2011: LIBYA

February 15: The Arab Spring arrives in Libya. After several days of protests in major cities, fighting breaks out between protesters and security forces in Benghazi. On Feb. 22, Muammar al-Qaddafi orders a violent crackdown, vowing to go "house by house" to find and kill the rebels.

March 17: As Libyan tanks threaten Benghazi, the Security Council passes Resolution 1973, for the first time invoking the "responsibility to protect" to condemn Qaddafi and impose a no-fly zone over his country. Two days later, a French fighter jet fires the first shots in the coalition forces' strike on Libya.

March-April: As NATO bombs, debate reopens over the legitimacy and limits of the R2P doctrine. Evans argues in a March 24 Sydney Morning Herald editorial that a military action intended to kill or unseat Qaddafi or to otherwise support a rebel victory "is simply not permissible under the explicit legal terms of UN resolution 1973. Nor is it permissible under the moral first principles of the 'responsibility to protect' doctrine." And though a European official warns in April that the Libya intervention should be "a warning sign" to regimes undertaking bloody crackdowns in U.S. allies Bahrain and Yemen as well as Syria, the U.N. takes no action.

August 20: Backed by NATO air power, Libyan rebels end Qaddafi's four-decade rule. The expansion of the allies' U.N.-sanctioned involvement, from enforcing a no-fly zone to unequivocally helping the rebels win the war, prompts Indian U.N. Ambassador Hardeep Singh Puri to remark, "Libya has given R2P a bad name." But New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, among others, argues, "The intervention has been done right" -- that after the disgraces of Rwanda and Bosnia and the overreach of Iraq, an atrocity has finally been stopped, in time and for the right reasons. "[T]he idea that the West must at times be prepared to fight for its values against barbarism," he writes, "is the best hope for a 21st century less cruel than the 20th."

FRANCISCO LEONG/AFP/Getty Images

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