What Good Intentions Have Wrought

"There is the increasing possibility that the situation in Libya will transform into a long-term tribal civil war."
"This is particularly probable if opposition forces received military assistance from foreign militaries."
Canadian intelligence specialists, March 15, 2011 assessment

"One can quarrel with it or not quarrel with it, but the mission was we would provide air cover for those that were initially subject to Gadhafi's attacks and ultimately became his overthrowers."
"The decision was made at the outset that we were not going to go into Libya (on the ground) per se. It was going to be up to the Libyans to then make t he best of the situation."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper

An armed man waves his rifle as buildings and cars are engulfed in flames after being set on fire inside the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi late on Sept. 11, 2012. US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three of his colleagues were killed in an attack on the consulate in the eastern Libyan city by Islamists outraged over an amateur American-made Internet video mocking Islam. Stevens died less than six months after being appointed to his post. STR/AFP/Getty Images

Hindsight, a formal intellectually introspective exercise, rarely arrives with solutions to problems, only regrets that what occurs in response to a chosen direction turns out disastrous. And then in realizing that, one must defend the original position since it is too painful to admit that the response was one taken in haste, with insufficient thought to the probable outcome. In the case of Libya, just as in any country in that region of the world abutting the Middle East, tribal, clan, sectarian and ethnic complexities sully outcomes.

While it might mean that a reasonable mind in thinking of the future might conclude that given a little help from powerful outside sources, the indigenous population, freed at long last from the imperious and cruel dictates of a tyrant might take the opportunity to act in concert for the greater good of the country in which they live, that reasonable but hugely uninsightful interpretation of the currents of hatred, resentment and violence made its decision in error.

Which is to say the executive branch of government in this instance, in throwing in its expected lot with that of its collegial members of NATO in the belief that it was the right thing to do, did so when the country's military intelligence officers parsed the situation and its outcome quite differently. Predicting in 2011 that Libya could and likely would descend into the ongoing destructive chaos of civil war, led by opposing tribal challenges to a central authority.

The warning was made, and it was most likely shunted aside as Canada threw in her lot with the bombing campaign under NATO auspices and UN approval to aid local militias in their resolve to remove Moammar Gadhafi's regime from power, permitting in the final analysis, Libya to descend into lawless and violent chaos where rival tribes and militias continue to meet in battle for control of the country.

"The one thing we can say categorically is that they couldn't be any worse than Col. Gadhafi", said the then-Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs in pointing out that the issue was to help Libya reach its way into becoming a democracy. The weak and ignored central authority that ostensibly represents democratic rule has been ineffective and powerless against the larger factions that challenge and dismiss it.

Gadhafi was indeed a brutal dictator, just as Iraq's Saddam Hussein was, but both kept opposing factions under control through fear and oppression, and the only violence that took place was what each government wrought upon their weaker, less-well-organized opponents. In their absence, each of the countries descended into violence. Perhaps worse, each of those countries has become a smouldering hotbed of Islamist fanaticism whose vicious depredations and threats surmount those of the tyrants.

And nor was the West totally ignorant of what they might be unleashing, since intelligence reports described the anti-Gadhafi stronghold of eastern Libya as an "epicentre of Islamist extremism" whose "extremist cells" operated in the region. And now, the iron fist that kept them in check is gone, and they are free to destroy and kill at leisure. Hell unleashed.

Al-Hayat Media Centre/AFP/Getty Images   An image grab taken from a video released on Feb. 15, 2015 purportedly shows black-clad ISIS fighters leading handcuffed hostages, said to be Egyptian Coptic Christians, wearing orange jumpsuits before their alleged decapitation on a seashore in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.