Not even a month ago, it looked as though Colonel Gaddafi was going the way of Mubarak and Ben Ali — a bloodier process, certainly, but a seemingly irreversible one.
Gaddafi’s revenge
Not even a month ago, it looked as though Colonel Gaddafi was going the way of Mubarak and Ben Ali — a bloodier process, certainly, but a seemingly irreversible one. His generals mutinied, and pilots sent to bomb Libyan rebels flew to Malta. His ambassadors resigned. There was talk of imposing a no-fly zone, to help the Libyan rebels in the same way the Kurds were assisted in 1991. But then Gaddafi realised that the only opposition he faced from the outside world was verbal. Now, steadily, he is taking back Libya.
The unthinkable seems to be happening. It now looks possible that Gaddafi’s four decades of tyranny are not over. However tenuously, he may yet cling on to power — and start a slow, murderous revenge on the tribes that defied him. This fits a theme, which should surprise no one outside of the London School of Economics. Arming the IRA, murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher and bombing of Pan Am flight 103 may be the acts which this country most vividly remembers. But across the world — not least in Africa — countless thousands recall his unpredictable bloodlust.
For these and many other reasons, the day of Gaddafi’s demise should not merely have been hoped for — it should have been helped along. But weeks into the crisis, the response of the United Nations and other transnational institutions remains hopeless. Bare-minimum policy though it is, the UN can still not even agree on establishing the no-fly zone which David Cameron rightly discussed. Turkish protests made Nato agreement impossible. By the time any multilateral deal is reached, Gaddafi will probably have finished bombing his opposition into submission — as he did in the city of Zawiya earlier this week. One should not be surprised at the UN Security Council, which has been dead for a decade or more. But among the free nations that might until recently have been expected to take a lead in such a situation, there are signs of a deeper inertia — or worse. President Obama has still made no useful interventions to halt Gaddafi’s war against the Libyan people. It sometimes seems as though American foreign policy has been outsourced to the UN. But if American policy has been absent, at least it has not just been embarrassing.
The Libyan crisis has exposed Britain’s inability to respond to a crisis. First, we were unable to extract our own citizens. There was something tragically eloquent about the fact that the HMS Cumberland, which was sent to evacuate them, is to be decommissioned as part of the defence cuts. It is a sombre reminder of Britain’s downgraded role in the world. Mr Cameron was right to lead international murmurs about the no-fly zone. But it is harder for him to act, when just one in seven Typhoon fighter pilots are properly trained and there are more attack aircraft in the RAF Museum in Hendon than there are under the RAF’s command.
The Prime Minister has been talking a game he is no longer equipped to play. This is largely a situation he inherited: Tony Blair fought five wars on a peacetime budget, and the troops paid the price. As Liam Fox put it in opposition, Britain’s choice was to upgrade our military capabilities to meet our ambition or downgrade our ambition to match our capabilities. The latter course has been chosen.
When we consider the demise of the armed forces in Britain, we console ourselves by stressing the expertise of our (far cheaper) special forces. But when six members of the SAS and an MI6 agent were picked up and detained by Libyan opposition forces after landing by helicopter in the middle of the night — before their mission even began — it was more Dad’s Army than Who Dares Wins. This was not the first SAS mission to have gone wrong, but few backfire so publicly.
Britain has become accustomed to being a force for good in the world, a country whose voice is heard even in Libya. But there is a price attached to having such clout, and it seems to be one we are no longer willing to pay. When Mr Cameron decided to transfer £2.6 billion from the defence budget to the overseas aid budget, it was a statement about Britain’s strategic intentions which was heard worldwide. We are now on our way from being a second-rank power to a third-rank power, and we will have to get used to being taken less seriously in the world as a result.
Meanwhile, Gaddafi has probably taught his totalitarian contemporaries some useful lessons. First: it is a very unwise leader who does not mercilessly crush his opposition when he has the chance. Western powers may protest, and move warships around like chess pieces, but nowadays the West has created a system in which lawyers, not generals, decide on military action. This enables tyrants, who are not so constrained, to crush rebellions. Gaddafi is demonstrating, for the region and the world to see, that there is no price to pay for being a cruel dictator, only for being a weak one.
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