I’m not sure it’s fair to call Colonel Gaddafi ‘paranoid’.
I’m not sure it’s fair to call Colonel Gaddafi ‘paranoid’. Not really. ‘Paranoid’ is what the King of Bahrain would be if he decided that western governments actually did care that he was rounding up protestors — and the doctors who treat them, and reporters, and students, and pretty much anybody else with the wrong sort of beard — and that these western governments were actually secretly planning to do something about it, despite giving every outward appearance of not giving a monkey’s arse. Say. Whereas Gaddafi just seems to think everybody is out to get him, and they are.
It’s a slow-motion disaster, Libya, isn’t it? First we reckoned that so-called Gaddafi loyalists were bound to rise up on the side of freedom whatever happened, and then they were bound to rise up on the side of freedom, but if only we could stop him from bombing things. Then, quite subtly, we shifted to believing that they were bound to rise up on the side of freedom if we started bombing things. Two and a half months on, we’ve run out of things to bomb and, by some accounts, bombs to do the bombing with, and so we’re going to start dropping smaller bombs, with helicopters, with greater precision. And still, an awful lot of those so-called bloody loyalists persist with their so-called bloody loyalty. ‘Nato?’ you want to say. ‘This whole bombing thing? Are we sure?’
I mean, sure, some are getting less loyal. The odd general defects, now and again, and we tell ourselves that finally the rising up on the side of freedom has happened. Only, really, they probably just don’t want to get bombed. And it seems to me, cynic that I am, that people who join the side of freedom only because freedom has bigger bombs possibly aren’t taking the whole ‘freedom’ ethos quite on board. Which seems to bode ill, I’d have thought, for the future.
I don’t like thinking these thoughts. They feel a bit like unthoughts, not least because the vast majority of the people whose views I most respect — which include, in no particular order, my boss, my dad, and the President of the United States — think quite differently. The situation makes me think of those days when, from the moment you wake up, everybody you encounter wants to pick a fight. After a while, you start to realise that it’s probably not them, but you. It’s just not plausible that all these people have got Libya wrong, and I haven’t, is it? Normally, I’m a big fan of agreeing with people who are cleverer than me. On this, though, I just can’t.
It’s a worry, because I know where this stuff leads. One moment you’re perplexedly unconvinced by western foreign policy in the Middle East, the next you’re on a stage with George Galloway, reading an anti-war poem by Harold Pinter and not finding it shit. I don’t want that.
Christopher Hitchens writes in his memoirs that one of the most unattractive things about anti-Iraq campaigners was their habit of finding the lowest possible motive for anything, and then maintaining that it must be the only one. Express misgivings about our role in Libya, and such things feel terribly seductive. But I don’t really think we’re involved because of oil (even if oil is the reason we’re not involved elsewhere), and I also don’t think it’s a cunning ‘use it or lose it’ plan by a shadowy military-industrial establishment. I don’t even quite think that our passivity in Bahrain, Syria and everywhere else entirely delegitimises our supposed keenness for the Arab Spring, even if it does make it look a bit shaky. I just think we cocked it up.
What I’d rather is that our focus from the start had been to get people to stop killing each other, whichever side they were on. Conducted a humanitarian intervention that had actually, principally, been humanitarian. Embarked upon a peacekeeping that had actually been motivated, wholly, by keeping peace. This might sound like a hopelessly and ludicrously naive ambition, but so, in retrospect, was everybody else’s. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re wrong, but just because you aren’t doesn’t mean you’re right, either.
Now for the short funny bit at the bottom, which they tend to blend in with the rest on The Spectator’s website, making me look like I’m a lunatic.
These last few days, I’ve been mesmerised by www.sexymp.co.uk, a new site on which members of the public rate MPs in terms of which one they’d most like to have sex with. Currently that’s Luciana Berger (Lab, Liverpool Wavertree) which, given her striking resemblance to the sixth most attractive member of the cast of Glee, isn’t all that surprising. But she’s one of only three non-Tories in the top 15. Whereas the bottom 15 are fairly well distributed. Plus 14 of the top 15 are English (the exception being Eilidh Whiteford of the SNP), whereas seven of the bottom 15 are Scottish and a further three are from Northern Ireland.
I hope all this data is going to good use. Obviously the male and old here are unfairly penalised in favour of the female and young but, making an allowance for that, could one plot a correlation between fanciability of MPs and the quality of life in their constituencies? And where there are glaring inconsistencies, such as with Miss Berger up top, could one infer carpet-bagging?
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
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