Mission Not Accomplished in Libya

In his State of the Union Address last week President Barack Obama seemed to link the fate of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad with that of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. “A year ago, Gaddafi was one of the world’s longest-serving dictators — a murderer with American blood on his hands,” said the President. “Today, he is gone. And in Syria, I have no doubt that the Assad regime will soon discover that the forces of change cannot be reversed, and that human dignity cannot be denied.” As the international community struggles to respond to Syria’s increasingly bloody power struggle, some see Libya as an example worth following. It was, they emphasize, a foreign military intervention limited to air power and small Special Forces deployments that helped e a patchwork of local militias to dispatch the Gaddafi regime at minimal cost in foreign blood and treasure. But Libya’s power struggle is far from done and dusted.