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In March 2011, the world watched as protests against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi erupted into a full-blown civil war. The situation was dire, and the international community had to decide how to respond. Enter the Obama Administration.

The United States, along with other NATO allies, saw the opportunity to prevent a humanitarian disaster. Initially, the U.S. aimed to enforce a no-fly zone to protect civilians. But the stakes got higher when rebels requested more direct intervention. Obama and his team were torn between inaction and action, knowing that military involvement could lead to unforeseen consequences.

In hindsight, this looks so dumb—so why did they get involved in the first place? Well, the administration was driven by a mix of moral imperative and strategic interests. Obama was keen on demonstrating American leadership in a post-Iraq War era, showing that the U.S. could intervene responsibly and with international backing. Plus, the Arab Spring was already reshaping the Middle East, and ignoring Libya could mean losing influence in the region.

The turning point came in March 2011 when the UN Security Council authorized military action to protect civilians. NATO launched Operation Odyssey Dawn, with the U.S. leading the initial airstrikes. The goal was to degrade Gaddafi’s military capabilities and create a buffer zone for rebel forces.

However, the U.S. quickly handed over command to NATO, hoping to distance itself from direct combat roles. This move was partly due to domestic political pressures and a desire to avoid a prolonged military commitment. Yet, the situation in Libya remained volatile. Gaddafi’s regime continued to retaliate against rebels, and the U.S. found itself increasingly entangled.

By October 2011, Gaddafi was killed, and his regime crumbled. But the aftermath was chaotic. Libya descended into factional violence and instability, with rival governments vying for control. The country became a hotbed for extremist groups, including ISIS, which set up bases and recruited fighters.

Looking back, the decision to intervene in Libya appears to have been fraught with unintended consequences. The initial hope of a quick, clean operation turned into a messy, ongoing conflict. Critics argue that the lack of a coherent post-conflict plan left Libya vulnerable to chaos and extremism.

Obama himself later reflected on the decision. In a 2016 interview, he admitted, “We underestimated the strength of the regime, and the opposition was fractured and didn’t have a clear vision for the future.” This candid admission underscores the complexity of international interventions and the difficulty of predicting their outcomes.

The legacy of the Libyan intervention remains contentious. It serves as a cautionary tale about the risks of military intervention without a clear exit strategy. The U.S. learned hard lessons, but the scars of the decision linger in the unstable landscape of modern Libya.

The Libya Thing: How Obama Went to War Without Really Meaning To

Quick refresher on where the world was in February 2011. Tunisia’s dictator had just fled. Mubarak had resigned on the 11th after eighteen days of Tahrir Square. The whole region felt like it was tipping, and the White House had spent weeks trying to look like it was on the right side of that.

Then Libya happened.

Protests started in Benghazi around February 15. Gaddafi didn’t do the Mubarak thing and step aside. He went on TV, called the protesters rats and cockroaches, and promised to hunt them down house by house. The east of the country fell to rebels almost immediately, and for a couple of weeks it looked like he was finished.

He wasn’t. By early March, his forces had regrouped and were rolling the rebels back town by town along the coast road. By mid-March, they were closing on Benghazi, a city of roughly 700,000 people, and Gaddafi was saying out loud that there’d be no mercy.

Why get involved at all

This is the part worth sitting with, because the administration was split badly. Gates, Biden, and the Joint Chiefs were against it. Their argument was basically: this isn’t a vital U.S. interest, we’re already in two wars, and no one has a plan for what comes after. Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power were for it, and their argument was Rwanda and Srebrenica. Power had literally written the book on America standing by during genocides. Rice had been at the NSC in 1994. For that camp, letting Benghazi happen would be the defining moral failure of the presidency.

Then the incentives stacked up in a way that made “no” hard to say. France and Britain were pushing hard (Sarkozy especially). On March 12, the Arab League itself asked for a no-fly zone, which gave political cover nobody expected. And the whole thing looked cheap: air power only, no ground troops, allies doing most of the flying. Obama could act, avoid another Iraq, and not be the guy who cheered Tahrir Square and then watched a massacre.

He made the call the evening of March 15.

