A NATO intervention: The Right Choice for Libya

Abstract

On the 19^th of March 2011, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) launched an invasion into Libya to protect civilians from the mass atrocities being committed by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Rape, murder, human rights violations and indiscriminate attacks were just a few of the abuses that Gaddafi was carrying out.[1] Despite these obvious atrocities, this NATO intervention has been a hotly contested topic since a civil war broke out following the intervention. Opposing scholars (Hobson, 2016[2]; Kuperman, 2015[3]) suggest that Libya would have fared better without an intervention, and

declare that the intervention was another way the West tried to demonstrate its geopolitical power in the Middle East. This paper rebuts these scholars and asserts that it was the right choice for NATO to intervene, despite the ensuing Libyan civil war, because it was necessary to end the precarious situation in Libya. Furthermore, if NATO hadn’t intervened, additional unnecessary harm would have come to the Libyan people. This is proved by comparing the Libyan war to the Syrian civil war, which did not have a NATO intervention, and by analysing the threatening actions of Gaddafi. To conclude, this paper asserts that it was the right choice for NATO to intervene in the Libyan conflict under the mandate ‘Responsibility to Protect’ because civilian safety in Libya 2011 was in jeopardy and because there was an international consensus, under a legitimate authority, that an intervention was needed.