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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

It is now a nation in continual civil war between a warring bunch of factions. People are desperate to emigrate from there and a lot of area is controlled by human traffickers. This is the end result of military intervention against Gaddafi. This was a nation that had free health care for the public. A lot of people are dying daily, but you don't hear about it since international journalists are afraid to enter the area - they will be taken as hostages by one group or another immediately.

Instead of waging War, international negotiation for the succession of power with guarantees of safety should have been performed painstakingly - with lots of carrots offered, but there are just too many warmongers in the US and even the UN.

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When one faction rules out negotiating any outcome that doesn't involve Gadaffi's removal (and doesn't have much unity beyond that) and the other faction is Gadaffi and his loyalists that don't want to move, the chances of negotiating a peaceful transition were always going to be slim. Revolutions often don't have happy endings. Libya had free healthcare, but it also was also the fiefdom of a dictator who said that those who didn't love him didn't deserve to live.

Not every violent conflict has to be the fault of the US and the UN, and the argument they ought to have intervened more to stabilise the country afterwards is at least as plausible as the argument that they intervened too much. (The conspiracy theory that Western intervention had something to do with Gadaffi's gold dinar idea doesn't have much to rest on either. Round about the time Gadaffi was talking up one of the oldest ideas in Islam as part of his vision for Africa and not getting anywhere even when he was the African Union president, a Malaysian state actually introduced one and was roundly ignored, even by the Malaysian government.)

If you have to choose between one evil and another - its probably better not to choose at all. Non-intervention would have been the best policy to follow here. Hysteria raised by journalists should not be the primary motivating factor for waging war. No one did the cost analysis for lives ended by anarchy and extra-ordinary poverty and suffering caused by complete national economic breakdown.

This is just my personal opinion - but military intervention should be only used for self-defence and the defence of one's allies. And for nothing else.

It's not our fault, until we get involved. This faux crusade of democracy our politicians use as justification just reeks of imperialism, destablising these countries so they are no longer able to sustain any form of government without a puppet government backed by our nations.

In a democracy we as the electorate like to pretend we have no involvement in this decision making, yet we pride ourselves on the system of government that apparently represents 'the people' the most. "Don't blame us, it's just our government!"

International journalists weren't afraid of reporting other things they don't have access of though.

There's an article on Libya every 2-4 days in the Guardian.

Most are about the migrant crisis, but the rest are about the ongoing war.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/libya

Libya was in the midst of a civil war before the UN military intervention you referred to. In fact, the military intervention occurred mere hours before Gaddafi's plans to obliterate Benghazi could be implemented. The military intervention was a no-fly zone to prevent Gaddafi's forces from killing civilians [0]. So people are dying daily, not because of a UN intervention, but because Gaddafi's ouster created a vacuum that resulted in a power struggle. Note that the only other alternative would have been for Gaddafi to retain power at the cost of significant loss of life.

The other point is that the people desperate to emigrate are non-Libyan Africans using Libya as a port of departure. These people have suffered rape, mutilation etc at the hands of the various warring factions.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...

>This was a nation that had free health care for the public

Oh well, that's alright then. Does Mussolini get a pass because he made trains run on time?

Mussolini was invading other nations. Which nation was Gaddafi invading ? If Mussolini wasn't carrying out invasions, he would have definitely got a pass.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chadian%E2%80%93Libyan_conflic...

Albeit long before being removed from power.

There must be a better way of dealing with murderous dictators. Though it's politically incorrect these days there might be something to said for something like the old British colonialism in those cases where you go in and take over the country under foreign governance for a while. Maybe governance by some UN body rather than Brits and for a limited time, say 10 years, followed by elections.

I agree. It is about time we move more towards less autodestructive international power communication.

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