While the world’s horrified attention is drawn to one humanitarian disaster, another is intensifying. The difference is that the plight of Japan’s people is due to the impersonal forces of nature, whereas catastrophe in Libya is being wreaked as a matter of policy. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is driving back the rebels.
Against his depredations, Western policy has foundered. There needs to be utmost clarity towards Colonel Gaddafi’s criminal regime. David Cameron should act on his instincts and rally support to ratchet up diplomatic pressure. The alternative is stark. As Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Foreign Secretary, argues in The Times today, victory for Colonel Gaddafi would be a disaster not only for Libya’s people but for the entire Arab world (see page 24). The message to autocrats would be clear: the effective response to popular pressure is murderous repression, which the international community will allow to succeed.
Amid international divisions over the right response to Colonel Gaddafi, his forces have consolidated control. Rebels have lost the oil port of Ras Lanuf and are in retreat from Brega. A regime of sufficient brutality, facing an insurgency lacking weapons and military experience, has an unassailable advantage. Unless that is neutralised, the rebels will lose. The costs for them will be terrible. So will the threat to the Western democracies.
Libya’s agonies are not an internal issue that must be allowed to come to a natural conclusion, nor in any reputable sense are Libyans Colonel Gaddafi’s “own” people. This is a war of aggression fought by an illegitimate ruler against a captive people. If they are defeated, then the mercurial Colonel Gaddafi will turn on others. This is not merely a prediction but a description.
Colonel Gaddafi is by history and impulse a supporter of terrorism. The bombing of a Berlin nightclub in 1986 and of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 are only the most notorious of his crimes. Even after his chastened diplomatic opening to the West in 2003, Colonel Gaddafi sponsored an assassination plot against Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Violence employed casually but targeted deliberately is his method, within Libya’s borders and without.
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There is no warrant in international law or self-defence to allow him to persist. There is a widely accepted principle of humanitarian intervention to stop the commission of crimes against humanity. It was justified after the Gulf War in 1991 to protect Iraq’s Kurds and in Nato’s actions in Kosovo in 1999 to prevent genocide by Serb forces. Mr Cameron should invoke it now against Colonel Gaddafi, and make clear the judicial consequences that will follow for troops that commit war crimes. He should also stress the danger that the unrestrained despot poses to the international order. He should consult, certainly, with Britain’s allies; but he cannot take no for an answer.
Unfortunately the most decisive statement by the Obama Administration on the crisis is scorn for a proposed no-fly zone. It is one thing to argue about the logistics of stopping Colonel Gaddafi’s warplanes from bombing rebel forces (and Britain would have greater sway in those discussions if the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal had not been lately decommissioned). But meanwhile Libya’s rebels beg and the Arab League urges the UN Security Council to impose a no-fly zone.
France and Britain support that call. The international coalition that President Obama appears to be awaiting is already there in outline. It needs mobilising. Mr Cameron should urgently reinforce that message in Washington. Economic sanctions and the freezing of assets are symbolically valuable but they will not depose a despot who has supped full with horrors. The rebels against him risk life and liberty. Their cause demands not just sympathy but active solidarity from the West.