NATO’s 2011 Libya intervention was regime change disguised as civilian protection.

Evidence

Despite its stated intention, the NATO attack in Libya was a regime change operation. Without outside interference, Gaddafi could have easily kept control of the country. To justify military action and the violation of Libyan national sovereignty, the international forces invoked the “responsibility to protect,” a doctrine developed in the wake of tragedies in Rwanda and Kosovo in the 1990s, with the aim of protecting civilians from things like genocide. But the targets chosen by NATO revealed that the real goal was to overthrow the government. A layperson would have never guessed it, but a “no-fly zone” actually meant bombing quite a lot of Libya. Fighter jets carried out thousands of airstrikes, killing scores of civilians, and they bombarded Gaddafi’s hometown, even though no one in the loyal region needed any protection from the government. NATO simply wanted the leader of the country to fall. And he most certainly did, in dramatic, terrifying fashion. Rebels sodomized Gaddafi with a knife and then uploaded the video to the internet. Anyone in the world could watch the Libyan leader being tortured to death. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 242

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the book’s running theme of Western interventions exploiting uprisings, and connects to the 2003 Iraq war narrative of fabricated justifications. — connects to: NATO’s R2P operation in Libya was a regime-change bombing campaign — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 242

Broader Connections

• NATO’s R2P operation in Libya was a regime-change bombing campaign #expands (0.97) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 242