* Khaddafi ordered his soldiers to shoot non-violent protesters * There was (as a result) an active rebellion against him that could use some support
There was no invasion by western forces, and I think the air support was mostly to stop Khaddafi from massacring his own people. I don't think western forces ever assisted in an attack; it was fairly limited and mostly denied Khaddafi the advantage of his air force.
A thumb on the scale to tip the balance between Khaddafi and the rebels, basically.
And in fact, Syria is not so different, although the involvement is on a much larger scale. It's still mostly various rebel factions that do the actual fighting. Iraq, by contrast, was a full scale invasion, and one based on a lie.
I'm not saying that makes Libya and Syria completely justified, but it's clearly a different case than Iraq, and much easier to justify, if you accept the legitimacy of the rebels.
I was of the understanding that the invasion was to increase France's political clout in North Africa, to avoid Ghaddafi's plan of unifying Africa under a gold standard (Gold Dinar) and most importantly to sell oil under the aforementioned currency.
Interestingly, Dutch Wikipedia now calls him al-Qadhafi.
Here's a very fun Stack Overflow question about using a regex to match the different spellings: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5365283/regular-expressi...
And there are tons of counter examples. For example, Eritrea is recognized as one of the worst dictatorship in the world, and we have no troops over here to free the people of Eritrea.