Toppling Qaddafi is a detailed, carefully researched look at U.S. and NATO roles in Libya’s war of liberation. It is also an attempt to draw lessons from that experience. This can only be done by relating this operation to past events and future contingencies. Chris Chivvis thus places NATO’s war in Libya squarely in the line of post–Cold War humanitarian interventions that began in Somalia in 1991 and continued throughout that decade in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He also so notes its continuity with the U.S. air campaigns conducted in Afghanistan as well as in Bosnia and Kosovo. Rather remarkably, all four of those air wars achieved their objectives without the need for substantial U.S. ground forces or the loss of a single American pilot.

While the Libya intervention thus has many antecedents, it is also unique in one respect. In contrast to nearly every U.S. intervention since at least 1945, it involved no postcombat U.S. military presence – no occupation force, no peacekeepers, no trainers, no advisors, nothing. In this regard the Libyan operation was not a product of the relatively benign 1990s experience with humanitarian peacekeeping operations (the last three of which also occasioned no American casualties), but rather the more sobering consequences of the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, where thousands of American service members were lost and maimed. In this sense the “no boots on the ground” Libya operation is unprecedented, and as Chivvis indicates, this lack of any postvictory follow-through may yet prove its most controversial legacy.