidden tribal underpinnings of what’s playing out now in Libya.