When ever I see something like this I can’t help but wonder if it would have happened if EU and America hadn’t assassinated Gaddafi. I know that’s kind of a knee jerk reaction, but really what is happening in lybia now? What’s the plan? Protect the oil pipelines and just don’t look too close anymore?
The "EU and America" didn't assassinate Gaddafi. If the "alternate reality" didn't already erased it, you may recall something called "Arab Spring". It's not like Gaddafi was in a stable position at the time, and even less likely he would skate the whole situation until today. Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the reb…
Right. "We came, we saw, he died! [lol]"
Gaddafi was "assassinated" because there was a full-on civil war and the EU and America bombed the massive convoy he had sent to crush the rebellion in Benghazi and enforced a no-fly zone otherwise Gaddafi's planes would obliterate the rebel forces and the civilians living in those cities
This is just revisionist nonsense. There was no "full on" civil war in Libya until NATO intervened and turned it into such. This video [1] (from 9 years ago) does a good job laying out the counterargument - the US took the opportunity of a small-scale uprising to regime change Gaddafi and plunged the country into now a decade of chaos and destruction with no end in sight, destabilizing most of North Africa and flooding Europe with refugees in the process.
Everyone's "performance" has been bad, but why don't we talk about Syria/Russia/[Al-Qaeda] dealings in Libya in the last ~5 years?
Why don't we talk about how the US illegally invaded Syria, allied itself with Al-Qaeda offshoots and tried to topple another antagonist Ba'athist government, failed, and plunged that country also into now an effectively permanent low-level civil war? Why is it the US and NATO can invade and bomb and occupy the territory of anyone they want by claiming "their leaders are bad" but if anyone else does it to our friends (many of whom are also bad) it's all "territorial integrity" and "national sovereignty" and "the rules based order"?
Because our foreign policy is run by utter amoral hypocrites and liars. We are the flailing, declining hegemon, leaving a path of destruction in our wake. And in cases like Syria or Libya its hard to avoid the conclusion our perspective is "if we can't have it we'll settle for wrecking it".