OpenDemocracy has published online two excellent articles stating the case for the current humanitarian intervention in Libya from a left-of-centre, reasoned and humane point of view: one by Anthony Barnett (the founder of openDemocracy and now the Co-Editor of its UK section, Our Kingdom) and the other by Professor Juan Cole, entitled “An Open Letter to the Left on Libya“. Both should be required reading for anyone, especially anyone on the left, who has misgivings about this operation. Some, but not all, of the comments appended to them are also helpful and informative. I have two reservations about their comprehensively argued case for the defence, which I have set out in the following comment on the articles:
These are two excellent and persuasive articles, if I may respectfully say so. I offer just two reservations. First, I see no reason why Britain needed to take part in this particular military intervention. The facts that the UK is a permanent member of the Security Council and co-sponsored and voted for the UN resolution can’t imply an obligation to take part in every activity approved by the Council; we were major contributors to the Iraq intervention (unfortunately!) and are still major contributors in Afghanistan; our defence resources are badly over-stretched already; and the most vulnerable people in our own country are being subjected to an almost unprecedentedly savage programme of cuts and retrenchment by a cynically ideology-driven government. Against that background, for us to spend millions of pounds on an open-ended commitment in Libya seems to me impossible to justify, and quite unnecessary. There are plenty of other countries willingly taking part in the Libyan intervention and our contribution is very far from being crucial to the success of the operation (whatever ‘success’ might mean).
Secondly, I have a nasty feeling that the very first operative paragraph of the UN Security Council’s authorising resolution, UNSCR 1973, is in danger of being overlooked in the coalition’s enthusiasm for knocking out Gaddafi’s tanks and guns in support of the rebellion:
“1. Demands the immediate establishment of a ceasefire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians; …”
What steps are we taking to seek a settlement involving the departure of Gaddafi, a ceasefire and the establishment of a transitional authority for the whole of Libya including representatives of Gaddafi’s tribe (and perhaps even of his existing government, other than himself) as well as of the rebels, so that the killing can stop sooner rather than later? The Turks are said to be trying to mediate with Gaddafi, and I suppose the UN Secretary-General must be doing something to try to implement the primary purpose of the resolution — a cease-fire and end to attacks on civilians — but I haven’t seen any UK or US government activity in that area. If there’s even the faintest possibility of a settlement (perhaps with a UN-sponsored peace-keeping force from middle eastern and African countries, predominantly Muslim) instead of continuing the bombing and rocketing until there’s no-one left standing, we surely should be making every effort to explore it. Meanwhile the mission to protect civilians is visibly morphing into a military campaign in support of the rebels. This risks losing the invaluable support, or anyway acquiescence, of much of the Arab world as well as imposing strains on the cohesion of both NATO and the EU.
But I salute both the Barnett and the Cole articles as definitive and watertight statements of the case for this particular humanitarian intervention.
Brian
David Cameron had earned generous tributes to his success in securing a tough Security Council resolution on Libya, authorising an air war against Gaddafi: but why did he (and most of the media and the chattering classes) think it necessary for Britain to play such a prominent part in it? Come to that, why does everyone assume that if there’s to be an air war over Libya, British aircraft and their crews must play a prominent part in it?
When Mr Cameron first called so stridently for a Libyan no-fly zone, he was rightly criticised for imprudently getting ahead of our allies and partners, and laying himself open to the suspicion of dreaming of another Iraq – another western attack on a middle eastern Muslim country, unlikely to win the approval of the Security Council, liable to unite the Arab world against us, involving another open-ended military commitment that the country couldn’t afford. Suspicion was intensified when Cameron and his supporters, bear-led by a raucous Malcolm Rifkind, started to claim, implausibly, that if the Security Council ‘failed’ to authorise a Libyan no-fly zone, it could still be set up legally under cover of some other alleged provision of international law unknown to the law books. Serious and well-founded doubts were expressed about the chances of a no-fly zone having a decisive effect on the civil war now being fought in Libya: the main threat posed to the rebels by Gaddafi’s forces comes from his tanks, artillery and other ground forces, much less so from his air force. The fact that the only other voice calling loudly for a no-fly zone came from French President Sarkozy, enthusiastically advocating every kind of mayhem in response to the Libyan situation, did nothing to dispel doubts about the wisdom of the exposed position that Cameron had chosen to occupy. Nor did it seem well judged to have committed Britain so early on to such a controversial, activist policy when there was so far no consensus in its favour either within the EU or NATO, or even with the Americans, whose active participation would clearly be indispensable if ever a no-fly zone were to be established.
