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Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi was missing a thumb, dressed in a gown with gold fringes and hiding in a lavish home high in the hills of northwest Libya

son of the former Libyan dictator Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi

Then the Arab Spring came, and Seif instead joined the Qaddafi government’s brutal crackdown on the Libyan uprising. Soon after, he was captured by a rebel group and spent the following years in a kind of cave, cut off from the outside world.

Few countries exemplify the tragedy of the Arab Spring like Libya. The fall of the 42-year dictatorship of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi brought a decade of anarchy as competing governments, militias and foreign powers struggled to seize control of the oil-rich country. The United States and NATO allies that had backed the anti-Qaddafi uprising with a bombing campaign largely turned their backs after he fell, and past United Nations efforts to forge a government foundered in the chaos.

Libyans have a chance to clamber out of the mess. A cease-fire of sorts has been holding since October, and a broad-based political forum convened by the United Nations in November managed to appoint a prime minister and a three-member presidential council charged with leading the country to elections this coming December.

But if there’s to be any chance for peace, the foreign powers that have flooded Libya with weapons, drones and mercenaries — primarily Russia, Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates

President Obama’s campaign in Libya may be the most deceptively sold U.S. military policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s “all aid short of war” policy in 1941. In his speech to the nation Tuesday night, the president described a military action in Libya where the main U.S. military commitment had already ended, where NATO was relieving the U.S. of operational responsibility, where the U.S. mission was limited to protecting civilian populations, where the U.S. goal is strictly humanitarian, and where the U.S. took no view about Libya’s future government beyond a vague preference that Muammar Qaddafi move on. As described, this is a preposterous policy. Fortunately, the president is giving every sign of not believing a word of it.

In fact, the U.S. mission is aimed at the overthrow of Qaddafi. The U.S. is engaged in sophisticated propaganda operations urging Qaddafi’s troops to turn on him. And it’s reported that the U.S. is negotiating with Qaddafi about a secure exit from Libya. In fact, the U.S. mission is as deeply concerned with European energy security as with the humanitarian crisis. Critics correctly point out that the US has managed to ignore many other humanitarian crises – and is in fact ignoring one right now in the Ivory Coast. This particular crisis is occurring in a country from which NATO ally Italy buys more than one-fifth of all its net oil imports and in which Britain has a very large investment. We are not going to war for oil. But we very rarely go to war without oil.

Henry Kissinger used to contrast the Bush 43 and Clinton administrations: “Under Clinton, the explanations were much better than the policies; under Bush, the policies were always much better than the explanations.” The Libyan war takes the Bush frailty to extremes: the explanations are laughable on their face – but the policy seems astute and promising.

In Libya, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton showed herself to be quick to use the American military without thinking about what comes next. As the decisive voice pushing the Obama administration to war, Clinton had no serious plan for a post-Qaddafi Libya, a point driven home forcefully once again in a New York Times cover story on Sunday.

Libya was not the first time she endorsed a U.S. military operation in the Middle East without thinking ahead: Clinton voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. She has shown repeatedly that she did not learn the lessons of Iraq, and has yet to admit to the failure of Libya.

The second is to acknowledge the limits of the capacity of the United States to transform the world in our interests and image. As explained in the New York Times, "Mrs. Clinton's deep belief in America's power to do good in the world ran aground in a tribal country with no functioning government, rival factions and a staggering quantity of arms."

I was curious about whether there's any evidence in the modern world for the old notion that a well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny. Do countries with high gun-ownership rights tend to be more democratic? Or more likely to overthrow dictatorships?

from a look at the Small Arms Survey's international rankings from 2007, it's hard to detect a pattern.

The top 10 gun-owning countries in the world (after the United States) include both democracies like Switzerland and Finland, as well as authoritarian countries like Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Hillary Clinton plans to deliver a scorching assessment of Donald J. Trump’s foreign policy prescriptions on Thursday, casting her likely Republican rival as a threat to decades of bipartisan tenets of American diplomacy and declaring him unfit for the presidency.

persistent assault to portray a potential Trump presidency as a dangerous proposition that would weaken American alliances and embolden enemies.

specific criticism of comments Mr. Trump has made about rethinking the United States’s support of NATO

dvancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt, signaling the first major assault on territory that

the terrorist group’s largest base outside of Iraq and Syria.

reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles

In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, Washington toppled regimes and then failed to plan for a new government or construct effective local forces—with the net result being over 7,000 dead U.S. soldiers, tens of thousands of injured troops, trillions of dollars expended, untold thousands of civilian fatalities, and three Islamic countries in various states of disorder.

We might be able to explain a one-off failure in terms of allies screwing up. But three times in a decade suggests a deeper pattern in the American way of war.

In the American mind, there are good wars: campaigns to overthrow a despot, with the model being World War II. And there are bad wars: nation-building missions to stabilize a foreign country, including peacekeeping and counterinsurgency.

