Why President Obama called Libya intervention his worst nightmare?

In March 2011, the Obama administration led the push for UN Security Council Resolution 1973, authorizing NATO intervention in Libya to stop what officials called an imminent massacre in Benghazi.

Seven months of bombing followed.

By October, Muammar Gaddafi was dead, killed by rebel forces on the ground as his convoy tried to flee Sirte.

President Obama stood in the Rose Garden and called it a mission accomplished without a single American service member on the ground.

Years later, Obama gave a very different assessment.

Asked about his biggest regret as president, he said it was failing to plan for what came after intervening in Libya, a mission he still called the right decision, but one his administration executed without any strategy for what would follow Gaddafi's fall.

What followed was state collapse.

Libya had Africa's highest Human Development Index in 2010.

Within years it fractured into rival governments, armed militias, and a security vacuum that regional and international actors have exploited ever since.

In 2017, CNN cameras captured something that shocked the world, African migrants being auctioned as slaves for as little as 400 dollars in open air markets, a direct consequence of a state with no functioning authority left to stop it.

Experts still debate how directly NATO's bombing campaign connects to the return of slavery on Libyan soil, but nobody debates this.

The country NATO intervened in to save civilians became a place where civilians, mostly Black African migrants, are now bought and sold.

If a foreign intervention removes a dictator but leaves behind a slave market, was that ever really about saving lives?