Enoch Schmaltz

The Libyan Question

NATO, Obama, and the destruction of a country

On October 20, 2011, a convoy of 75 vehicles left the besieged city of Sirte moving west. Inside one of them was Muammar Gaddafi. By mid-afternoon he was dead in a drainage pipe in his birthplace, pulled out by rebel fighters while American drones circled overhead from a trailer in the Nevada desert. The old Libya ended that morning. Nothing new began. The Libyan Question is the account of how it happened and what it produced: a humanitarian intervention that became a regime change operation, a mandate to protect civilians that produced a decade of civil war, a military campaign that succeeded completely and planned for almost nothing.