For all the cheerleaders who thought overthrowing Qaddafi was such a great idea

[bhikkhu]

147. So the country is fracturing; sometimes that happens

I would never advocate supporting a ruthless dictator for the sake of maintaining a nation's unity; its the people that matter, not the nation's borders or internal integrity. We like to see a neat globe with clean borders, but the world is full of autonomous regions, self-governing regions, oppressed minorities, break-away republics, cohesive cultures spanning borders, etc.

While the world has become a much more peaceful place since WWII, I do think the UN has more or less failed to provide a solution to what are typically seen as "internal issues" of member states. Lacking a solution, pointing fingers isn't much use. I don't think many in Libya want to go back, however difficult the way forward is. Respect would say we let them, and help if we are asked, and if we can.

on edit - reading a bit from our own revolution, post-war: "John Adams feared that greed, disobedient children and apprentices, and turbulent schools and colleges would weaken the Republic. In 1813, he asked when, where and how "the present chaos" would be "arranged into Order." Thomas Jefferson believed that the nation was moving backward rather than forward; Alexander Hamilton concluded that "this American world was not made for me," and by the time George Washington died, his hopes for democracy had waned. Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, eventually threw his notes and documents for a planned memoir of the Revolution into the fire. "America's revolutionary experiment on behalf of liberty," he wrote in 1812, "will certainly fail."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/mwt/sfeature/sf_after.html