How Obama Botched Libya

It’s a far worse situation than Americans are being told by the administration and the liberal media. How are the people of Libya better off with their oil production nearly shut down and no functioning government? Here Cato Institute’s Gene Healy breaks down the facts of what has been truly an Obama debacle. And to think the likes of John McCain and Bill Kristol have been lobbying to give this President another shot at disruption in the Middle East with a Syrian bombing adventure. It’s madness.

Healy writes:

Put aside the fact that the war was illegal by Obama’s own terms, expressed on the campaign trail in 2007, since it “unilaterally authorize[d] a military attack in a situation that [did] not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Our allegedly limited “kinetic military action” in Libya — which lasted some seven months — was also a disaster in humanitarian terms.

As political scientist Alan J. Kuperman recently explained, NATO intervention “increased the duration of Libya’s civil war by about six times and its death toll by at least seven times, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors.”