Will Cameron play the Bush to Obama’s Blair?
Eight years ago an American president led a passive British prime minister into a war both countries would regret. David Cameron is eager for history to repeat itself, with the national roles reversed. While Barack Obama dithers, Cameron demands tough action against Libya — with a western-imposed no-fly zone seemingly uppermost on his mind. ‘Do we want a situation where a failed pariah state festers on Europe’s southern border,’ he asks, ‘potentially threatening our security, pushing people across the Mediterranean and creating a more dangerous and uncertain world for Britain and for all our allies, as well as for the people of Libya?’
Yet a failed state is exactly what Libya would become if Britain and America intervene. Cameron’s hawkish position may win him friends in Washington — Senator John McCain has been particularly glowing about ‘the leadership that Prime Minister Cameron has shown’ — but he is deceiving himself about the Libyan insurgency. Not all of Gaddafi’s enemies are the West’s friends, and many would be eager to turn their arms against foreigners. As one fighter in Benghazi told the Guardian, ‘If the Americans came, the people would fight them in the streets, just like Iraq.’
And a no-fly zone would be hardly more than a prelude to the Americans coming. Gaddafi’s air power is secondary — his tanks, artillery, and mercenaries are his primary weapons. Not only a no-fly zone, but airstrikes, at a minimum, would be needed to delay him. Yet short of introducing ground forces, nothing America and Britain could do would guarantee victory for the rebels.
What happened in Iraq after the first Gulf War is instructive. Shia encouraged by George H.W. Bush to believe they would be supported by America rebelled against Saddam Hussein and were slaughtered. Sanctions, bombing runs, and continual patrols of the skies above northern Iraq were necessary to avert a massacre of Kurds. After ten years, Saddam was still firmly in place.
Nor did airstrikes and sanctions stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. A backbencher might do well to ask Cameron the question that the US columnist George Will put to Libyan interventionists: ‘What lesson should be learned from the fact that Europe’s worst atrocity since the second world war — the massacre by Serbs of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica — occurred beneath a no-fly zone?’
A cynic might suggest that Cameron is simply grandstanding: he can afford to talk tough because the Royal Air Force will not be charged with enforcing whatever military measures western powers take. US air power is the world’s policeman — Cameron would be the world’s Neighbourhood Watch. That would be nice enough if the Prime Minister were egging on a fight against street criminals. But civil wars are not so easy to police, and loose talk of intervention often ends up costing lives.
The only conceivable intervention that might not lead to more bloodshed in Libya — that might not transform a civil war into a war against invaders — would be one by other Arab states. Alas, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Morocco so far have shown a much keener interest in stamping out the uprising in Bahrain than in putting paid to Gaddafi’s tyranny. Cameron worries that defeat for Gaddafi’s foes would short-circuit the Arab spring. But the West’s friends in Riyadh are already suffocating the region’s cries for freedom.
That leaves the Libyans to win their own freedom, and the prospect grows dimmer by the hour. This week, Gaddafi’s forces took back Ajdabiya, leaving Benghazi as the only rebel stronghold. But western leaders are wrong to think that if the rebellion fails now it will never succeed. Egypt and Tunisia have given Arabs throughout the region an example of revolutions that can succeed without David Cameron or America—just as Iraq and Afghanistan have given Muslims the world over examples of what corruption and misery and western efforts at forcible democratisation can bring. Cameron’s interventionism would substitute the discredited example for the hopeful one. It would also involve America and Britain in another war as disastrous as the one into which Bush led his poodle.