Conventional wisdom in establishment foreign-policy circles was set. The skeptics were wrong. Libya was both a success as a discrete humanitarian intervention and a case study to apply to future liberal-internationalist interventions. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans forgot about the country.

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On November 1, 2011, Freddie deBoer, an anti-war socialist with no particular foreign-policy expertise or credentials, published a little-read blog post where he objected to various declarations that the war in Libya had ended successfully. "What actually matters–what has moral valence–is the material condition of the lives of the Libyan people," he wrote. "Nothing there is finished. Nothing is settled. To call it a democracy now would be an absurd act of projection. Many corrupt men are now freely operating in Libya, armed to the teeth and with a feeling of entitlement. Some of them want to execute homosexuals, oppress women, and adopt Islamic theocracy. Some want to ensure the ascension of their tribe or clan. Some just want to get their piece of the pie. There is neither security nor stability yet, and anyone who actually cares for the future of the Libyan people would admit that." He also questioned whether the U.S. government would ever truly act in the interests of the Libyan people. "We manipulated Libya when we backed Qaddafi as he ruthlessly murdered his people; we will do it [again] in Libya by backing whatever new military junta ossifies in the coming months," he predicted. "It would take a special combination of ignorance and obtuseness to believe we have no operatives in that country now. We have interests in Libya and so we are manipulating Libya, and we will trod on person, property, and democracy to do so if it suits our ends."

The intentions of American policymakers are beyond my knowledge. But the U.S. did have operatives in Libya. "Islamist militants armed with antiaircraft weapons and rocket-propelled grenades stormed a lightly defended United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya," The New York Times reported on September 12, 2012. " The attack, which killed the American ambassador and three staffers, would ultimately reveal that the CIA was running a secret mission out of Benghazi.

A few months earlier, Ross Douthat, a New York Times opinion writer with no particular expertise in foreign policy, dedicated his Sunday column to another unintended consequence of NATO intervention in Libya:

The worst-case situation has not come to pass in Libya itself. But thanks to the ripple effects from Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, it’s well on its way to happening in nearby Mali. Not much attention has been paid to these events. ... But northeastern Mali is part of the same Saharan region that encompasses southern Libya, which means weapons and fighters from the Libyan war have moved easily across Algeria into Mali since Colonel Qaddafi’s fall, transforming a long-simmering insurgency into a multifront civil war. Mali’s insurgents are mostly Tuaregs, a Berber people whose homeland cuts across several national borders. This spring, their uprising won them effective control of the northern half of Mali, which they renamed Azawad. The central government’s weak response, meanwhile, led to a coup in Mali’s capital, Bamako,which replaced the civilian president with a junta that promised to take the fight to the rebels more effectively. That hasn’t happened; instead, the rebels have taken the fight to one another. The Tuareg insurgency included an Islamist element, known as Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), which is affiliated with a jihadi group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. In the last month, Ansar Dine’s fighters have seized the breakaway region’s major cities, ousting their erstwhile allies and embarking on a Taliban-style campaign of vandalism against the region’s monuments.

He thought there was no chance of Western intervention in Mali. As it turned out, France sent troops there. The latest? "The U.N. Security Council on Monday welcomed agreement on a roadmap for negotiations between the Malian government and Tuareg separatists and called on both sides to engage in follow-up peace talks starting August 17," AP reports. "The talks between the Bamako-based government and Tuareg separatists are aimed at restoring stability in northern Mali, which fell under the control of al-Qaida-linked Islamic extremists in 2012. A French-led military intervention scattered the extremists last year but new bursts of violence in recent months are posing a new threat to Mali's central government."