From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Ladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. Speaking on Libyan state television last month,

Sayyaf Gaddafi, son and partner in kleptocracy to MoMar, told Libyans what their country wasn't.

The young people who are in the street trying to imitate what happened in Egypt,

Libya is not Egypt. Fair enough, Libya isn't Egypt. And sure enough, the Gaddafi's haven't been

squeezed out of power as easily as Hosni Babarak was. But if not the Egyptian revolution,

what comparison does suit the Libyan crisis? As events have

unfolded from street protests to civil war, U.S. pundits and politicos have rushed to invoke

their own historical analogies for Libya. Democrat Anthony Wiener suggested Libya was like

Rwanda. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer chose another African country.

Libya will probably end up as a failed state.

It could end up like Somalia.

On Fox News, the preferred analogies are generally Afghanistan and Iraq.

So isn't this what President Bush went through in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq?

Except for the channel's resident liberal, Alan Combs.

This is much more like Kosovo than Iraq or Afghanistan.

Foreign Policy Magazine's managing editor Blake Hounschel says that to understand this plague

of comparisons, it helps to know that there aren't many who know what we, the audience, do not

know. Pundits abhor a vacuum,

he says, and we'll fill it with just anything, informed or not. I asked Hounsel for his analogy.

No historical analogy is perfect. But I think the closest parallel we have is actually Bosnia.

This operation in Libya is a humanitarian operation. There are

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