Hurrah for the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee
Hurrah for the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee , whose report http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmfaff/119/11901.htm
has rightly criticised the absurd Libyan intervention, supported by two of the most ludicrous politicians of modern times, France’s former president Sarkozy and our own unlamented Mr Slippery, David Cameron.
I remain amazed that Mr Cameron has had so little trouble because of his role in Afghanistan, where he more or less became a servant of Rupert Murdoch and the neoconservative permanent war campaign, and in Libya, where he created a crisis where there wasn’t one.
This behaviour is not significantly better than the Bair creature’s behaviour in Iraq, and may actually have had as dire an effect. The anarchy in Libya certainly created much of the migration crisis that now engulfs Europe, and has changed our continent beyond recognition.
When will people understand that in the post-colonial world, it is no use getting hoity-toity about the morality of the rulers who have taken over the West’s former colonies?
We all accepted, in the 1950s and 1960s, the argument that peoples had a ‘right to self-determination’, even if they used it to choose unpleasant despots. The alternative, that colonial rule might actually be better for almost everyone involved, became unsayable and unthinkable, and not worth advancing in civilised society. There's really not much point in removing Despot A if he is then replaced either by anarchy or by Despot B. And let's face it, we're never going to reconquer these places, even if we had the nerve and self-confidence to do so.
Oddly enough this rule tended to apply only to the former possessions of the clapped-out European empires. China pays no attention to it, and the USA, a vast contiguous land empire assembled via purchase and violent conquest, is still strong enough to resist any attempts to get ‘self-determination’ by any part of its territory.
The USSR was rather amusingly compelled to grant liberation to most of its empire in 1991, after decades of preaching to others about their imperialism. This is doubly paradoxical, as the Soviet Empire was also the first ideological one, and it was this that did for it. The Soviet takeover in Afghanistan under Brezhnev may well count as the first liberal intervention of modern times (the Communist ideologues favoured it , the soldiers, diplomats and professionals, who knew what Afghanistan was like, opposed it). It was this failure that did for the whole Leninist empire.
As for the Libya episode, I remember it well at the time, especially the growing attempt to pretend that the Cameron government had always had chilly relations with Gaddafi, and that the Blair government had been the Colonel’s patsies. Maybe they were, but if so, what about the Cameron government’s initial attitude to the Tripoli potentate. This is interesting. Look out for the reference to Mr Bellingham:
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/08/bravo-blair.html
But the MPs’ report (see for instance paragraph 32) shows that various claims made in favour of intervention, especially the alleged plan for a massacre in Benghazi, were – to put it kindly – seriously exaggerated. This was not the only thing of this sort. I recall being asked on BBC Question Time around then to treat, as if it were proven truth, some atrocity propaganda about mass rape.
People sometimes accuse me of looking glum or bad-tempered on TV. Perhaps I do, but if so it is because I am amazed at what’s being said around me. Honestly, how can any educated, responsible, conscious person not know the simple rule, that truth is the first casualty of war and that atrocity propaganda must always be treated with caution. Yes, it is sometimes true (and history shows that is exactly when we tend to disbelieve it most, as in the well-authenticated reports of the massacre of European Jews, smuggled out of Hitler’s efficiently evil empire by a few incredibly brave people).
Oddly enough the early proof of the Holocaust was dismissed, in my view, precisely because it was *not* a pretext for war – we were already at war with the perpetrators. It would have required us to do something much more complicated and politically complicated than war, had we acknowledged it.
But there is this strange impulse in the human breast to rush into benevolent wars (especially if you won’t personally be doing the fighting, killing or dying) which makes us unbelievably credulous at the worst moments.
I still wonder what the real reason is for our Iraq, Libyan and Syrian enthusiasms. I suspect it lies a bit south of Jordan and somewhere to the east of the Red Sea.