Back in March 2011, a multinational NATO-led coalition decided that it would be a good idea to bomb the hell out of Libya to get rid of the North African strongman Muammar Gaddafi.
Thanks to a combined barrage of more than 110 U.S. and British Tomahawk cruise missile assaults, plus a flurry of sorties by the French, British and Canadian air forces, the mission was accomplished in just seven months.
When the West pulled out of Libya in October of that year, it left a political void that gave birth to a lawless no-man’s-land bedlam with at least 1,700 different armed bands and militias armed to the teeth, each claiming legitimate authority over the country or a part of it.
Over the course of the next five years, the nonstop violence in what was once the wealthiest and most stable nation in Africa led to the deaths of thousands of civilians and the displacement of 400,000.
As a result of a contested election in 2014, Libya’s glaring political divisions even led to the creation of two rival seats of government, one in Tobruk and another in Tripoli, each boasting its own military capacity and legislative assembly.
After a two year stalemate, a United Nations-backed unity government, led by a well-heeled and Western-educated Fayez Serraj, imposed itself in Tripoli with the promise of reestablishing peace and stability, despite strong opposition from the internationally recognized government in Tobruk and a rival government inside the Libyan capital.
Now the West — specifically, the United States — is back for more.
On Monday, Aug. 1, the U.S. military — at the express behest of the shaky Serraj administration — conducted airstrikes on the coastal city of Surt, ostentatiously to eradicate the Libyan branch of the so-called Islamic State (I.S.).
The United States has already been arming gun-glutted Libya with a succulent array of weapons, tanks, jets and helicopters since May of this year, in direct a violation of a U.N. arms embargo, and that has done nothing to curb the country’s free-flowing bloodbaths.
According to the United States’ own official estimates, there are fewer than 1,000 Islamic State fighters in Surt, but rather than let Serraj’s military take them on, the Barack Obama administration decided to engage in an overkill air attack, and damn the tornados (and possible civilian causalities) in a heavily urbanized region.
In a televised statement Monday, Serraj said that no U.S ground forces would be deployed as of yet in the effort to eliminate the I.S. fighters in Surt. (The operative word here is “yet.”)
But in January, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States was prepared to take “decisive military action” against the Islamic State in Libya, no matter what that might entail.
Since that time, both U.S. and British special operations teams have been conducting secret reconnaissance missions in Libya to identify militant leaders and map out their networks.
From every indication, it won’t be long before there are U.S. boots on the ground in a nation run by warmongering thugs and militaristic gangs awash with weapons.
The only feasible path to stability for Libya is not more airstrikes and the proliferation of violence, but rather carefully orchestrated diplomacy and a power-sharing that will appease at least the majority (albeit not the totality) of the country’s warring sects.
It should not be forgotten that it was Western intervention and an impetuous obsession to overthrow Gaddafi (with the indiscriminate arming of anyone who said that they opposed the tyrannical dictator, regardless of their other political or militaristic affiliations) that created the conditions for the current anarchy that prevails throughout the country.
Libya today is a hellhole that was created by foreign intervention, and unless a fresh approach to resolving the situation is adopted, the West will have to continue to address the problems its own past actions helped create.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at therese.margolis@gmail.com.