Tripoli airport captured by Libyan jihadis

Anyone wanna bet that ISIS/ISIL/IS/xyz is also involved in the ongoing conflict there?  If they are not as yet, they very soon will be.  

Today's  BBC has the story.

And, below is a very interesting article I read this morning.  It has plenty of links you can access from the first link, to all the statements made within the article.  

Justin Logan writing at NationalInterest:
Keeping Score on the Libya Intervention:  Good Idea or Tragic Mistake?
On April 22, 2003, at the American Enterprise Institute, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer remarked:

“Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.”

In response, the Crooked Timber blog declared April 22 “Krauthammer Day,” so that each year we could reflect on Krauthammer’s perspicacity and the powerful sense of accountability and stewardship that pervades America’s foreign-policy establishment.

In that spirit, I suggest we declare August 24 “Slaughter Day,” to commemorate former State Department director of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter’s August 24, 2011 Financial Times piece entitled “Why Libya Sceptics Were Proved Badly Wrong.” According to Slaughter, “the real choice in Libya was between temporary stability and the illusion of control, or fluidity and the ability to influence events driven by much larger forces.” Having chosen the latter, Slaughter said, it wasn’t too early to judge the Obama administration correct and the skeptics wrong.

Slaughter’s account of the initial debate over the war includes several arguments: according to her, the advocates claimed Washington had a “strategic interest” in demonstrating to the under-thirty populations in the Middle East that we “live up to [our] values”; Washington needed to assert its belief that “effective leadership must come from the centre,” which is America; and the intervention emphasized U.S. relations with “social forces,” not just states, which was an overdue change.

I don’t remember those arguments featuring in the debate. The main skeptic argument was that even after the U.S.-led coalition regime-changed Qaddafi, stability, unity and liberalism were likely to be elusive. Stephen Walt surveyed the social-science literature on foreign-imposed regime change and judged,

“the probability that our intervention will yield a stable democracy is low, and … our decision to intervene has increased the likelihood of civil war. Heading off that possibility is likely to require a costly and extended international commitment, which is precisely what the people who launched this operation promised they would not do.”

Three years on, it’s worth a look at Libya and an effort to determine just how wrong the Libya skeptics were. So let’s start with the economy: According to Morgan Stanley, 2014 will see Libyan oil production above 25 percent of what it was under Qaddafi. Unemployment among youth ages 15-24 is 24 percent.....

........ Slaughter doesn’t write about Libya anymore, focusing instead on how bombing Syria would get Vladimir Putin out of Ukraine and on the question whether women in America can “have it all.”....