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Comment by SEJeff | Hacker News Reader

As we used to say when I was in Iraq (with the US Army), "Don't mess with America, or we'll bring freedom to you too!"

Look how well it worked out in Libya, Iran, Iraq, etc.

I think it was the British and the French who brought freedom to Libya. Foreign intervention seems to nearly always make things worse. Just the other day there was an appalling attack on a maternity hospital in Afghanistan. People are saying that the West needs to do something...

The military intervention in Libya was initially led by the United States and then handed off to NATO. The US contribution to direct attacks consisted mostly of cruise missile strikes. The British, French and Canadian air forces also played a major roles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_military_intervention_in_...

The amount of deaths and horror that freedom has brought to Libya is soul crushing. I would wager that a good percentage of Libyans would Trade that freedom for the dictatorship with all that it entails, obviously not those that suffered injustice of a dictatorship but the majority ... work home life ...

As an American, who is also a veteran of OIF II, it really dismayed me to watch what happened in Libya. Granted, I did watch the liveleak of the end of Gadaffi and I'm not sad a truly horrible human being is no longer in charge of a country. That said, I'm very sad for the people who have to endure so much upheaval.

The reality is that you can't go from a strongman authoritarian to a magical well functioning democracy overnight (or maybe even ever) without a a few generations of change. It is really heart breaking to see it.

I guess "freedom" can't just be the dismantling of a government. Since "freedom" as our societies value it only emerges in the context of some ordered society and government that protects those things.

The problem in those places seems to not have been, how hard is it to get rid of the established order, but rather, how hard is it to create a new order which preserves people's freedoms.

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