While I agree with the sentiment, Maduro’s fate, for the time being, seems much better than Gaddafi’s. And while increased chaos in the region is not unlikely, I don’t foresee open air slave markets in SA at least

Because the oligarchy running the show behind the scenes is the same.

Libya wasn’t for oil, intervention was approved by the full UN Security Council, it was motivated by stopping crimes against civilians committed by the regime, and the intervention ended immediately after the regime fell, instead of “running things” and taking the oil like Trump is doing.

You’re rewriting history.

Lybia is a tribal country that has always been divided between its eastern and western part. Gaddafi married a bride from the opposing tribe to seal an alliance and bring stability to the country.

The "revolution" was done by the Tripoli (western) tribe, against the Cyrenaica (eastern) one - it was more a civil war starting than a popular uprising.

Gaddafi could have indeed crushed them, bring back order to the country, avoiding the current long lasting chaos, civil war, open slavery, migrant waves and so on.

It's hard to evaluate situations with a westerner mind, in countries that are structured around very different cultural norms, and with deep ethnic divisions. "Democracy" is not the silver bullet it those cases, and maybe we should acknowledge that.

Anyone who went to Afghanistan to fight knows this, but explaining it to a suburban Cul du sac family is impossible

That's the false history of the felon Nicolas Sarkozy, who is going to prison for the crimes he did in Libya for his personal enrichment [0].

The reason France and its crook leader invaded Libya was, according to public reports[1], because they had negotiated back-room deals with anti-Qaddafi rebels for oil. 35% of Libya's oil production in exchange for French support. Literally a war for oil.

Qaddafi's atrocities were real, but they were never the motivation of the French-lead bombing of Libya. That was a false rationalization made up to manufacture public consent. Manufacture consent for a failed intervention, that left Libya worse off than it had ever been.

> "was approved by the full UN Security Council"

Whose members actually knew about the corrupt oil deal[2], and chose to go along with the fraud, lying to their own people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_financing_in_the_2007_F... ("Libyan financing in the 2007 French presidential election")

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/01/libya-oil ("The new Tripoli government has denied the existence of a reported secret deal by which French companies would control more than a third of Libya's oil production in return for Paris's support for the revolution")

[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/libyan-oil-gold-and-qaddafi-... ("Libyan Oil, Gold, and Qaddafi: The Strange Email Sidney Blumenthal Sent Hillary Clinton In 2011")

Interesting, I didn’t know about the French side of that.

Gaddafi was trying to establish a gold-backed "arab" currency system and wanted to sell his oil using it. This was a threat to the US dollar so Obama was very happy to see Sarkozy knock at his door asking to go get the oil themselves lol