Libya — the last country we bombed because its leader crossed a red line or was about to

worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Qaddafi

example of a successful foreign military intervention, which should be repeated in Syria

In just the last two weeks, Islamist militants have detonated a car bomb at the gates of the capital’s security headquarters, gunned down a senior Interior Ministry official in broad daylight and shot down a military helicopter over Sinai with a portable surface-to-air missile.

Egyptians returning from jihad abroad to join a campaign of terrorism against the military-backed government.

“Egypt is again an open front for jihad,” said Brian Fishman, a researcher in counterterrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington. “The world is being turned on its head, and, for the United States, the ability to rely on Egypt as a stabilizing force in the region — rather than a source of problems — is really being challenged.

the disagreements underscore a broader philosophical schism over America’s role in the world a dozen years after the invasion of Iraq.

“He may be more cautious about the outcomes of the significant use of military force,” said Barry Pavel, a national security official in the White House during Mr. Obama’s first term and now a vice president of the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank. “She may be more robust in ensuring that U.S. engagement is felt in a meaningful way and there isn’t a perception of a U.S. withdrawal or disengagement.”

Mr. Biden seemed to emerge from the Iraq crucible with more scars, and shifted more to the left. He was quicker to repudiate the war and, with Mr. Gelb, crafted a plan to essentially divide Iraq into three autonomous regions under a limited central government. Once he became vice president, he was determined to avoid what he saw as the mistakes of the Bush administration.

The U.S. Army field manual defines "the rule of law" as follows: "The rule of law refers to a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires, as well, measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency."

it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms," they declared. "From the perspective of many around the world, the U.S. appears to claim, in effect, the legal right to kill any person it determines is a member of al-Qaida or its associated forces, in any state on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret evidence, evaluated in a secret process by unknown and largely anonymous individuals—with no public disclosure of which organizations are considered 'associated forces,' no means for anyone outside that secret process to raise questions about the criteria or validity of the evidence, and no means for anyone outside that process to identify or remedy mistakes or abuses."

Unfortunately, the U.S. government violates "rule of law" norms in other areas too. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not operate with "procedural and legal transparency." The Office of Legal Counsel adopts highly contestable yet totally secret interpretations of statutes that dramatically affect policy outcomes. Citizens and corporations are served with secret court orders and often feel confused about whether they are even permitted to consult with counsel. Laws against revealing classified information are not enforced equally—powerful actors routinely leak official secrets with impunity, while whistleblowers and dissidents are aggressively persecuted for the mere "mishandling" of state secrets. The director of national intelligence committed perjury without consequence. President Obama has blatantly violated a duly ratified, legally binding treaty that requires him to investigate and prosecute acts of torture. He also violated the War Powers Resolution by participating in the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi without securing the approval of Congress. And he won't even clarify exactly what groups he considers us to be at war with! That is only a partial list.

the broad U.S. effort to address the threat from al Qaeda and its like-minded successors seems to be lurching from failure to failure. Indeed, the entire U.S. approach to the greater Middle East has been a costly series of missteps, which is why some of us have called for a fundamental rethinking of the whole U.S. approach.

The GOP would like to blame the current mess on U.S. President Barack Obama, but U.S. Middle East policy is a bipartisan cock-up going back more than 20 years.

Remember: the central challenge in the greater Middle East is the lack of effective and legitimate political institutions

A hidden assumption underlies the debate over North Korea. The assumption is that preventive war—war against a country that poses no imminent threat but could pose a threat in the future—is morally legitimate. To be sure, many politicians oppose an attack on practical grounds: They say the costs would be too high. But barely anyone in the foreign policy mainstream calls the idea itself abhorrent.

By historical standards, that’s astounding. Over the past two decades, American foreign policy has undergone a conceptual shift so complete that its current practitioners don’t even acknowledge how revolutionary their current views are. During the Cold War, the dominant figures in American foreign policy considered preventive war to be fundamentally un-American. A member of the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, or Reagan administration, transported to 2017, would wonder how their successors embraced a principle that they associated with the regimes America fought in World War II.

In the second half of the 20th century, when America’s leaders heard “preventive war,” they thought about Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And for good reason. Both regimes had used the doctrine to justify their attacks in World War II. In August 1939, on the eve of his invasion of Poland, Hitler told his generals that, “we are faced with the hard alternative of either striking or the certainty of being destroyed sooner or later.” In a 2006 journal article, University of Pittsburgh law professor Jules Lobel quoted the Commander of the Japanese fleet, Admiral Yamamoto, as writing that, “[i]n the event of outbreak of war with the United States, there would be little prospect of our operations succeeding unless, at the very outset, we can deal a crushing blow to the main force of the American fleet in Hawaiian waters.”