Counting the High Cost of Obama's Libya, Syria Debacles | Cato Institute

Counting the High Cost of Obama's Libya, Syria Debacles | Cato Institute: "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.”

In a new article in the journal International Security, Kuperman tallies up the meager benefits and considerable costs: “Human rights conditions in post-intervention Libya,” which according to Human Rights Watch include abuses “ ‘so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity,’ are considerably worse than in the decade preceding the war.”

The Washington Post’s recent look at Libya two years after the revolution describes a hellscape “governed” by hundreds of armed militias, where “even minor disputes escalate into frequent gun violence on the streets.”"

"thousands of portable surface-to-air missiles, useful for shooting down civilian aircraft, have been “privatized,” with some possibly in the hands of terrorists.

Outside Libya’s borders, Kuperman notes, “the most obvious negative impact has been in Mali,” where Tuareg soldiers with Moammar Gadhafi’s former security forces fled with their weapons and sparked an insurgency in the country’s north."

"hopes for outside aid encourage risk-seeking behavior by those expecting rescue.

“When NATO started bombing Libyan forces in March 2011,” Kuperman writes, “Syria’s uprising was mainly nonviolent and its government’s response — although criminally disproportionate — was relatively circumscribed.

But after Gadhafi’s fall, “in the summer of 2011, Syria’s uprising turned violent,” with “a fifteenfold increase in the killing rate” by 2013."