A Libyan bomb blew up New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland 27 years ago this week, killing all 259 aboard. Many of them were traveling with wrapped Christmas gifts for their families in America. Eleven Scottish people on the ground were killed by falling wreckage.

At the time I was a very young man working at the CIA. I had had several encounters with a colleague killed on that flight, who was not much older than I, and who left behind a widow and two small children. He was publicly honored and acknowledged in 2012.

It’s common, because of the chaos in Libya that followed, to lament the 2011 overthrow and death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who almost certainly ordered the Lockerbie bombing. I am not among the lamenters. After a 42-year reign of terror, his demise was long overdue. The upheaval in Libya, which included the infamous 2012 killings of a U.S. ambassador and several other brave Americans in Benghazi, should have been forestalled by better Western planning for a succession. But nothing justified trying to prop-up Gaddafi when much of his nation justifiably rose up against him.

Gaddafi would have been a hilarious joke absent his many tortures, rapes and murders. As a young army colonel he overthrew the pro-U.S. king in 1969 and thereafter was renowned for his flamboyant showmanship, including farcical military uniforms and Bedouin desert costumes, not to mention numerous “nurses” who catered to his physical needs and Uzi-toting, beret-clad “nuns of the revolution,” always also attractive women, who were his personal guard. They also helped procure, beat and imprison thousands of young girls across decades whom he kept in sexual bondage.

Combining the worst of Islamism and Marxism, Gaddafi crafted his absurd and oppressively inhuman Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, guided by his Green Book, modeled on Mao’s even more homicidal Little Red Book. His messianic police state, ruled by revolutionary committees, and which included an absurdly large military for a small nation, was sustained by endless oil dollars. Like any good totalitarian megalomaniac, he decreed his own calendar, and demanded Libyans call him The Guide.

Gaddafi funded and hosted terror training camps for the IRA, the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhoff gang, the Japanese Red Army and numerous Palestinian and other Mideast terrorist groups. He subsidized and orchestrated mass shootings, hijackings, and airliner bombings, including a Libyan passenger jet, killing over 150 hapless passengers, whose fate he tried to blame on Western sanctions. Killing overseas Libyan dissidents was routine.

There were few fellow monsters in the world he did not support with his oil cash, including cannibals like Uganda’s Idi Amin, Central Africa’s Emperor Bokassa, and Ethiopia’s genocidal Mengistu. Gaddafi was aligned with the Soviet Union of course and aspired to join the Warsaw Pact, an honor the Soviets declined.

Gaddafi’s great enemy was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who not very long after coming to power in 1970 was awakened by specially Gaddafi-dispatched Libyan envoys after midnight demanding that Sadat’s Westernized wife dress more modestly and wear a veil. Sadat commonly called the highly erratic Gaddafi a madman and, after Libyan military provocations against Egypt, asked support from the Carter Administration to overthrow the Libyan dictator by invasion. Support was declined, and Sadat instead was assassinated in 1981 by Islamists likely backed by Gaddafi, who publicly hailed the killing as just reward for peacemaking with Israel. During the 1979-1980 Iran hostage crisis, the Carter Administration, knowing of Gaddafi’s ties to the Ayatollah, and working through Carter’s colorful brother Billy, who had worked as a lobbyist for Libya, sought Gaddafi’s help in mediating a solution, to no avail.

President Reagan, who called Gaddafi the “mad dog” of the Mideast, was more forceful against him, prompting a Libyan assassination plot against Reagan. The U.S. conducted military exercises in international waters that Libya grandiosely claimed were its own. When threatened, the U.S. shot down Libyan fighter jets and sank naval vessels. In 1986, Libyan agents bombed a Berlin disco, killing two American soldiers. Reagan ordered U.S. air strikes on Libyan targets, including Gaddafi’s home, but he unfortunately escaped and survived a subsequent military revolt against him.

Gaddafi seems to have retaliated for the U.S. air strikes with the Lockerbie bombing, although the proof was long in coming. Libya finally agreed to reparations in 2003, after the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, prompting Gaddafi to fear he was next. He also agreed to dismantle his embryonic nuclear program, although his later overthrow revealed unsurprisingly he had not in fact fully divested himself.

The common argument now is that Gaddafi was effectively defanged after 2003 therefore the West should not have helped in his 2011 overthrow. During the Libyan uprising against him, British and French jets attacked Gaddafi targets, with the U.S. “leading from behind” with logistical support. But even without Western intervention, Gaddafi was not going to reclaim the country he had literally tortured and raped for decades. Libya instead would have suffered a year-long Syrian-style civil war far more horrendous than even Libya’s current disorganized and divided state. Critics claim overthrowing Gaddafi opened Libya to terrorism, forgetting that Gaddafi himself was one of the world’s longest reigning patrons of terrorism, with resources far exceeding ISIS and al Qaeda.

The recent lesson of Libya is that longtime dictators can’t be overthrown without intense and plausible succession plans. Although decades-long rule by ruthless mass murderers like Gaddafi and Saddam, which eviscerates nearly all civil society, likely means any succession no matter how well managed will be bumpy and bloody.

A larger lesson of Libya is that most international trouble spots cannot be thoroughly solved but at best only managed, contained or ameliorated, to be replaced by a future set of differently vexing threats. Winning WWII led to the Cold War. Winning the Cold War led to the War on Terror and radical Islam. The overthrow of vampires like Saddam and Gaddafi, though justified, led to new conflagrations, whose partial remedies will themselves presage future conflicts.

Human history, and its conflicts, never ends, except with the parousia. Meanwhile, relatively decent governments can only hope to achieve approximate and transitory order and peace, while mindful that few struggles are ever fully settled.