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    Cameron and Libya

    Libya is a huge and horrible mess, obviously, and the British PM's role in that is not the country's central problem, but how come Cameron's reputation isn't in tatters over the murderous ungovernability of the place that his and others' "humanitarian" military intervention ushered in four years ago? Shouldn't he being hounded for this the way Blair was over Iraq? He gets a remarkably easy ride over it, to the extent that it's rarely mentioned by either his detractors or supporters.

    #2
    Cameron and Libya

    A toothless opposition and broadly supportive media doesn't hurt.

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      #3
      Cameron and Libya

      I also think, oddly, the Libya bombing was for some reason seen as a lot less controversial (than Iraq) at the time.

      (A personal example was my parents - I remember having a discussion with them, saying it was a bad idea, and they were in the "something needs to be done" camp. They were very opposed to the Iraq invasion.)

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        #4
        Cameron and Libya

        The Arab League promoted the idea of bringing down Gaddafi, and that didn't involvce a full land invasion.

        By contrast, the proposed invasion of Iraq was debated in parliament, there were large demonstrations against it, and the consequences were much more evident and predictable than those of dislodging Gaddafi (though in hindsight, these seem much more obvious).

        And most importantly, the engagememt in Libya wasn't predicated on what was a transparent lie, namely the WMD ruse.

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          #5
          Cameron and Libya

          Yeah, this is all true, but it just seems now that Libya is descending into a comparably toxic and awful mess as Iraq was, and you'd think there'd be a bit more focus. Not sure I buy the line that you couldn't have foreseen the subsequent chaos either. It seemed painfully obvious.

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            #6
            Cameron and Libya

            Yep, you just needed to look at the precedents.

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              #7
              Cameron and Libya

              E10 Rifle wrote: Libya is a huge and horrible mess, obviously, and the British PM's role in that is not the country's central problem, but how come Cameron's reputation isn't in tatters over the murderous ungovernability of the place that his and others' "humanitarian" military intervention ushered in four years ago? Shouldn't he being hounded for this the way Blair was over Iraq? He gets a remarkably easy ride over it, to the extent that it's rarely mentioned by either his detractors or supporters.
              Guessing broad cross-party support and UN sanctions for the bombing and what happened to Syria without military intervention.

              Not to defend Cameron or liberal interventionism or owt but Blair launched an illegal ground-based war of aggression on a previously basically stable, if repressive, state amid massive popular disapproval and a parliamentary mandate brought about through a series of massive lies.

              That had the effect of plunging the country into over a decade of sectarian strife, the emergence of much worse regional powers, hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and the loss of 200-odd British service personnel.

              Cameron participated in a UN sanctioned no-fly-zone - requested by the Arab League and Libyan rebel groups, ostensibly to protect civilians in Benghazi from Libyan state aggression.

              This had broad parliamentary and popular support and although the mission subsequently crept to include regime change (and lost its UN backing), it's hard to compare it to Iraq.

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                #8
                Cameron and Libya

                E10 Rifle wrote: Yeah, this is all true, but it just seems now that Libya is descending into a comparably toxic and awful mess as Iraq was, and you'd think there'd be a bit more focus. Not sure I buy the line that you couldn't have foreseen the subsequent chaos either. It seemed painfully obvious.
                Well yeah, but equally I don't think the UN no-fly-zone and subsequent escalation of bombing caused the chaos - I think the chaos was caused by the loss of authority of the Libyan state and eruption of civil war.

                I guess the only alternative which would have avoided wider chaos would have been Gaddafi swiftly and mercilessly putting down the rebellion and continuing his brutal rule but I'm not sure that's great either.

                And more likely Benghazi would have been the scene of bloody and destructive urban warfare and airstrikes that would have made it look like Homs or Aleppo.

                I'm not defending the intervention but I think unlike Iraq, British military action didn't have much of an effect on the wider stability of the country.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Cameron and Libya

                  E10 Rifle wrote: Libya is a huge and horrible mess, obviously, and the British PM's role in that is not the country's central problem, but how come Cameron's reputation isn't in tatters over the murderous ungovernability of the place that his and others' "humanitarian" military intervention ushered in four years ago? Shouldn't he being hounded for this the way Blair was over Iraq? He gets a remarkably easy ride over it, to the extent that it's rarely mentioned by either his detractors or supporters.
                  Yeah, agree.

                  I reckon there's a lot of "concern trolling" around Iraq, awful as it was, and that would explain the difference.

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                    #10
                    Cameron and Libya

                    There was genuine concern that Gaddafi was going to massacre civilians. I don't know if that concern was based on misinformation, but I remember feeling it to be genuine in terms of the public mood. A bigger Obama/Cameron crime might have been not having any game plan for when Gaddafi fell.

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                      #11
                      Cameron and Libya

                      It's basically the same game plan as in Iraq, to break up the country, destroy its social fabric and leave it in chaos, with the natural resources in the hands of compliant kleptocratic warlords. You don't really hear much about Libya today in the media (and not much about Syria either beyond the border wars involving the Kurds) because the deed is done.

                      Algeria is next.

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                        #12
                        Cameron and Libya

                        Tubby Isaacs wrote:
                        I reckon there's a lot of "concern trolling" around Iraq, awful as it was, and that would explain the difference.
                        You've been on the Guardian messageboards again.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Cameron and Libya

                          The knock-on effects of the UN/NATO and our (likely most people who post here anyway) shallow government's attempts at a cheap, victorious war in Libya (egged on by each countries own mini-Churchill - or in Cameron's case mini-Blair) may live on longer than perhaps any other action of theirs.

                          My only hope is that military intervention will become less popular because of it. If Ed Miliband done anything decent and important in his time, it was Labour's then opposition to the morons wanting to get involved in Syria.

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                            #14
                            Cameron and Libya

                            Satchmo and BLT sum it up very well.

                            All I can add is that come the Arab spring, those countries with a strong tribal culture (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain) were going to suffer far more than those that didn't (Egypt, Tunisia, Saudi, Qatar, UAE). The UN was right to support the overthrow of Gaddafi and Assad, but incredibly naive. The situation Libya is in right now probably would have only been accelerated beyond our worst nightmares had Gaddafi hung onto power, like Assad's Syria. There was a window where things in Libya could have worked, but tribal power struggles put pay to that.

                            It's unfair to paint Cameron with Blair's seriously sh+tty brush and actually undermines the sh+ttiness of Blair's brush. There was naively justified reason for Cameron and the UN's actions, unlike the war crime committed by Blair and Bush.

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                              #15
                              Cameron and Libya

                              Egypt seems to be suffering enormously, as far as I can tell.

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