The Spectator's Notes | 27 August 2011

Ever since the Franco/British-led intervention against Gaddafi in March, the Guardian and the Daily Mail — whose foreign policy in all matters relating to the Muslim world is oddly similar — have been droning on about the Libyan ‘quagmire’. Nor would you ever have known from the BBC, until last weekend, that the rebels had a chance. In the Guardian, my friend Simon Jenkins, clever and original though he is, has said (1 April) that Gaddafi would win a victory over the West like the one he claimed after the American bombing in 1986, that (19 April) ‘The great lie has once again been rumbled, that air power can deliver any sort of victory’, and that (2 August) nearly six months of combat had produced ‘full-scale fiasco’ and ‘no sign’ of the rebels winning. All the critics may well be right that the next phase will be difficult, but they put themselves in an absurd position by arguing that the combination of the rebels and Nato could not defeat Gaddafi. Because of our rather ignominious association with the ‘mad dog’, we British knew about what weapons he had and didn’t have. We also knew that he had virtually no support from other Arab regimes. We were able to get inside information against him, and the National Transition Council told the truth when they said that they had people on their side in every Gaddafi brigade. He ended up only with mercenaries, and his hard core. And the bombing worked exactly as intended, to overcome otherwise insuperable obstacles for the rebel troops on the ground.