Are you Libyan? I have never heard the views of someone who is inside the country about the "Arab spring" (as we called it) and the UN's intervention.
I understand that Gaddafi was a bad dictator unless you were in his chosen group. Is life for the average Libyan now better and less fearful than when he was dictator?
I'm moroccan but I'm very active in the Muslim community so I have a few Libyan friends. From what I gathered, their opinion is usually a mix of yearning for the "good old days" when the Libyan state was somewhat functional and the standards of of living were actually pretty high for the region... but also a deep hatred for ghaddafi too. They don't miss him or think he was a good leader, they just miss a functional state that wasn't ruled by warlords. That nostalgic feeling is pretty universal too. The corruption was centralized so much easier to deal with and much more predictable. Those I know who still live in Libya are not doing too badly, but their quality of life has taken a nosedive and everything is more uncertain.
They don't (usually) blame nato or have a deep resentment towards the intervention, but there's the impression that they have been played and used like pawns. So the very cynical view is that getting rid of ghaddafi was the goal, not helping the Libyan people at all. A cynical outlook at geopolitics is almost universal in the middle east though. But it's very far from the total hatred some felt towards America after the iraqi invasion.
I guess the insane politics around the current libyan civil war that's happening there right now doesn't exactly disprove that impression.
Thank you, that was a really helpful insight into how Libyans feel and I appreciate you taking the time to share it.
If you can find a copy of "Hard Choices: The Making and Unmaking of Global Britain" by Peter Ricketts (ISBN-10: 1838951830, ISBN-13: 978-1838951832) you may find the contents relating to Libya of interest. Peter Ricketts was the UK's National Security Advisor at the time and is not complementary about the decisions the UK made and how the UK and other nations treated Libya. I finished reading it shortly before I read your comment, and it prompted my question.
I will say for sure that almost nobody in the UK understands how badly we screwed up, unless they are from a military background, particularly anti-Boris-Johnson, or, weirdly, fans of the band, Fat White Family, who got into a kind of "de-platforming" trouble for daring to point out Boris's callous indifference to our failures.
> So the very cynical view is that getting rid of ghaddafi was the goal, not helping the Libyan people at all.
I don't know how cynical that is, to be fair. I think there was some adventurism from NATO for sure -- a well-intentioned belief that NATO was helping Libyans to get rid of Gaddafi, to mutual self-defence benefit. (Which they ultimately did; his death being the form of departure Putin apparently most fears.)
Like I say -- it was disastrous and I don't think we talk enough about how disastrous.
I understand that Gaddafi was a bad dictator unless you were in his chosen group. Is life for the average Libyan now better and less fearful than when he was dictator?