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Libya Has Already Had Quite Enough “Help”

Western governments should be reluctant to "help" Libya when their last attempt to "help" the country contributed directly to its ruin.
Libya

The Financial Times berates Western governments for doing too little to resolve Libya’s current conflict:

Western governments have been curiously passive in their approach to the Libyan crisis. While diplomats are involved in the talks, high-profile politicians from the US and the EU are keeping a low profile. At times it has seemed as if Libya ranks well down the list of priorities in the Middle East — well below the war against Isis in Syria and Iraq, the Iran nuclear issue and the Israeli-Palestinian question.

It is possible that one reason for this may be a reluctance to acknowledge the disastrous aftermath of Nato’s intervention. But embarrassment is not a valid excuse for failing to confront an increasingly dangerous conflict [bold mine-DL].

Most supporters of the Libyan war don’t accept that the intervention is responsible for the current disorder and violence in Libya, but more than that there is still no political will in Western countries to assume any responsibility for remedying Libya’s post-Gaddafi problems. There never was any, which is one reason why it was such a mistake to fight a war for regime change when no one had any intention of trying to stabilize the country afterwards. The Libyan war was sold as a “good” intervention partly because it was supposed to be cheap and relatively quick. Implicit in the pro-intervention argument from the start was that the U.S. and its allies would more or less wash their hands of Libya’s problems once Gaddafi was gone. That was how the British and American governments made an unnecessary war slightly more palatable to electorates that were tired of costly wars of choice. There might be chaos after regime change for the people in the country, and it might destabilize the wider region, but that didn’t concern the supporters of the war. (Or they pretended that these things wouldn’t happen because they would have undermined the case for intervention.) What mattered to them was that “humanitarian” intervention was seen as having “worked” by toppling a dictator.

Having said that, there are also good reasons for adopting a relatively hands-off approach to Libya now. Western governments should be reluctant to “help” Libya when their last attempt to “help” the country contributed directly to its ruin. It is not at all clear that the responsible Western governments would know how to “help” resolve the current conflict, nor is there is any political support for a major effort to restore order to the country. Even if there were support for such a thing in the West, the presence of Western forces would be an incitement to new insurgencies and terrorist attacks, which is why it never made any sense for Western governments to occupy the country after the regime fell. While the U.S. and its allies helped to wreck the country, there is unfortunately not very much that they can do that would actually repair the damage. They could keep trying to “do something” for Libya and likely make matters worse, but that isn’t going to help anyone. At this point, support for negotiations between the country’s warring factions is the best and only practical thing that Western governments can do for the country that they have “helped” bring to its current pass.

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