An opportunity presents itself for Britain in North Africa. We must hurry, for the time to seize it is running out. It is the opportunity to do nothing. Unless our Government scales back its interventionist rhetoric soon, the opportunity will be missed. If there is a case for intervention, let that be carried out by others. We British should sit this out.
We have no residual imperial responsibilities in Libya and a limited exposure to commercial risk. We face no threat to our domestic security from the region except one that could be heightened by intervention. We have no strategic military interest there. Nor, finally, would a British contribution be critical to the success of any imaginable international intervention. If it can be done, it can be done without us.
Here then is a powerful case for sitting on our hands. I shall try to make it soberly. The case falls into two parts. Should a consortium of Western powers impose a no-fly zone over Libya? And, if so, should Britain be involved?
It is important to separate those two questions. Our lingering post-imperial mindset is apt to proceed with a lazy automaticity from any assertion that the world ought to do something to the assertion that we British ought to be involved in doing it. It does not follow. The economies of Brazil, Italy and the UK are of roughly similar size, yet you may be sure that the question of whether their country should contribute to military intervention in Libya will not be an issue in Brazil, and will be less of an issue in Italy than in Britain — although Italy is the former colonial power there.
Along with us, the other European power most excitedly talking up the possibility of intervention is France: but remember that Libya’s neighbour, Algeria, was part of France within the lifetimes of many of us; and France was the imperial power in adjacent Tunisia, Chad and Niger, retaining deep interests in all these states. It also has an important relationship with another former possession vulnerable to the current wave of Arab popular unrest, Algeria’s neighbour, Morocco. I believe that the French would be unwise to wade in this time, but it must be acknowledged that France’s interest in the Maghreb is of an altogether different order to Britain’s.
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So even if I were persuaded that others would be well advised to pile in I would still advise that Britain should steer clear. But I’m not persuaded. This intervention would be the modest tip of a huge potential iceberg of contingent responsibilities. Once again — having failed to learn our lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan — Britain is teetering towards a decision that carries with it a terrible risk of mission creep.
“No-fly zone” sounds so reassuring, doesn’t it? Almost municipal, like “No fly-tipping”, “No heavy goods vehicles after 10pm” or “Please keep off the grass”. But be under no illusions, what is being proposed is an attack — an aggressive intervention designed to disarm one side in a civil war. To launch this attack is to take ownership of the future conduct of that war.
The first step is apparently the easiest: to issue to Tripoli a no-fly directive. Commentators who know more about war than me appear to disagree on whether it would be necessary simultaneously to cripple Libya’s air capability by bombing facilities and paralysing its aircraft, so I’ll venture no opinion. Certainly the consortium of powers issuing the no-fly command would have to be ready and able to back their words with actions. But there must be a fair chance that the implicit threat behind a no-fly command might never have to be carried into action, and that Colonel Gaddafi would ground his air force at once.
Let’s suppose he did. But what then? It would not necessarily mean a decisive victory for the rebels. Potentially we would have either a continuation of the regime’s offensive by other means, a stalemate or a confused mixture of both.
Gaddafi would be unlikely to throw in the towel. Two more likely possibilities must to be contemplated. The mad dictator might continue his offensive by ground-borne operations. Tanks too, armies too, shells too, can kill. Mass executions can still take place although the sky is quiet. Having intervened decisively in the air — presumably on the logic that the world cannot sit idly by when a humanitarian disaster unfolds — would the intervening powers not then have a clear responsibility to intervene on the ground too?
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The second possibility is that Gaddafi’s advance on the rebels would be stalled. But that would not mean the rebels had won. Gaddafi would be in control of some territory, the rebels of other areas and towns. It is likely that in this confusion shortages of food, medicine and, in some places, water would grow. Again, I would submit that having taken responsibility, and in many senses caused the stalemate, the powers would be under a duty to break it.
But how? Boots on the ground? What is it we would be trying to do? To impose a government? To organise the institution by the rebels of a government? Which rebels? Who, anyway, are “the rebels”? Do we really know? Are they a unified force with a leader whom we could deal with? Would they remain so?
Immediately a horribly familiar series of dilemmas comes crowding in. Might an interim administration be necessary and wouldn’t the occupying powers — which, by this stage, the international force would amount to — have to arrange or even supply it? Should they then remove all the senior layers of the Gaddafi-tainted Libyan administration and rebuild the civil service, police and local authorities from the ground up? What do you do with the Libyan armed forces, some of whom would have remained loyal to Gaddafi, some of whom would have joined the rebels and large numbers of whom (I suggest) would be of indeterminate loyalties? How would the interim administration be funded — from oil revenues? — and shouldn’t the cost of the international intervention also be reimbursed from Libyan sources?
And at what point, finally, does the initially solid international consensus for intervention begin to break up? Who will the region’s Islamists see as friend and who as enemy? How will opinion move in Riyadh, Cairo, Algiers and Rabat?
The more you think about these questions, the more explicable becomes Washington’s extreme caution about what to do next. British militarists (always on the alert for new arenas and, therefore, new justifications for new hardware) notwithstanding, and British neocons (not dead, only waiting to regroup after their setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan) notwithstanding, we British should note Washington’s doubts. We might remember, too, that the French, who blundered badly in Indo-China, Suez and Algeria, are capable of tremendous miscalculations in world affairs.
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To the end of my life I shall have imprinted in memory the television pictures of that statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled (in retrospect by a suspiciously small and uncertain crowd) in a Baghdad square. We thought it was all over. It had hardly begun.