If the "alternate reality" didn't already erased it, you may recall something called "Arab Spring". It's not like Gaddafi was in a stable position at the time, and even less likely he would skate the whole situation until today.
Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the rebellion in Benghazi and enforced a no-fly zone otherwise Gaddafi's planes would obliterate the rebel forces and the civilians living in those cities ( which started to happen, before the EU and US moved their asses ). Speaking of "assassinations", I don't think Gaddafi's forces would punish the offenders with only a slap on the wrist. Do I need to mention the shipping containers with bullet holes in the Sun at the desert full of prisoners?
Everyone's "performance" has been bad, but why don't we talk about Syria/Russia dealings in Libya in the last ~5 years? which coincidentally have been the worse and more unstable years since the 2011 war? ( Not to mention the usual bottom feeders of doom that appear in these situations, ie. the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and every other "entrepreneur" group funded by the bored Sheiks in the Arabian Peninsula?
I'm not even sure who administered the city which was crushed by the flood in 2023 considering the free-for-all in Lybia ever since.
As usual with Western-induced rebellions, everybody ended up losing. I'm also not sure why you are confident that Gaffafi was going to "obliterate the civilians" (read - his own citizens).
Derna is in Eastern Libya, so it's under control of the Libyan National Army regime, the one run out of Benghazi. Pretty easy to look up actually.
If not omniscience at least clear evidence that there is no other course of action and that this is absolutely required (spoiler, it wasn't). Reacting irrationally is just what animals do.
Not even Russia or China voted against it at the time so apparently most of the world agreed it was a good idea.
Or do you believe that a cease fire is when the other side ceases firing so you can get a good shot yourself?
Shows the involvement clearly.
Iraq and Libya invasions, without recovery plan, made the west too morally bankrupt too succeed in Syria
A more strategic target to Russia
Two things that sound to me like obvious next steps is sending NATO air defense with NATO personel into Ukraine to provide better cover from Russian missiles. And after that, a no-fly zone. Actual combat support is probably too much to ask.
That's part of it. Because the West usually does these things for purely self-interest, but likes to play the "world police" card to justify things, then gets frustrated when people say "well, if you're the world police, why are you not stopping the genocide in Rwanda?" and the West shrugs, but the answer is generally obvious, "because there's no benefit we can glean from it".
Right. "We came, we saw, he died! [lol]"
Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the rebellion in Benghazi and enforced a no-fly zone otherwise Gaddafi's planes would obliterate the rebel forces and the civilians living in those cities
This is just revisionist nonsense. There was no "full on" civil war in Libya until NATO intervened and turned it into such. This video [1] (from 9 years ago) does a good job laying out the counterargument - the US took the opportunity of a small-scale uprising to regime change Gaddafi and plunged the country into now a decade of chaos and destruction with no end in sight, destabilizing most of North Africa and flooding Europe with refugees in the process.
Everyone's "performance" has been bad, but why don't we talk about Syria/Russia/[Al-Qaeda] dealings in Libya in the last ~5 years?
Why don't we talk about how the US illegally invaded Syria, allied itself with Al-Qaeda offshoots and tried to topple another antagonist Ba'athist government, failed, and plunged that country also into now an effectively permanent low-level civil war? Why is it the US and NATO can invade and bomb and occupy the territory of anyone they want by claiming "their leaders are bad" but if anyone else does it to our friends (many of whom are also bad) it's all "territorial integrity" and "national sovereignty" and "the rules based order"?
Because our foreign policy is run by utter amoral hypocrites and liars. We are the flailing, declining hegemon, leaving a path of destruction in our wake. And in cases like Syria or Libya its hard to avoid the conclusion our perspective is "if we can't have it we'll settle for wrecking it".
No. Don't assume malice where ineptitude will be sufficient.
Our Foreign Policy is run by armchair, master-degree wannabe-generals in suits and ties, some dark triad, some not, but always away from real bullets, to instead being preoccupied with their own advancement, protecting their friends, and increasing the size of their portfolio, justifying their grand aims with real (or imagined) claims of good intentions
This is the essentially same thing the person you're replying to said: amoral hypocrites and liars.
