During the 2012 presidential campaign, then-U.S. President Barack Obama boasted about his role in the overthrow of Libya’s strongman, Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, claiming he had deposed a despot “at the cost of less than what we spent in two weeks in Iraq.”
The cost of the U.S.-led North African adventure has grown considerably in the decade since the United States jammed Resolution 1973 through the United Nations Security Council on St. Patrick’s Day in 2011, authorizing the use of force in Libya to protect civilians from potential atrocities at the hands of Africa’s longest-serving dictator. The security vacuum has been filled by legions of armed militias, foreign mercenaries, Islamist extremists, human traffickers, and regional and international powers, who have all transformed the North African country into the region’s greatest exporter of instability and mayhem. And it resulted in the killing of former U.S. Ambassador to Libya John Christopher Stevens and three other U.S. citizens—as well as countless Libyans.
