Nordic neighbours release new advice on surviving war

Muammar Gaddafi was a terrible person. But when he died, things in his country got even worse.

Muammar Gaddafi is a complex personage, a cruel dictator and a efficient benefactor. He was a force for the greater good with the Great Man-Made River Project, a project would not have been possible without him.

And it was gratious cruelty from NATO to destroy the pipes fabrication plant during the first Libyan civil war.

Putin 2.0 would still have nukes and a huge, if ineffective, army

Nearly all dictators do some beneficial civil works and other actions though. After all how else can they keep the population just happy enough to avoid rising up?

You're also assuming that the GMMR would not have been commissioned by another Libyan government, and perhaps even been completed more efficiently, had Gaddafi not seized power and held onto it for decades.

While NATO's bombing of the Brega plant was controversial, it was in my view justified by Gaddafi's forces staging rocket launchers at the location. If you're staging active military assets inside civilian locations, and they're part of hostilities, those locations lose their protection under international law.

The Brega plant was also not critical to the ongoing operation of the GMMR, as there was a second plant at Sarir that was able to make the pipe sections and had sufficient capacity to handle maintenance and sustainment needs.

One loose analogy could be the death of Stalin. His main men got on fighting for a few years, with a few important ones like Molotov and Beria (initially considered something of a favorite) ending up sidelined or dead. The Cold War ultimately continued, though in a less total manner.

But Stalin's Soviets were comparable to N. Korea, than, say, modern Russia, in terms of regime and its complete grip on everything. So I'd say the result would be more chaotic, might be actually comparable to Libya.

Libya is an impoverished backwater with a population of 7m, a GDP per capita of 9K. To whom were they a threat outside of their region?

Pan Am 103 springs to mind, a transatlantic flight from Frankfurt to Detroit.

I thought it was now attributed to Iran?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103