I notice your standards for US/EU intervention are very very high and basically nobody should ever being killed.
Why don't you apply the same reasoning to Gaddafi's regime and Syria/Russia/Al-Qaeda? You seem to have every problem existing in the Universe when the evil West does something ( and also a problem when it doesn't, also a problem that the West exists I suspect ), yet not a peep when these regimes torture and kill people by the thousands, or are you going to tell me that's just a fantasy? Or when they do it it's justify because it's the West's fault too, so those poor victims have no other choice than to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them?
Btw, I'm not even "defending" the US/EU track record in Libya. I think they did a really bad half-assed job, but I also recognize the context of it all.
Anyway, I've had it.
We used to call this war. Is Russia just ‘intervening’ in Ukraine right now?
We used the term “intervention” to describe limited military action. Countries throughout history have conducted interventions as opposed to full-scale war.
Russia’s assault on Ukraine isn’t an intervention and is instead a war and we know this because of the size and scale of the operation but also the intentions of the operation, which, are to take over the entire country of Ukraine.
And I am inclined to believe them, not because of what Western governments have said, but because the whole Arab Spring played out in real time on social media.
I agree that what happened to Gaddafi himself was horrific. It would have been a much better thing if he had been arrested and brought before a tribunal. But he was killed by Libyans, who were angry about the Libyans that Gaddafi himself had killed. The contribution that Western Governments made to those events was to stop the killing of thousands of people who opposed the regime. Arguing against intervention is arguing in favor of what would have happened without intervention—which is, effectively, what we have seen in Syria.
Now, was Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the verge of murdering tens of thousands? Were Ukranian forces gathered, ready to rain artillery shells down on a major Ukrainian city? If not, I don't think it would be appropriate to describe the Russian invasion as an "intervention". What would Putin have been "intervening" in? Ukranian self-determination?
The Ukraine military was already shelling Donbas before the invasion begun, killing civilians. That was one of the original justifications for the invasion.
Quite a few were - we will probably get a good idea of the numbers ~40 years later unless the President at the time deems otherwise.
Do remember that Yanukovych's election was certified by international monitors. https://www.oscepa.org/en/news-a-media/press-releases/press-...
A significant fraction of Ukraine voted for him - esp from the south and east. Toppling an elected government whose election was deemed valid by a vetted group of international observers is what split Ukraine and finally led to this bloody situation today.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/212663/Election_repor...
And if you think the U.S. was not involved, I am afraid that is a extraordinary act of burying your head in the sand. The U.S. was involved even in the earlier Orange revolution in 2004. At that time, the U.S. media was not as sophisticated as it was later. The Guardian and US papers proudly declared the US combating Russian influence and "protecting democracy" by sponsoring protestors! Ukraine was always a tug of war between U.S. and Russian influence but 2014 coup was what broke the Camel's back.
Remember - Nuland is even on record discussing who should hold the reigns after the coup. She didn't want Klitschko in the central government. Too moderate for her. She wanted the Anti-Russian and far-right guy Arseniy Yatsenyuk in power.
And Lo and Behold - Her Prophecy Was Fulfilled! In an interview with Poroshenko, he admitted that Nuland was in Kiev during the time of the Maidan protests. She traveled 3 times during that period, organizing support and supplies for the "democratic movement" - even going to the extent of giving sandwiches to protestors.
OSCE via Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/osce-reports-surge-numb...
Unless Reuters is "naked Russian propaganda" now, there was definitely an uptick in kinetic activity in the Donbas, with most of it falling on the Separatist side of the line of control.
Note that nowhere in that article does it say that the Ukrainian side did that. For all we know this was a provocation, as Russia is won't to do. Alternative explanations have been present many times and none of them have stuck.
Also note that there was an endless build-up prior to the second phase of this invasion which had absolutely nothing to do with that particular incident even if it was done by the Ukrainian side, which I highly doubt given the fact that it was one of the pretexts used.
Finally: in that region there have been many actions by either side and no matter what: the Ukrainians are well within their right to kick out an invader, the myth of the separatists has been debunked solidly, until the little green men showed up there was no meaningful separatist activity.
