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Dow Jones. To Read the Full Story. Subscribe Sign In. Continue reading your article with a WSJ membership. In , he gained favor with the administration of George W. Bush when he announced the existence of a program to build weapons of mass destruction in Libya and that he would allow an international agency to inspect and dismantle them.
Though some in the U. In , U. Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Libya, one of the first western heads of state to do so in recent memory; he praised Libya during the visit as a strong ally in the international war on terror.
In February , as unrest spread through much of the Arab world , massive political protests against the Qaddafi regime sparked a civil war between revolutionaries and loyalists. In March, an international coalition began conducting airstrikes against Qaddafi strongholds under the auspices of a U.
Security Council resolution. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On April 14, , third-round leader Greg Norman loses a six-shot lead in the final round of the Masters golf tournament and finishes second—one of the worst collapses in sports history.
Nick Faldo wins the green jacket, finishing five strokes ahead of Norman. The historic toss on opening day is to star Walter Johnson, the Washington Senators' starting pitcher against the Philadelphia Six days after being assigned for the first time to the western front, two American pilots from the U.
In exchange for an end to the disputed Soviet occupation, the United States agreed to end its arms support for the Afghan The American airlift of Vietnamese orphans to the United States ends after 2, children are transported to America. The operation began disastrously on April 4 when an Air Force cargo jet crashed shortly after take-off from Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon.
More than of the Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Loretta Lynn, a singer who greatly expanded the opportunities for women in the male-dominated world of country-western music, is born in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky on April 14, Unlike some country-western stars that sang about a rural working class life but lived an urban High winds kicked up clouds of millions of tons of dirt and dust so dense and dark that some eyewitnesses believed the world was Noah Webster, a Yale-educated lawyer with an avid interest in language and education, publishes his American Dictionary of the English Language.
The dictionary, which took him more than two On April 14, , the 41st annual Academy Awards are broadcast live to a television audience in 37 nations. It was the first time the awards had been televised worldwide, as well as the first Oscar ceremony to be held in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Such military assistance included weapons, training, and covert deployment of hundreds of troops from Qatar, eventually enabling the rebels to capture and summarily execute Qaddafi and seize power in October The biggest misconception about NATO's intervention is that it saved lives and benefited Libya and its neighbors.
In reality, when NATO intervened in mid-March , Qaddafi already had regained control of most of Libya, while the rebels were retreating rapidly toward Egypt. Thus, the conflict was about to end, barely six weeks after it started, at a toll of about 1, dead, including soldiers, rebels, and civilians caught in the crossfire. By intervening, NATO enabled the rebels to resume their attack, which prolonged the war for another seven months and caused at least 7, more deaths.
The best development in postwar Libya was the democratic election of July , which brought to office a moderate, secular coalition government—a stark change from Qaddafi's four-decade dictatorship. Other developments, however, have been less encouraging. The victorious rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings and expelled 30, mostly black residents of Tawerga on grounds that some had been "mercenaries" for Qaddafi. HRW reported in that such abuses "appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.
Radical Islamist groups, suppressed under Qaddafi, emerged as the fiercest rebels during the war and refused to disarm or submit to government authority afterward. Their persistent threat was highlighted by the September attack on U. Even more recently, in April , a vehicle bomb destroyed half of the French embassy in the capital, Tripoli. In light of such insecurity, it is understandable that most Libyans responding to a postwar poll expressed nostalgia for a strong leader such as Qaddafi.
Among neighboring countries, Mali, which previously had been the region's exceptional example of peace and democracy, has suffered the worst consequences from the intervention. After Qaddafi's defeat, his ethnic Tuareg soldiers of Malian descent fled home and launched a rebellion in their country's north, prompting the Malian army to overthrow the president.
The rebellion soon was hijacked by local Islamist forces and al-Qaida, which together imposed sharia and declared the vast north an independent country. By December , the northern half of Mali had become "the largest territory controlled by Islamic extremists in the world," according to the chairman ofthe U. Senate Subcommittee on Africa. This chaos also spurred massive displacement of hundreds of thousands of Malian civilians, which Amnesty International characterized as "Mali's worst human rights situation in 50 years.
Sophisticated weapons from Qaddafi's arsenal—includingup to 15, man-portable, surface-to-air missiles unaccounted for as of —leaked to radical Islamists throughout the region. NATO's intervention on behalf of Libya's rebels also encouraged Syria's formerly peaceful protesters to switch to violence in mid, in hopes of attracting a similar intervention. The resulting escalation in Syria magnified that country's killing rate by tenfold.
NATO's intervention in Libya offers at least three important lessons for implementing the responsibility to protect. First, potential interveners should beware both misinformation and rebel propaganda. If Western countries had accurately perceived Libya's initial civil conflict—as Qaddafi using discriminate force against violent tribal, regional, and radical Islamist rebels—NATO would have been much less likely to launch its counterproductive intervention.
The second lesson is that humanitarian intervention can backfire by escalating rebellion. This is because some substate groups believe that by violently provoking state retaliation, they can attract such intervention to help achieve their political objectives, including regime change.
The resulting escalation, however, magnifies the threat to noncombatants before any potential intervention can protect them. Thus, the prospect of humanitarian intervention, which is intended to protect civilians, may instead imperil them via a moral hazard dynamic.
To mitigate this pathology, it is essential to avoid intervening on humanitarian grounds in ways that reward rebels, unless the state is targeting noncombatants.
A final lesson is that intervention initially motivated by the desire to protect civilians is prone to expanding its objective to include regime change, even if doing so magnifies the danger to civilians, contrary to the interveners' original intent. That is partly because intervening states, when justifying their use of force to domestic and international audiences, demonize the regime of the country they are targeting.
This demonization later inhibits the interveners from considering a negotiated settlement that would permit the regime or its leaders to retain some power, which typically would be the quickest way to end the violence and protect noncombatants.
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