Then on Thursday after long days of negotiation in New York the United Nations Security Council adopted resolution 1973 (2011) of 17 March, adopted by ten votes in favour, none against and five abstentions. The resolution, all 22 preambular and 29 operative paragraphs of it, duly authorises an air war against anyone in Libya whose actions threaten the safety of civilians. (It does many other things too, but that’s the core of it.) Cameron (and Sarkozy) could perhaps be forgiven, after the flak they had been taking, for claiming that with this UN decision they had been handsomely vindicated. Both leaders instantly committed their countries to leading roles in the execution of the resolution, and started moving their fighters and bombers ready for the fray.
Despite the certainty of being accused of sour grapes, I suggest that a number of reservations need to be made and questions asked about the vindication theory, and about the justification for the praise heaped on Mr Cameron at the special session of the house of commons on Friday.
First, our the prime minister’s timing was seriously ill judged. By jumping in with his call for a no-fly zone ahead of proper consultation with our principal allies and partners, he jeopardised President Obama’s canny strategy of waiting for an appeal by the middle east’s regional governments, represented by the Arab League, the African Union, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, and other associations, for UN action against Gaddafi, so as to avoid giving any impression that this was yet another US-led, western intervention against a sovereign, independent Arab Muslim state, on the pattern of Iraq and Afghanistan. While Obama was patiently withholding any firm pronouncement for or against a no-fly zone, meanwhile encouraging the Arabs to call for one and consulting the Russians on the kind of UN resolution that they would not feel compelled to veto, Cameron was already noisily committed to a no-fly zone and to a prominent UK role in enforcing it.
Secondly, it never seemed likely that action confined to a no-fly zone would be enough to stem Gaddafi’s progress towards the recapture of Benghazi and the other areas still under rebel control. This potentially lethal deficiency in the Cameron proposals is handsomely remedied in the Security Council resolution, which authorises (indeed actually imposes) a no-fly zone but also, much more significantly, permits air attacks on military targets on the ground — tanks, artillery, military vehicles or convoys, etc., and not just aircraft — if these are threatening civilians.
Thirdly, even resolution 1973, with its call for a cease-fire before anything else happens, carries with it the risk of committing the participants in the air war against Gaddafi indefinitely to increasingly controversial military activity with increasingly dubious prospects of anything resembling “success” if Gaddafi’s forces are fought to a standstill, declare and observe a cease-fire, and sit tight in a total stale-mate, with Gaddafi in secure control of Tripoli and perhaps the main oil installations. What then? Escalate to intervention with ground troops, with the only possible objective of régime change – a war aim that the Security Council could and would never authorise? It’s all very well to say that “we” (who?) can’t stand idly by while thousands of Libyan civilians are slaughtered, and to brush off concerns about the very possible consequences of our actions with the tired old formula about crossing that bridge when we come to it: but that was exactly the kind of lack of foresight and anticipatory planning that landed us all in such a comprehensive mess in Iraq.
Fourthly, perhaps most fundamentally (and most controversially), why should it be Britain which not only leaps into the lead in demanding military action, however sorely needed, against a middle eastern Muslim régime, however repressive, but also insists on playing a prominent part in the military action as soon as it has UN authority? Britain has no special or unique responsibility for the protection of Libyan civilians, compared with (for example) Italy, whose colony Libya used to be, or France, which more than any other western country has apparently supplied Gaddafi with more and more sophisticated weaponry, including updating and modernising his Mystère jet fighters. The logic of the situation suggests an Arab-led operation, with a few select and respectable western countries in discreet support. Britain is more heavily engaged in Afghanistan than any other western country except the US, and undertaking yet another active military operation in yet another country in the region risks gross over-stretch of our defence resources. Britain, more than almost any other western country apart from Greece and Ireland, has opted to tackle its international debt and budget deficit by ferocious cuts in almost all its social and welfare services, gratuitously adding to unemployment, smothering demand in the economy, and risking driving its economy into a second recession even more severe than the first: what further swingeing cuts (or new borrowing) will be needed to pay for another military adventure in which no major national interests are at stake? It would have been prudent to encourage two or three rich Arab states to play a prominent part in the air war that is now beginning. It would have displayed political and diplomatic sensitivity for the country which played such a prominent role in the illegal attack on Iraq, and is still so prominently engaged in an increasingly unpopular war in Afghanistan, to leave it to others to force the pace over Libya and then to contribute their own airmen and women, and military hardware, to the combat.