If you are asserting that the Helsinki-based OSCE was duped by Russia detonating a bunch of explosions on their own side of the line of control....prove it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
"By February 24th, there was nothing out of the ordinary. Now the [Russian] Defense Ministry attempts to fool society, tries to fool the President, and tell the story of a crazy aggression from the Ukrainian side and they were going to attack us with the whole NATO block."
Not sure how you get more conclusive then that; Putin himself?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organization_for_Security_and_...
It does not support your (Russia’s, really) claim of a Ukraine-initiated escalation
On page 2, with the map of the Donbas, the vast majority of the explosions are in northwest Luhansk, NE of Luhansk city itself, and North of Donetsk....on the Separatist side of the line of contact.
That the surge in shelling was Ukraine-initiated against Russian-backed separatists (and not vice versa coordinated from Moscow as part of the prelude to its own invasion)—and, even moreso, that even if it was, a Ukrainian offensive against separatists in Ukraine (and not even against the openly Russian-occupied part) was a reasonable basis for seeing a threat of NATO invading (or backing an invasion of) Russia—is the Russian propaganda.
Sorry, I suggest you dig deeper. He was killed by Misrata fighters who were directly NATO sponsored and equipped. There were lots of articles on how NATO supported Misrata at the time.
Are you saying that these people were working under orders from NATO? What was their motivation, if they were not fundamentally angry about how Gaddafi had treated their fellow countrymen?
Yes, there were under orders from NATO. They even coordinated air-strikes. This is no real surprise to anyone. Hell, I think some of the NATO generals even complimented the coordination. Can dig that up if needed.
Anger at a nation's leader does not justify NATO intervention. Most of these rebels were quick to take Libya back to the barbaric ages where women were treated as cattle. Libya also became an ISIS HQ. No one talks about human rights violations after Gadaffi was kicked out and tens of thousands killed. Media attention became nil at that point. Of-course NATO nations pat themselves on the back - hey we took out the bad guys. So what if our "good guys" kill 10x more ?
I find the hypocrisy and justification used for NATO wars utterly sickening.
What reasoning? First of all I'm an American citizen, so I concern myself more with what my country does with my tax dollars than what other countries do, especially within their own borders or in situations that don't directly affect American citizens. I don't believe America's job is global law enforcement. It's like asking an American "why don't you apply the reasoning that President Trump is corrupt to President Ali Bongo of Niger? Why aren't you calling for President Ali Bongo's arrest? Double standard?"
also a problem that the West exists I suspect
It's fascinating that my criticism of the US/NATO bombing and invading and occupying other countries leads you to suspect I have a problem "that the West exists". In your conception perhaps "the West" would cease to exist as such if it were not the global hegemon?
yet not a peep when these regimes torture and kill people by the thousands
Saudi Arabia tortures and kills people by the thousands. If China or Russia invaded Saudi Arabia and attempted to turn it into a client state using the justification of Saudi misdeeds, would you support them? I suspect not, but we're back to "when the US/NATO does it it's good, when US/NATO adversaries do it it's bad" being the "rules-based order" many believe should exist.
You're talking about the hypothetical situation when China or Russia would invade a country to stop the regime from torturing and killing people by the thousands. And you proceed to claim that when they would do it, the West would say "it's bad".
There have been plenty of occasions in, say, the last 75 years where China or Russia have invaded some country. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but not one single time was it to stop the regime from torturing and killing people by the thousands.
Otoh there have been, and still are, plenty of regimes that are killing and torturing like that, and which receive the full support from China and Russia.
This is literally one of the arguments put forth by Putin for intervention in Ukraine. The most often-cited example I hear from Russians is the fire in Odessa: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/02/ukraine-dead-o...
And the government was resorting to airstrikes the same month: https://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-launches-air-strikes-a...
Can you imagine if the US response to CHAZ/CHOP was to drop JDAMs on Seattle?
Now one can counter-argue "not enough people were dying to justify foreign intervention", to which the obvious retort is "who gets to make that determination?"
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The context is that Sarkozy didn't want Gaddafi muscling on the Franc's domination of Africa's economy.
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/12659
https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy9d49/libyan-oil-gold-and-q...
From those, I'd much rather be under the US or EU sphere of influence.
