You think upwards of 100,000 dead is a lesser evil? To me that's a very good reason to try to stop a nutter like Gaddafi.
That's a very premature assessment. Libya will be facing some big challenges in the coming years. But it's hardly a failed state now.
If anything the Libyan operation showed that intervention
can work. The objective was not to make Libya a more modern state, it was to stop Gaddafi from murdering tens or hundreds of thousands of people. What happens now is up to the Libyan people. They have a choice in how things move forward. The Allied operation was to give them that opportunity to choose, not to make a choice for them.
You either too young or too naive to know, so I'd make it as short as I can...
Qaddafi, however a despot he was (by fact or by western propaganda), Libya under his reign was a functional state with as many modern fixtures and infrastructures (software and hardware wise) paid for with oil money; Qaddafi was a power broker - and nonetheless an effective one - in a region that has always been dominated by tribal and secular politics/violence...and now, the power broker is gone, and there's no effective replacement in the new government, and thus as you can see, the tribes and secular militias fight amongst themselves. Sure they do have a choice, but for all the time they could remember if there's no strongman around to play power broker, they fight against each other to see who's the strongest.
There has been no news to Libya's oil production resumed to their previous levels, why? If the area is still in a flux, without solid security in the form of national army or local warlord's militia, the foreign companies just won't go back, neither would any of the engineers - remember, Libya's oil production was predominately operated by foreign manpower...for comparison, Iraq's oil production got back into gear because of security in the form of US coalition.
So what'd happen to Libya now? Without somebody rise up to the "power broker" role (even more remote would be an overlord of any sort), there'll be no national government left to implement modern & important amenities - education and health care, for instance...fatalities in civil war is bad enough, the percentage of minors to survive into adulthood will definitely drop due to breakdown in national healthcare and vaccination programmes, common diseases will claim more lives; and education...well there might be replacement in providers but pretty certain most would be in the form of religious schools - like those that churn out Taliban and extremists of all sorts; or training camps for terrorists in this now lawless land.
So that's why I said Libya is now qualifies as a failed state.
The most immediate concerns, though, would be weapons - a lesser known fact is that Qaddafi really horde weapons, and many now are unaccounted for. The "good" news would be some of them already expended during the fighting in the last 12 months; "not as good" news are some in the hands of the not-effective government and various militia's active service; the bad news is those that has been stash away or simply nobody know where they are now...the natural law pertain to stuff like that is, simply put, will find their way into black market - they could ended up in the hands of AQ cells worldwide, Chechen rebels, Somali pirates, African warlords who paid for in blood diamonds, or some "lone wolfs" who could cough up enough cash and things like that whack-job in Norway last year.
And I'm not just talking about crates of RPGs or Kalashnikov, or even the MANPADs - to this day Libya's stockpile of chemical weapon has not been dealt with. Although now the known stash are under guard, as various articles claimed, it's not far fetch that they could "lose" a few...the specter of a WMD attack in the world's metropolitan region is never gone.
Let me remind you that people have been tolerating lesser evil for as long as history itself everywhere - as little as live with inconveniences as opposed to spending more on something, to electing a lesser arse into office, to "allow" the existence of dictators so long they don't cross certain bottom lines (brinkmanship IS negotiation tactics), one of which is to keep the suffering within their borders...so long they remember they're somebody's pawns in the bigger game they'll be fine. Saddam Hussein and Qaddafi made the same mistake of pissing off the superpowers, and they both ultimately paid for it one way or the other.
And damn, I tried to keep this short yet look at how much I ended up with...