There seems to be a strange kind of British love affair both with war and with the idea of leadership. No doubt there are sound historical reasons for our subconscious association between war and glorious victory, and a similarly deep-seated assumption that if there’s going to be a war, Britain must automatically be playing the “leading role” in it – an obvious imperial hangover. It’s no coincidence that the country which had the most worried doubts about the call to arms in Libya, and which abstained from the vote on UNSCR 1973 on Thursday, was Germany, whose subconscious associations are doubtless very different. In Friday’s parliamentary sitting on Libya, almost every fulsome tribute to the prime minister’s brilliant success referred to his, and Britain’s, “leading role” in securing the Security Council resolution. (The tributes to the success of the British diplomats at the United Nations in New York who had taken part in the heavy lifting of negotiating the terms of the resolution were surely much better earned.)
In much the same way, those in politics and the media who argue against the immediate withdrawal of all British forces from Afghanistan, where their presence is fairly obviously doing more harm than good, almost invariably talk as if “our” withdrawal would be the same thing as the withdrawal of the Americans and all the other members of the coalition in Afghanistan, leaving the country defenceless against the return of the Taliban, with al-Qaida in tow. The idea that the Americans and their other partners might soldier on without Britain never seems to occur to these arm-chair warriors. Nor, it now appears, can the same proud patriots conceive of the enforcement of the Security Council resolution on Libya without Britain in a starring role. They are seemingly quite impervious to the inconvenient facts that the nimble M. Sarkozy stole in front of Mr Cameron in campaigning for military action against Gaddafi and then stole Britain’s thunder again by ensuring that a French warplane would be the first to fire at a Libyan military vehicle.
Those of us who found Tony Blair’s itch for military intervention, and his obsession with British leadership, obnoxious and alarming were, it now seems, premature in celebrating his departure from UK politics. Blairism rides again, personified in the strident and triumphant voices of Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Mr David Cameron. They have taken a huge and above all a totally unnecessary gamble. We can only hope that it will pay off.
Update (20 March 2011, 2300 hrs): An interesting discussion of some of the issues raised by the UN resolution is going on in comments on the same post at http://www.labourlist.org/libya-fine-but-why-britain.
Brian
Reading the papers and the blogs on Libya this week, I find myself increasingly going against the liberal bien-pensant grain. For example, –
1. I strongly disagree with the widespread sentiment voiced in last week’s Observer editorial that “doing nothing is not an option.” On the contrary: not only is “doing nothing” very much an option: it’s probably the only sensible option, anyway for now. Any form of western physical intervention now would almost certainly do more harm than good. The participation of the UK in any collective western intervention would be particularly mad. Unilateral British intervention would be sheer criminal insanity.
2. The growing chorus of voices in the mainstream media and the blogosphere which argue that “we” (who, exactly?) have a duty to take firm (i.e. military) action to save the democracy-loving people from Gaddafi’s bombs and bullets, even if there is no authority for intervention from the UN Security Council, is deeply irresponsible and reprehensible. The disastrous failures of the illegal (because not UN-authorised) military adventures over Kosovo in 1999 and Iraq in 2003 should have taught us all a lesson in the need to uphold the rule of law in international as well as in domestic affairs. The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principles have been approved by the whole UN since 2005 and any attempt at by-passing them in favour of unauthorised military action by NATO, or a ‘coalition of the willing’, or a well-meaning Tory-LibDem coalition, would literally be criminal.
3. Sending a group of SAS “special forces” with “a diplomat” covertly into rebel-held Benghazi on some ill-defined secret mission seems to indicate that someone in Whitehall has been reading too many adventure comics or James Bond stories. No wonder some of them have been arrested. Liam Fox, the defence secretary, told us gravely on television this morning that “we would understand” that he couldn’t tell us anything about this barmy adventure. On the contrary, Secretary of State: having leaked some of the facts to the press, you have a duty to tell us what the hell you’re up to, especially now that it seems to have gone pear-shaped already. When are we going to learn to mind our own business — especially now that our own business is being so catastrophically mismanaged?
4. It’s nonsense for the 50 generals and other assorted defence experts to tell the government to rescind the defence cuts in view of the need for all those ships and aircraft for an intervention in Libya. The utter folly of the cuts being made in the defence budget has nothing to do with Libya: it’s the lunacy of being scared to abandon the British so-called independent nuclear deterrent, thereby saving billions of pounds urgently required for other real needs, when our ‘deterrent’ is not in the least independent and has noone to deter.
5. The LSE’s programmes for training Libyans in the principles and practice of democracy were (or are?) extremely worth-while, especially as they were financed by Libyan oil money and thus were not at the expense of other LSE programmes. The possibility of dozens of future Libyan leaders having spent time in London absorbing western political secular values at the LSE was one that the LSE was absolutely right to seize. Nothing that has happened in Libya since puts the LSE in a bad light. The LSE Director, Sir Howard Davies, should not have resigned. He should be applauded. By the same token, Blair should be applauded (for once) for having established mutually beneficial commercial relations with Gaddafi’s Libya in exchange for Gaddafi terminating his support for the IRA and other terrorists.
