PBS – Joshua Foust: A Hollow Victory: The Slow Unraveling of Libya
In his column for PBS Need to Know, ASP fellow Joshua Foust writes about the intervention in Libya and cautions against prematurely calling it a success.
Calling Libya a victory is still premature – we have no idea if Libya will turn out well. Like the war in Libya, the U.S. invasion of Iraq began in March and seemed early on to be a blazing success – by December of 2003, joyous Iraqis celebrated the capture of Saddam Hussein and thought their nightmare was at an end. War supporters either ignored or explained away the growing acts of violence and disorder as the pitiful actions of a few regime dead-enders… even as the country slipped into a nightmarish chaos.
We would do well to avoid the same sort of early, and wrong, declarations of victory in Libya. The country remains far from unified, or even settled. And the constant drumbeat of bad news – gun fights, rival militias, torture, arbitrary detention, and so on – do not yet bode well for Libya’s future.
Libya may well turn out to be better without Gaddafi than under his boot. But right now, no matter the euphoria expressed by the few Libyans contacted by western journalists, it’s far too early to say.
