No Cigar.

Max Boot  (b.1969 in Moscow to Soviet Jews), a senior fellow and an advisor to the Romney campaign, comes close to admitting this country had no business getting involved militarily in Libyan affairs, by first summing up the failures:

There has been a crippling and dangerous lack of security in Libya since Moammar Kadafi was overthrown last year with the help of NATO airstrikes. This was an issue that many observers worried about while the war was ongoing: Was there a plan to create security and governance after Kadafi's downfall?

The U.S. could have dispatched an international peacekeeping force for this purpose, on the model of Kosovo and Bosnia, but this option (which I advocated at the time) never seemed to get serious consideration in either Washington or Brussels. Perhaps that's just as well, because there is little doubt that foreign troops on Libyan soil would have been targeted by the same jihadists who killed the U.S. ambassador and previously had attacked the British ambassador.

But there was also no Plan B. If NATO and the Arab League weren't going to send peacekeepers, what were they going to do to ensure a modicum of security? The answer is: not much.

Apparently after Kadafi's fall, the CIA worked with Libyan allies to try to secure the strongman's remaining stockpile of chemical weapons and possibly some of his shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, but the U.S. did almost nothing to help the new government in Tripoli disarm militias and restore law and order. This left Libya's new leaders at the mercy of thousands of armed men on its streets who answered only to local warlords or possibly to no one at all.

In a way, if on a much lesser level, Obama was repeating the mistake that President George W. Bush made in Afghanistan and Iraq, two other countries where the U.S. did little to fill a power vacuum after toppling the existing regimes. Those examples should have taught the U.S. a lesson that has been relearned in Libya (and is now being confirmed in Syria): Any power vacuum in the Middle East inevitably gets filled by jihadists, who have access to weapons and a proclivity to use them, while the "silent majority" of moderate Muslims, who are concerned primarily about a better life for themselves and their families, are too cowed to resist.

To be specific, the most costly failure in Libya — for which four State Department representatives paid with their lives — was the failure to do more to help set up a new security force for the nascent, pro-Western state.

No, the failure was our intervention, dramatic but effective only in sowing chaos:   Their country, their choices.

One can argue until the cows come home, but it's an accepted fact:  we reap what we sow.  This harvesttime, we're surprised the reaper's bringing in a good crop of chaos?  Providing ineffective ... security is -- in the overall scheme of things -- but a footnote on what's proven to be a breathtakingly arrogant operation.

Boot's last line miscalculates and gets it wrong:

It's deadly arrogant to presume possessing  Western minds, with the most advanced strategic weapons in civilization, somehow permits the United States to make other countries' choices for them.