United nations

Philip Zelikow, who served on the 9/11 Commission and in both Bush administrations, has a persuasive piece in today’s FT arguing that a no drive zone on the highway from Tripoli to eastern Libya could be as effective as a no fly zone and easier to implement. He says that it could be enforced from off-shore with the use of precision weapons. Legally, there would be issue with this scheme—as there would be with any intervention in Libya that is not based on a full Security Council resolution  under chapter 7. But there simply will not be enough time now to get full UN authorization before Gaddafi has reasserted full

Britain, France and Lebanon’s decision to table a UN Security Council resolution proposing a no fly zone and a bar on flights in and out of Gaddafi’s Libya is an honourable effort to push the international community to move before the window for action closes entirely. Yet as the French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe acknowledged yesterday,  “If we had used military force last week to neutralize some airstrips and the several dozen planes that they have, perhaps the reversal taking place to the detriment of the opposition wouldn’t have happened,” Juppe told Europe-1 radio. “But that’s the past.” “What is happening today shows us that we may have let slip

The situation in Libya is still uncertain, but the fog of war is clearing to expose a depressing picture. Forces loyal to the Gaddafi regime are conducting a successful offensive. The Times’ Deborah Haynes confirms reports (£) that Zawiya has fallen and rebels have been forced from the oil town of Ras Lanuf. William Hague has spoken to Mahmoud Jabril, Special Envoy of the Libyan Transitional Council. The Foreign Office has issued a communiqué on the conversation and some of Jabril’s emotional concern escapes the bland text. In the words of the Foreign Office, he wants ‘the West to act to hinder Qadhafi’s ability to inflict further violence on the

Should Gaddafi be pushed? That is the question diplomats and policy makers are beginning to ask. The UN has imposed travel restrictions and frozen Gaddafi’s assets. But Gaddafi is resisting the hangman’s noose; the loss of his Mayfair property empire is the merest of inconveniences. And still he fights on. There is now a growing humanitarian case for direct military intervention by Western powers. However, there are plenty of arguments against even introducing a no-fly zone. Gideon Rachman makes some of them in today’s FT: ‘A few of the problems are practical. Some military observers say that a no-fly zone would be of limited use in Libya, since Col Gaddafi

Yesterday saw the publication of a report into Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, the Hamas-run part of the Palestinian crypto-state, and the Israeli military’s raid on a flotilla of aid ships bound for the coastal enclave last year. The inquiry, headed by former judge Yaakov Turkel, argued that: “The naval blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip… was legal pursuant to the rules of international law” The inquiry defined the fight between Israeli forces and Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups as “an international armed conflict”. Critically, the panel’s two international observers – former Northern Ireland first minister David Trimble and Brigadier-General Ken Watkin of Canada – both agreed with the

At a speech to the Royal Defence Academy earlier in the year, Andrew Mitchell outlined the costs of overseas conflict to Britain and offered a number of lessons for the future. The most important, he argued, was the need to help prevent wars before they start, starting with being “better at identifying the potential for conflict.” The Cabinet’s only ex-soldier, Mitchell has seen up close the cost of conflict, burns with anger about the Rwandan genocide and knows that development funds will forever be wasted if people are mired in violent conflict. The thesis he has brought to DfID – that there can be no development in conditions of conflict