For all the cheerleaders who thought overthrowing Qaddafi was such a great idea

[eridani]

Just like in Iraq, the recipe seems to be overthrow a nasty dictator--reap chaos and total social breakdown.

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21638122-another-font-global-mayhem-emergingnot-helped-regional-meddling-and-western?fsrc=nlw|hig|9-01-2015|NA

Nowadays Libya is barely a country at all (see article). The factions that came together to fell Muammar Qaddafi have given up trying to settle their differences by negotiation. The east is under the control of a more or less secular alliance, based in Tobruk; in the west, a hotch-potch of groups in Tripoli and Misrata, once the symbol of heroic resistance to Qaddafi, hold sway, backed by hardline Islamist militias. Libya has two rival governments, two parliaments, two sets of competing claims to run the central bank and the national oil company, no functioning national police or army, and an array of militias that terrorise the country’s 6m citizens, plunder what remains of the country’s wealth, ruin what little is left of its infrastructure, and torture and kill wherever they are in the ascendancy.

The West has tried to keep out of Libya. America, France and Britain reluctantly intervened to oust Qaddafi in order to prevent him massacring his fellow Libyans, but in the wake of Western failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the trio was determined not to get sucked into overseeing Libya’s hoped-for transition to democracy, let alone put boots on the ground. Instead, it was left to the UN—and to the Libyans themselves, who insisted that they could mend the place on their own.