This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 19th, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown. Today marks three years since the start of months of bombs dropping on Libya.

The war was pitched as a humanitarian mission.

So how did it work out? Ben Friedman, a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies,

the Cato Institute says even on humanitarian grounds the war in Libya made things worse.

On March 19, 2011, three years ago, the U.S. and other allied militaries began bombing the Libyan military on behalf

of the rebels there to defend them. So this is an anniversary of sorts and a good time to evaluate the goals that President

Obama and other advocates of military intervention or war set out for what we did there.

So leaving aside, I suppose,

the sort of unprecedented moves

that the White House took in asserting both authority to do this and further asserting

that this in fact was not a war because we had not introduced troops in some way leaving all that those assertions aside how do we

evaluate the outcome the president and his advisors Hillary, other advocates of war, basically gave three goals for what

we did in Libya for helping the rebels there, ultimately overthrow Gaddafi.

Ironically, the one thing the war obviously accomplished, the overthrow of

Gaddafi was not one of the goals they gave because that would have violated or gone

beyond what the UN Security Council authorizing war

allowed. We didn't have a congressional authorization for war as you alluded to but

we did have a UN Security Council resolution which said you were just there

to defend civilians.

So they couldn't say we were going after Gaddafi, but what they did say was that we were going

to number one, protect civilians. That was the main goal.

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