Over a six month period, nearly 25,000 air sorties were flown and over 5,000 targets were damaged or destroyed, saving thousands of civilian lives, while NATO suffered zero casualties and inflicted minimal collateral damage.
We saved thousands of lives and inflicted minimal collateral damage from our bombing. I suppose those are true statements. Long live Responsibility to Protect! But they are not the only true statements about our intervention. And letting them stand alone gives a false impression of the humanitarian toll.
It is also true that the failure to quickly defeat the Khaddafi regime resulted in tens of thousands of deaths over the six months of civil war (and the original civil war isn't quite over even though the factions flipped between government and rebels), as I noted in an update to this post:
Yes, our tepid aerial intervention killed few Libyans from the air (and no American or NATO personnel losses at all--which is great, I might add), but when fighting drags on because we didn't go for the kill, casualties naturally go up. Estimates from April count 10,000 to 30,000 Libyans dead for just a few months of civil war and intervention. As I pointed out early on, if your sole concern is loss of life, staying out of the fight and letting Khaddafi quickly put down the revolt would have been the best course.
For a small country even 10,000 over a few months is a lot. What the toll will be when this is all over is anybody's guess, but the relative toll will be pretty harsh compared to the fewer than 100,000 who died in Iraq in 6 years of heavy fighting in a much larger population.
The collateral damage was from the slow pace of the regime change. If you think that it doesn't count because few of our bombs were off target, you're kidding yourself.
If our primary goal was to save lives, we should have either gone in with a division of troops to seize Tripoli or stayed out and let Khaddafi win. Either option would have resulted in fewer civilian casualties and collateral damage. But if your primary goal is to avoid having our finger prints on direct civilian deaths, doing what we did was optimal.