I realize that other commenters have also been breaking the rules, but your post here stands out in that manner.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Again thanks to Hillary's emails, we can suspect that the CIA had a hand in eliminating the new candidate that france wanted to support (we had contact with both Kaddafi's son and the leader of a rebel group, both died), but i wouldn't put that war, then civil war, on US. Also, while France supported eliminating Kaddafi here, they supported the dictator in Tunisia with police forces and weapons (that are marked as non-lethal, but since we haven't found many nonlethal weapons after the revolution, either there was a kickback, or a lot were stolen/lost, or a part of what was sent were lethal weapons).
And for Syria it's the same, Obama's administration wasn't really focused on that part of the middle east, and Hollande (France) forced their hand.
Truly, i cannot believe France's reputation in Africa is that low. I wonder why.
Qaddafi got what he deserved from a karmic point of view. He was instrumental in gifting the Islamic Republic to Iran so hope you enjoyed that bayonet Colonel. But obviously his regime was far better for Libya and Africans than the loonies that are cranked up, trained, and armed by Western intelligence agencies as part of their mad approach to managing exploited realms. But again “it’s just business”.
The WTO ended up finding the EU guilty in 2020.
For Syria, Obama made threats to try to prevent the use of chemical weapons. The UK wanted to avoid another Libya, the other EU countries aren't warmongers, Turkey wouldn't have said anything, so only France did the 'actually, they used chemical weapons, and the US is not alone if you go so you won't have another Iraq!'.
I don't know what happened to Hollande, why he grew a pair suddenly, but I don't think we ever had a president who didn't stir shit at least once in 70 years.
Yep. Can confirm.
This was publicly reported during the 2011-12 period as well. There were a couple press junkets Obama, the State Dept, and DoD did at the time highlighting this stance of non-interventionism. Read some of the older Economist articles from that era as well.
I didn't know Emailgate actually had emails from that time.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Hmmm. That’s tough to argue against when you put it like that.
Another way to put it is that many facts can be true at the same time. Superpowers are gonna Superpower, but they are also hypocrites operating on a double standard.
So then the question is, are all facts the same? The answer I’ve come to is that some facts are more useful than others.
The fact that America is a great power is a very important fact.
The fact the great powers act alike is a useful fact.
The fact that can derived from these, that America does great power stuff, is of no value. It’s just the obvious result of other facts which are more important if your goal is prediction or parsimonious explanations for historical events.
Egypt, Sudan, South Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, and Less Rocco (sometimes called Western Sahara) are either stable or were not destabilized by the Libyan civil war.
You won't get any sympathy for that opinion.
Other US military interventions have varying levels of righteousness, but this one is a pretty clear-cut case.
1. Gaddafi was talking about war crimes but didn’t commit them in reality
[1] https://www.npr.org/2012/01/05/144637499/bahrain-the-revolut...
The same story was repeated earlier with Bin Laden. It is like the U.S. never learns. Now once again in 2022/23 the Idlib mujahideen are being courted by the U.S. war apparatus to make problems in Syria as a way to divert Russia.
Of-course they did! If you recall, there was even an offer made by Gadaffi and his sons for holding elections and a step-down if he lost. They even agreed to international observers for elections!
Every single concession was rejected by NATO as a "ploy". They wanted Gaddaffi dead.
Got the article: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2011/6/16/gaddafi-son-offers-... but there were also several other concessions offered - all of which were singularly dismissed. The Libyan friends I used to know a decade ago weeped after Gadaffi died.
A nation state in the middle east that used to offer free education for both sexes and free medical care is now dust and ashes - all thanks to NATO.
Gaddafi would have died sooner or later anyway, and he was a kleptocrat like all other dictators were and are.
> but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?
What would be needed is an intervention force that takes over the entire country and stabilizes it similar to the current setup in Bosnia and Kosovo - the warlords are in a stalemate. The problem is, NATO is too busy with Ukraine (and even that engagement is sadly controversial enough despite there being no troops involved), the US wants to focus on China, Europe can't be arsed to actually do anything, the French are even more reviled than Islamists are in Africa (see the recent putsches), the African Union is more of a paper tiger that's additionally focusing on the before-mentioned putsches, and China doesn't care as it's not part of their New Belt Road.
