The Libyan intervention stopped Gaddafi. But his dictatorship ended in just another brutal, extrajudicial killing, as rebels bloodied and tortured Gaddafi before killing him and putting his body on display in a meat locker in Misurata. It was not an end that democracy-promoting U.S. officials should have been proud of, but top Obama administration figures were, anyway. “We came, we saw, he died,” then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said upon learning of Gaddafi’s death.

More importantly, the rebels did not prove to be the natural democrats some intervention advocates believed. After the U.S. intervention, the country struggled and failed to set up a working government. Today, power is wielded mainly by a group of militias left over from the revolution. The presence of terrorists was shown dramatically by the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi — the same city where McCain praised the freedom fighters — that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. To show how little governmental authority there is in the land, the U.S. diplomats relied not on Libyan officials but on a militia, the Feb. 17 Martyrs Brigade, for security. Of course, the militia didn’t protect the Americans when the Benghazi attack came.

And Libya, by all accounts, is now a mess. The U.S. intervention was a success in the sense that it deposed Gaddafi and left no American dead or wounded. But it left behind a chaotic power vacuum in an increasingly unstable region, plus the disastrous legacy of Benghazi. Now, Syria is a much bigger place, with more arms and more infrastructure and more chaos if things go terribly wrong. Perhaps lawmakers contemplating U.S. intervention in Syria might be better off remembering Libya than focusing on Iraq.