Cameron’s blind spot in Libya

It is easy to assume that in the British context, the mistake of invading Libya was down to decisions made by David Cameron himself. He was the Prime Minister at the time, and a key player in NATO talks. In reality, Cameron is a flabby weakling on foreign policy, even a self-confessed ignoramus, and picks between his advisors’ recommendations on decisions as major as Libya. He is easily influenced or swayed one way or another.

Cameron is still nervous over that fateful decision in 2011. An army officer who works in a unit advising the prime minister, who for obvious reasons did not want to be named, told me over the summer that his feelings of guilt over Libya are visible on Cameron’s face whenever he meets him for briefings.

This squeamishness towards Libya has bred a dangerous lack of engagement in Whitehall. “There are no quick fixes so nobody wants much to do with it,” a Libya analyst told me. “It’s a bit unfashionable,” said another. It has been well over a year since the British embassy in Tripoli closed its doors. The new ambassador, the moustachioed Peter Millett, is said to be keen and enthusiastic – but the financial and operational resources necessary for seriously re-engaging with the crisis are not forthcoming.

Cameron is smart, but he is not clued up enough on foreign policy. He simply wasn’t interested in it earlier in his career. As others have noted, the prime minister has fallen under the sway of neo-conservative figures such as Michael Gove and neo-liberal Tony Blair (the former premier is known to have been asked in to Number Ten during Libya discussions). Cameron has not formulated his own philosophy, he has simply drawn on and adopted those of others.

Both Blair and Gove are fiercely intelligent, charismatic but not necessarily always right and often dangerously not so. They both operate on their own fundamental principal of statesmanship – that a “just war” is possible. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in two recent episodes. The first was Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. At this time, Gove was still working as a journalist for The Times, where he penned endless columns in favour of the war. While Blair was sucking up to Bush, he was also a hopeless romantic when it came to foreign adventures.

At the same time, Gove’s think tank Policy Exchange was already gunning for war in the Middle East. Just over a year after the think tank’s inception, and just over a month after British troops entered Iraq under Blair’s orders, Policy Exchange published an enthusiastic collection of essays entitled “Regime Change : It’s Been Done Before.”

The foreword to this collection was written by former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, and its cover carried a photo of an American soldier dragging a placard of Saddam Hussein through a dirty Iraqi street. If Gove of Policy Exchange and Blair of the War on Terror were the ones advising Cameron on Libya 2011, is it any surprise we went to war?

Yet, surrounding the temporary three-way of Gove, Blair and Cameron was a small group of other politicians, British and foreign intellectuals, political exiles, diplomats, intelligence chiefs and military generals. Together they discussed their thoughts, prepared briefings, made recommendations, cajoled the undecided, and polled or convinced the public.

Also included in this group were those senior civil servants who were nervous of speaking out against the invasion of Libya because they needed a job, academics who believed the invasion was a good idea and had the ear of government, some individuals in the media and think tank worlds, analysts who drew up the reports on the situation for Parliament and Cabinet, intelligence directors and military generals; all these people played their part.

This small group of men and women had their own interests at heart. These ranged from commercial interests (oil), moral (neo-liberal and neo-conservative), to political and personal (exiled Libyans who had personally suffered at the hands of the Gaddafi regime). Not all of them knew or spoke to each other, but as a semi-co-ordinated mass they took the decision to depose Muammar al-Qaddafi by force; and thus convinced Cameron it was a good idea. As for Joe public, your average voter had no say whatsoever in this gung-ho decision.

We shall never know whether the war in Libya was the right decision. We do not have the luxury of turning back the clock and finding out if Gaddafi really was planning a genocide, nor do we have access to the information that was available to Cameron at the time. Frank phone calls in high pressure situations are often easier to make than carefully worded emails which may come under legal scrutiny later down the line. Will text messages between our elites be preserved by the National Archives for later declassification? Unlikely. Even if they weren’t deleted, other phones or personal email accounts could have been used. The public were told only a certain version of the truth.

Objectively, it was a hard decision to take. The leader of a sovereign state was falling, along with a hyper-personalised government infrastructure which centred around one man and his whims. It was unclear what proportion of the country wanted him to go. The region was in turmoil. The Western media, having covered all the Arab Spring uprisings as if they were identical events, were strongly suggesting to the British public that Gaddafi would and should fall. Over the past decades the rogue state, which had the highest GDP per capita in Africa, had not invested in building a great navy, air force and army to threaten mainland Britain. Instead, Gaddafi had hired or backed terrorist groups, including the Irish Republican Army and the Lockerbie bombers. He had seized control of the country in 1969, then killed or imprisoned most of his serious opponents. He had already suppressed several minor uprisings. Yet Blair had offered Gaddafi a rapprochement, and the Americans were beginning to value him as a partner in the War on Terror.

Would democracy thrive immediately? Probably not, as Bernard Henri-Levy, one of the intellectuals campaigning for intervention in Libya in 2011, said in the aftermath of the war. He claims that the elites who pushed for invasion by air and land Special Forces were aware of the risks, they all looked to Iraq and their naiveté in invading without a proper plan and feared the same may happen again. Still, would Gaddafi step down without killing civilians? It was plausible he would not, but hard to say exactly.

War is horrible and can take many variations of barbarous forms, yet according to a piece of research published earlier this month by the Houses of Parliament, in the so-called “free votes” in which MPs are allowed to vote with their conscience not one of them was regarding questions of war.

What is it about foreign policy that doesn’t make it worthy of a vote of conscience? Why have votes on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya been whipped by Chief Whips whose day job is to collect titbits of information they can use to blackmail dissenting rebellious parliamentarians? Isn’t the potential death of hundreds of thousands if not millions of foreign civilians a “matter of conscience”? Why are the public not consulted more closely, or referendums held? Why aren’t snap elections called when such wars go wrong?

Libya was a no-win situation for Cameron. Either he intervened and the country fell into chaos, or he didn’t and it went into civil war, though there was a small chance Gaddafi would step down peacefully. It made us more cautious on Syria in 2013, but not on Iraq in 2014, when the British public barely batted an eyelid when UK troops were once again deployed – in the form of fighter jets, drones, or bearing clipboards and rifles as “advisers” and “trainers” to the Iraqi army. If Cameron really does feel guilty about Libya, he should do the decent thing and properly resource the Foreign Office team looking into post-conflict reconciliation in the country. Each situation and country in the Middle East is different, and each needs proper care and attention on its own terms. It’s no good to have a blind spot on a Libya that is on the brink of descending into a Lebanese-style civil war, whether it’s over personal embarrassment or moral guilt. Cameron should turn his eyes to fixing Libya first, before he gets involved elsewhere. A Marshall plan wouldn’t go amiss here.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.