And even assuming that there would be someone interested in intervening in that shitshow, they won't get the UNSC mandate required for that, as either Russia or the US will veto such an operation.
An occupation force is not tenable in the modern era.
Per a Washington Post article from 2004[1], the post-WW2 occupation of Germany had an initial force ratio of one occupying soldier per 40 civilians. At that level, occupying forces could assume direct command of civil structures, without needing to sign deals with the least-bad bandits or warlords in waiting to act on our behalf.
Per Wikipedia, Libya's current population is a bit above 7 million. With a similar force ratio, that means an occupying force would require 175,000 soldiers. A Fermi estimate of cost is $100k/yr/soldier ($10k doesn't pay for salary, $1m is implausibly large), giving an occupation cost of $17.5bn/yr[2] before any special funding like (re)building major infrastructure projects.
This kind of cost is insupportable in a modern democracy, where voters will rightly ask why 'we' should bother. Libya was not and is not an existential threat like WW2-era Germany, and we're not in the imperial/colonial era where occupying forces could loot the country to pay for its own occupation.
[1] -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/05/09/a...
[2] -- This is also why meaningful intervention in Haiti will not happen, if you believe the calling-for-intervention reports that civil government has more or less collapsed in that nation.
Where you can't do anything, you do not need to want anything.
1. Perhaps one can say that this is already done, since we do not hear of any recent examples. Still, this was not very far back.Not necessarily. A total prohibition there would give free reign to tyrants to oppress their own people or even invade their insufficiently-allied neighbours without fear of consequence. The second world war is widely regarded as a just conflict (on the balance), even if it did topple the governments of the Axis powers.
However, my thinking above raises cost-estimation from a practical problem (can we afford the war?) to a moral one. An optimistic belief in a 'short victorious war' gives the intervenor at least partial culpability for the harms of state failure following insufficient occupation and reconstruction.
Come on, North Korean regime exists for 70 years now and it is relatively stable. You're not going to heal the world. China will continue to do whatever it wants in Tibet and Cental Asia. The only thing you get by doing interventions against the regimes you do not like, is encouraging other countries to do interventions against the regimes that they do not like.
You can nudge tyrants into becoming milder and perhaps transitioning power sometimes in the future, and that would also have a benefit of not starting civil wars and having refuge crises.
That's incredibly rare to happen. Most dictators leave office by death or being forced into exile.
> the French are even more reviled than Islamists are in Africa
That is pure propaganda BS.
Is it? Yes, a lot of what led to the recent putsches was Russian propaganda, but "Françafrique" has been collapsing for years now - understandably, given that France's attitude towards Africa hasn't been positive in any kind, it was mostly "we're happy to support whatever dictator is in charge as long as we get cheap natural resources".
France especially, but also the rest of the old European empires, never really managed to properly heal its relationship with its former colonies, and now it's biting us in our collective arses as these nations re-orient themselves to Russia and China.
It’s not like Libyan society was ripe for democracy. We see that those who replaced him aren’t democratic leaders, but savages. Was he a merciless ruler? I mean, maybe. More interesting question is whether his methods were appropriate for the challenges of ruling that kind of society.
Gaddafi was assassinated by his own people. America and a few European countries gave military support to the rebels after Gaddafi had started trying to violently suppress the rebellion of his people, that is true. If they wouldn't have done that, he might have succeeded in murdering enough of his people to stay in power, who knows.
> what is happening in lybia now?
Nothing much. But a big problem of lack of governance is that critical infrastructure (like dams) gets neglected.
> What’s the plan?
No plans.
> Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?
Clearly doesn't work but no one wanted this situation except for some people located across the Atlantic.
I saw a heartbreaking report about the disaster region yesterday. One interesting aspect were hints that this disaster might have stimulated more cooperation inside Libya. May be this is a starting point for sorting out their internal political problems. I would really wish it to the people of Libya.
From everything I observed in the days and weeks following, there was a massive increase in feelings and expressions of unity. (These were also temporary.)
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/12/infrastructure-in-l...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/13/why-did-dernas-dams...