IMMIGRATION thread

[AE Bravo]

Evidently, even if the West had loved Gaddafi, this war could still have happened.

No. The west loves Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, those crackdowns were a success to their regimes. See Yemen also, Saleh was booted with a deal. The war could have still happened but with the Libyan regime's freedom in their own land without foreign restrictions and intl denunciation of regime legitimacy.

What does this tell us? Gaddafi-style dictatorships can not be assumed to be stable. If Libya gets a Gaddafi 2.0 in a few years, we could have another uprising in Libya in 60 years time. If Gaddafi had won, similar considerations hold: there is a riske of a new violent uprising x years down the line.

You are using the spring to convince yourself of Gaddafi's supposed unstable governance. In 60 years time you don't know what will happen. Gaddafi was a 70 year old guy and we don't know what his son would have done different. Gaddafi-style dictatorship may not have created an ideal Libya but it didn't break it. Whether you think Libya would have had another uprising 60 years from now or not doesn't matter, because that's the faulty premise and war of choice decision-making that started a civil war Qaddafi tried to prevent in the first place.

By making sure that the dictatorship lost, we did in effect try to break this potential cycle by pushing the result towards something democratic.

Very idealistic. Libya is a huge country with non-Democratic norms, jamahiriya socialism, and generally anti-colonial anti-west sentiment. Unless the invaders were willing to commit to nation-building and the changing of those norms by holding Libya's hands through it they should not have intervened. Since there is no way of doing this, than there is no possible justification for insisting on regime change when the regime offered what it had when it was losing.

There is no doubt that islamist extremists have gotten better conditions after the war in Libya - but even if Libya had completed a transformation to a peaceful democracy, that would likely still have been the case.

The single most powerful force that effectively muzzled and delegitimized these extremists was eliminated. Transformation to a peaceful democracy needed this very regime to pull it off.