Remember that our Immaculate Intervention in Libya that relied on air power alone was a reaction to the perceived "flaws" of our Iraq intervention. Why we'd trust them to understand the Iraq War let alone draw lessons from the war is a mystery to me.
By simply overthrowing the dictator of Libya but keeping our troops out of the occupation business, locals would work out their differences because they'd be unable to rely on us to do it for them; our friends wouldn't be "tainted" by our association with them; and jihadis would have no reason to flock to Libya.
Egypt would rather like some of that flawed Western approach for Libya now:
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi urged the United States and Europe on Thursday to help the Libyan army in its fight against Islamist militants now to save the country from requiring intervention on the scale of Iraq and Syria.
As an interesting aside, bombing missions that Egypt was supposed to have carried out earlier this year were done by Libyan pilots in Egyptian planes. Interesting.
Sisi isn't calling for direct intervention by ground troops--yet. But just wait. Libya is falling apart:
The government is running out of cash and credit. Another year or two of this and life gets very miserable for Libyans. The UN speaks of Libya has sliding into a state of anarchy. No one is willing to intervene militarily and the UN has constant problems with gangsters and Islamic terrorists attacking air efforts. This could end very badly. ...
The Tripoli government has support from Turkey, Sudan and Qatar while the Tobruk government has most of the world recognizing it, along with most of the Islamic world. This is especially true with neighboring Egypt and most of the Arab oil states.
It is interesting that we are finally getting to that civil war scenario of a divided Libya.
Well, I supposed it is someone else's turn to exercise that whole Responsibility to Protect (R2P) notion that led us to overthrow Khadaffi in the first place.
I guess our post-war plan wasn't as good as I assumed it would be.
