Libya gave up gives up its WMDs
1Now, I’m no fan of these regimes but they likely learned the opposite lesson of what was intended when US led NATO airstrikes in support of Libyan rebels led to the collapse of the Gaddafi regime and the dictator’s brutal death in 2011.
While Libya’s nuclear and bio weapons programs would turn out to be…let’s say “underdeveloped”…it did possess 23 tonnes of mustard gas and over a 1000 tonnes of the chemical precursors necessary to make the much nastier sarin gas…as well as many thousands of munitions for their deployment including a limited number of short range ballistic missiles.
These were destroyed or in the process of being destroyed when the Libyan uprising took place (in the context of the series of uprisings known as the Arab Spring) and it seems reasonable to assume that had they been under Gaddafi’s full control the rebels might have thought twice about taking on the regime and I also think it’s reasonable to assume that with his back to the wall he might have deployed them. Oh and they fallen into the hands of one of the factions that fought in the subsequent (semi-on going) civil war they might have been deployed (as has reportedly happened in Syria).
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