The war

March 17: UN Security Council Resolution 1973 passes, authorizing “all necessary measures” to protect civilians. Russia, China, Germany, Brazil, and India abstained rather than veto, which matters later.

March 19: French jets hit Gaddafi’s armor outside Benghazi. That night the U.S. and UK fired over a hundred Tomahawks at Libyan air defenses. The U.S. ran the opening phase, then handed command to NATO on March 31. An anonymous adviser described the approach to The New Yorker as “leading from behind,” and that phrase stuck to Obama for the rest of his presidency.

It was supposed to be days. It was seven months. The mission quietly became regime change; “protecting civilians” meant bombing anything Gaddafi’s side moved. In May the administration blew past the War Powers 60-day limit and argued this didn’t count as “hostilities,” which annoyed basically everyone in Congress.

Rebels took Tripoli in late August. On October 20, Gaddafi was pulled out of a drainage pipe in Sirte and killed. NATO wrapped up October 31. Zero American deaths, about $1 billion spent. On paper, a win.

After

There was no after. No stabilization force, no plan. The militias that toppled Gaddafi never disarmed. A year later, four Americans died in the attack on the Benghazi compound. By 2014, Libya was in a second civil war with two governments, ISIS held Sirte, and the country became the main launch point for migrant boats into Europe.

Asked in 2016 by Chris Wallace what his worst mistake was, Obama said: “Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya.”

Cryptocurrency, with its promise of decentralization and anonymity, has long been hailed as a revolutionary force for good. But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that crypto is not only evil and stupid, but dangerous as well.

First and foremost, crypto is evil because it undermines the very foundations of our society. By creating a parallel economy outside of government control, crypto enables criminal activity and tax evasion on a massive scale. It also empowers fraudsters and scammers, who use the complexity and obscurity of crypto to swindle unsuspecting victims out of their hard-earned money.

But crypto is not just evil, it is also stupid. Despite the hype and hoopla, crypto has proven to be a poor store of value and a terrible means of exchange. Its wildly fluctuating prices are evidence of its inherent instability, and its lack of any underlying assets makes it nothing more than a speculative bubble. In short, investing in crypto is a surefire way to lose money, and anyone who does so is making a grave mistake.

Furthermore, crypto is dangerous because it threatens the very stability of our financial system. By allowing individuals and organizations to bypass traditional institutions and create their own forms of money, crypto undermines the trust and cooperation that are necessary for our economy to function. In a worst-case scenario, the widespread adoption of crypto could lead to economic chaos and collapse.

In conclusion, crypto may appear to be a revolutionary and exciting technology, but in reality it is evil, stupid, and dangerous. We would do well to avoid it, and instead focus on building a more just and equitable economy that benefits everyone, not just a select few.

The Ledger Is Not Your Friend

Crypto was pitched as a revolt against the banks. What we got was the banks’ logic with the humans removed.

Think about what money used to be: a medium for exchange between people. A way to get the grain to the miller and the bread to the table. Crypto takes that already-abstracted token and abstracts it again, until the only thing left is the number going up. There is no bread. There is no miller. There is a screen, and a dopamine loop, and someone who bought in before you.

This is the endgame of a mindset — the same one that gave us the stock ticker, the derivative, the algorithm that trades faster than thought. The point was never to build a better commons. The point was to escape the commons entirely: to find a place where the code is law and no messy human institution can ask you to share.

And the code isn’t neutral. It was written by people who believed trust itself was a bug. Every blockchain is a monument to the assumption that we cannot look each other in the eye. So we burn a nation’s worth of electricity to avoid a handshake.

The “stupid” part is simpler. A currency that nobody spends is not a currency. It’s a collectible. A collectible whose value depends entirely on recruiting the next believer is a chain letter with better graphics.

We were told this would free us. It has mostly freed the early adopters, and sold the rest of us a lottery ticket dressed as a philosophy.

Log off. Find a person. Trade something real.

For the other side: defenders argue crypto gives people in unstable currencies or under authoritarian regimes a way to hold and move value, enables cheaper cross-border remittances, and that its energy footprint has dropped sharply as major chains moved to proof-of-stake. They’d also say early speculative excess doesn’t disqualify a technology — the same was said of the internet in 2000.