Maybe I knew a little more about Libya than Duncan and maybe I didn’t, but we both came to the same conclusion. What did I say over and over?
I said it isn’t humanitarian to kick out Gaddafi if what you leave is Somalia. Libya is getting closer and closer to being Somalia.
In any case, if you scroll past the Benghazi stuff in my archives, you’ll see that I earned the right to say “I told you so.”
In the end, Obama did better than I feared by managing to get Gaddafi out of there without much real effort, and he was smart not to make us responsible for the aftermath because it was a very predictable quicksand trap.
But my point was never that Gaddafi was a good guy that deserved to be in power. My point was that freaking out that he was about to decimate Benghazi only made sense if you could create a better outcome. I don’t see a better outcome.
I never did.
You told me so.
I forgot that the Qatari news service had a dog in the hunt.
I did not count on the US CIA screwing up a revolution by exporting a war to Syria from whence the blowback came to wreck any political consensus at the center.
I did not understand that regional militias would ultimately behave like the Afghanistan warlords.
But I did understand that the prime motive was Sarkozy fearing a refugee crisis as Gadhafi cracked down, one that would leave him vulnerable to Marine Le Pen. And a bunch of Libyan government players who gambled that they could make it work and then deserted Gadhafi.
The major contribution of US force was to get rid of a large number of Gadhafi’s tanks and to attack his residences. (After suppressing his air control systems.) And then there was whatever US special forces and CIA did.
But on the political front post-Gadhafi.
You told us so.
There was also plenty of reason to be concerned that if he had stayed the world would have seen a repeat of that genocide especially with some of his actions and language at the time. As someone who said there were no good options I still think it is better he is gone. Unfortunately it was going to be devolve into chaos no matter what the world did.
what i remember most about the libya two-step was newt gingrich demanding boots on the ground while obama was still weighing options, and newt gingrich opposing military action after obama decided to intervene.
Buck stops at the President’s desk, of course the US leads NATO, it’s policy and has military command. It was Hillary Clinton who pushed forward on Libya on the State Department’s propaganda of the UN R2P – Right to Protect theory. This was used for regime change, which is beyond International Law. Hillary Clinton was sweet with Turkey’s Erdogan and the Muslim Brotherhood state of Qatar. In NATO the US has principled support from UK, France and New Europe. Italy’s Berlusconi was opposed as he had an agreement with Gaddafi to limit migrants using the Libyan coastline to jump to the island of Lampedusa.
The US and CIA allowed Qatar to transport arms to Syria for regime change per Neocon doctrine. The upheaval after the protests of the Arab Spring was fertile ground for jihadists coming from across the globe: Chechnya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tunesia, Somalia, etc. The Brzezinski doctrine used in Afghanistan to oust the Soviet occupiers has been so very successful and blow-back was guaranteed. Primarily the states where the civil war was created will suffer, secondarily Europe will suffer dearly for the consequences of populist right-wing parties and more militarism. Indeed, I told you so.
The legacy of Bush was the Iraq War, for President Obama it will be far worse the Libyan failed state and the Syria/Iraq rise of the Islamic State. The White House is divided on foreign policy which results in an schizophrenic approach. Decisions come late and are insufficient to do the job.
Funny about that, no one seems to be ‘responsible’ for the aftermath. Yet there were people who did it.Why was Gaddafi actually taken out? Does anyone have a clue?
Well, intervening got us Libya, but not intervening got us Syria, so – I still think it was a good idea.
Also, Benghazi wouldn’t have been the only place with a massacre. There would have been massacres in Misrata and Zintan as well.
What curtadams said, I agree that deposing Ghadaffi created a power vacuum, I shared your deep concerns at the time, Boo. But what would the region be like today if we had not done that? And would Obama be getting beat up because he failed to intervene?
You told me so. And I said that I didn’t care as long as Gaddafi got what he deserved for Lockerbie. So it looks to me that we were both right.
P.S.
If G.W. Bush hadn’t stunk our name up in the Middle East, perhaps Libya would have turned out better. We could have intervened without (much) suspicion of empire building. But maybe not. Anyway, Gaddafi is dead, like bin Laden.
Daniel Larison also told us so.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-disastrous-libyan-war/