In 2011, Muammar Gaddafi had been Libya’s dictator for almost 40 years, and with protests
spreading throughout North Africa and the Middle East, they didn’t take long before
anti-regime demonstrations erupted in Libya too.
To quash the uprising, Gaddafi’s forces killed 100 protestors in only a few days,
which only provoked an even greater rebellion, in cities likes Benghazi and Misrata.
Marching to Benghazi, Gaddafi vowed to cleanse the country of those protestors he called
“cockroaches”.
In response, NATO, led by France and the UK, had a resolution passed by the UN Security
Council to launch a military intervention in order to “protect the Libyan people”
from Gaddafi, particularly those in Benghazi.
Now while David Cameron had argued in March of that year in the House of Commons that
the objective of any Libya intervention would not be regime change, only a month later Cameron
signed a joint letter with the US and France stating their collective pursuit would be
a future for Libya without Gaddafi.
The UN resolution was written in such a way to enable “all necessary measures” to
be taken legitimately by NATO in order to protect Libyan civilians. And the UK and its
NATO allies used this ambiguity to consider Libyan civilians only properly protected once
Gaddafi had been removed.
This mission creep from preventing a massacre to overthrowing a government, was deemed without
justification, by the recent Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry into the intervention.
In fact it stated that Benghazi was properly secured only a mere 24 hours after NATO strikes
on Libyan forces had begun.
Instead, the intervention lasted seven months only finishing with Gaddafi captured and killed,
with NATO then declaring Libya ‘liberated’. At this point, 8,000 people, both combatants
and civilians had been killed in the conflict.
The committee found that once Benghazi had been secured, there was still non-military,
political options available to NATO that could have been pursued, that might have avoided
bloodshed.
In fact, the International Crisis Group as well as various nations like Germany and Brazil
proposed one of these alternatives, but it was roundly rejected by NATO.
Since the intervention, Libya has been in and out of a violent and chaotic crisis, with
various rival governments now fighting for power and legitimacy.
Now there’s no doubt that Gaddaffi’s dictatorship did repress basic civil liberties for decades,
but since 2011 violent militias are now abducting, torturing and killing with impunity, and Isis
have set up various training centres in the coastal city of Sirte.
Libya’s destabilization and lawlessness has enabled networks of people smugglers to
operate much more freely, with thousands of refugees and migrants ending up dead or missing
every year having made the journey to Europe across the Mediterranean.
The country is also now flooded with arms, following raids on Gadaffi’s massive weapons
depots, with many of these weapons now falling into conflicts in Mali and Nigeria.
With perennial disruption to basic services like electricity and sewage, in five years
Libya has tumbled in the development rankings, with its GDP almost halving.
Of Libya’s six million people, half a million are now internally displaced, and two and
a half million now require some sort of humanitarian assistance.
As Barack Obama said earlier this year, Libya is now “a shitshow”.
The Select Committee found fault with the Cameron administration’s decision-making
at almost every stage. It found that UK did not take a proper intelligence analysis of
what was happening in Libya at the time before military intervention, nor could it actually
verify the actual threat posed by Gaddafi to civilians. The report suggests that looking
at the available evidence, both of Gaddafi’s history and the manner in which other rebel-held
towns were being recaptured at the time, does not support the idea that Gaddafi would have
massacred civilians.
The report also found the UK shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct Libya after
overthrowing its government, stating overall that the intervention significantly caused
the political and economic collapse of the country, civil warfare, humanitarian and migrant
crises, and massive human rights violations.
How was it then, that as senior Tory Bernard Jenkin says, this whole episode reads horribly
like a repeat of all the mistakes made in Iraq?
Now, David Cameron did set up a new ‘National Security Council’ early on in his premiership
in order to formalize a thorough decision-making process for foreign military intervention,
with Libya being the council’s first big test.
However, the Council seemed unable to successfully integrate any meaningful check and balance
into the Government’s decision-making. When Chief of Defence staff Sir David Richards
raised concerns about Cameron’s strategy in Libya, he was reportedly seen as ‘unhelpful’.
There might be broad consensus over the many calamitous mistakes made in Iraq, it’s hard
to see how any lessons are being learned to prevent repeating the same mistakes again.
While Brexit may be David Cameron’s defining legacy, it’s hard to deny the spectre of
a failed state on the Mediterranean also looms large.