Libya: who could have predicted?
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian:
Britain's half-war against Libya is careering onward from reckless gesture to full-scale fiasco. As it reaches six months' duration, every sensibly pessimistic forecast has turned out true and every jingoistic boast false. Even if the desperate and probably illegal tactic of trying to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi gets lucky, Britain would find itself running a shambles of its own making, with troops having to go in to "keep the peace". Unlike in Basra or Helmand, there will be no Americans on hand to bail them out. It is frightening how deep the imperial gene runs in generations of British politicians.
The Libyan rebels, portrayed by Whitehall propagandists as plucky little democrats, are hardly more sympathetic than Gaddafi's supporters, with those in the east at odds both with each other and with those in the west. While Britain claims to be "protecting" the population, the latest, admittedly unreliable, estimates put the civilian toll from bombing at 1,100 dead and countless injured. Certainly hundreds must have died. The RAF is clearly running out of targets and must justify each new attack in terms more appropriate to a Maoist hysteric. Last week theTripoli television station was destroyed and reporters killed, "to disrupt the broadcast of Gaddafi's murderous rhetoric". What has that to do with the original war aim?
Read the whole thing. What's particularly depressing about this bloody fiasco is how predictable it was. I'm not claiming any great oracular powers (God, Blind Freddy could see where this adventure would end) but here's what I wrote for Counterpunch in March:
Has there ever been a war justified more glibly? One supposes so but it's hard to recall when. Even the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as disastrous as they proved, involved the public articulation of a more-or-less coherent plan, something that's patently lacking from the adventure unfolding in Libya.
The mission will last days rather than weeks, says Obama – and the French immediately warn of a long fight. The Americans say Gaddafi is not a target; the British briefly insist that he is but then almost instantly change their minds. The goal of intervention is – or perhaps isn't – regime change, depending on who you listen to and when they're speaking.
For a particularly grotesque example of where we're now at, one need go no further than the New Republic, where Steven Metz advises the US to prepare both tactics against an insurgency (for use against pro-Gaddafi forces) andtactics for an insurgency (to assist anti-Gaddafi elements).
Would George W Bush, for all his Texas swagger, have dared to cowboy up a military conflict on such a crazy basis? Surely not — and yet across the world, the Libya intervention, a conflict with contradictory aims, no discernable exit strategy, and little public support, has been lauded by progressives.
The rest is on the articles page.