6. It’s far from obvious that a significant majority of Libyans want to get rid of Gaddafi. He seems to have substantial support in and around Tripoli where the majority of the population live. Of course it may turn out that so many Libyans want him out that his position will eventually prove unsustainable: but that remains to be seen. The complexities of the Libyan clan system and the fact that Gaddafi, unlike Mubarak, can still rely on the loyalty and support of substantial elements of armed forces of various kinds, make the advocates of intervention on the side of “the people” against “the tyrant” look impossibly simple-minded. We have stupidly referred Gaddafi to the International Criminal Court and thereby lost any hope that the old brute, if once cornered, will flee Libya and seek asylum abroad, so we have only ourselves to thank if he sticks it out to the bitter end and the last drop of Libyan blood, or (perhaps more likely) fights his enemies to a standstill and an effectively permanent stalemate. Or he might even win.
7. It’s much too early to assume that whatever régimes emerge eventually from the current confusions in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and other countries in the region where popular protests are growing will be any more democratic, peaceful, moderate or committed to human rights and good governance than their predecessors. The new régimes seem very likely to be strongly nationalistic, to incorporate Islamist elements, to be hostile to the west generally and to the United States and Israel in particular, and — initially at least — to be greatly strengthened by the legitimacy that will come from widespread popular support. General liberal rejoicing at the multiplying fall of tyrants is seriously premature.
8. Uncertainties about the future of oil supplies from Libya and perhaps other middle eastern oil-producing countries, especially Saudi Arabia, are already driving up world oil prices to new heights. A new oil shock, coming on top of the still feeble signs of recovery in the west from the crises of the banking collapse and deep recession, seems very likely to push the west back into a new and even more severe recession or even a global slump. If the monarchy in Saudi Arabia seems to be seriously threatened, that likelihood may become a certainty. We’d better hold on to our hats — and drain our tanks.
9. If the eventual emergence of popular, nationalistic, anti-western, anti-American, anti-Israel, Islamist-influenced or Islamist-dominated régimes around the region were to look like threatening (a) United States secure access to middle east oil, or (b) the continued existence of Israel as an independent Jewish state, or (c) both, no US administration in Washington, however liberal and enlightened, would be able to avoid military intervention in defence of what would be seen in the Congress and by much American public opinion as America’s vital interests (correctly, in the case of oil). Such intervention could set the whole of the middle east on fire, drawing in other powers with vital interests at stake including Russia, Pakistan and India, China, and perhaps the rest of NATO including Britain and France — meaning the possible involvement of no fewer than seven nuclear-weapon states; eight, if we include Israel. It would make the cold war seem like a tea party. (No, not that Tea Party.)
10. Of course the majority of the leaders of all the major countries involved have an overwhelming interest in averting that kind of Armageddon, and the oil-producers have got to sell their oil to someone. But many of the dangers I foresee are more likely to materialise than not, and if that’s so, the general welcome given by liberal opinion to events in the Arab world in recent weeks may prove to have been hopelessly misplaced.
That’s enough unpopular thoughts to be going on with. Don’t all shout at once!
Update: On para 3, about the UK’s SAS “diplomatic team” in Benghazi, the panel comment by Jon Leyne inset in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12658054 is an especially hilarious read, although the operation itself looks anything but hilarious and I suspect we’ll be lucky if it doesn’t end in tears, or worse.
Update 2 (18:30 6 March): The arrival by helicopter in the dark of the British ‘diplomat’ with his armed SAS protection team, hoping apparently to establish contact with the Libyan rebels, has ended in farce (which is admittedly better than tragedy). Libyan security guards found they were carrying arms, ammunition, explosives, maps and passports from at least four different nationalities, witnesses told the BBC. The SAS team has been released by the understandably suspicious rebels (who might well have shot them as spies) and after a pathetic telephone appeal by the British ambassador to Libya from his gardening leave in the UK, gleefully broadcast on Libyan television and now available on the BBC website, the team has been allowed to leave on board the Royal Navy frigate HMS Cumberland that had docked in Benghazi, presumably to ‘rescue’ it.
The BBC News website comments:
‘The BBC’s Jon Leyne, who is in Benghazi, says the British mission appeared to have been an “embarrassing miscalculation”. He said the UK was “obviously unaware of the reaction likely to be provoked in this tense situation by a group of armed men arriving on a helicopter, in the dead of night”.’
It’s legitimate to speculate about the IQs of whichever geniuses dreamed up this asinine project, and indeed of whichever ministers presumably approved it. A ministerial resignation to atone for this national humiliation might be in order?
Brian
