Now it's Time for a Chilcot-Style Inquiry into the Libya War

Having spent much of the weekend on Twitter, struggling and largely failing  to explain the concept of preventive patrolling to people purporting to be policemen (with ghastly punning pseudonyms), I turn with relief to the this morning’s headlines on the BBC. (I notice, having finished this paragraph, that it contains one of the longest alliterations I have ever seen. I promise that this was accidental).

 

I will in time get round to the new ‘Lancet’ report on cannabis and mental illness. I’m currently waiting for a certain organisation to reply to a certain query I sent them this morning.

 

I’m delighted that it has attracted some notice, after months of unchallenged legalisation propaganda on the airwaves and in the press. But as it happens I don’t think it contains anything hugely new. And it still suffers from the grave problems of all such research : what exactly is ‘psychosis’ and what objective means do we have of knowing that someone has suffered from it? How accurately can you measure the use of an illegal drug taken in unquantifiable doses through lungfuls of smoke? How do you measure the supposedly ‘minor’ effects of such drugs, the school failure, the diminished memory and concentration, the unemployability, the loss of patience and other virtues and – as I frequently hear in my correspondence – the long-term delayed-action effects, which can lead quite suddenly to the locked ward and even serious violence? The Lancet report also appears to acquit old-fashioned sixties cannabis.

 

But my main concerns were two other reports. One was that some murderers ‘loyal to Islamic state’ had wantonly killed a number of Coptic Christians. The fact that this took place in Libya trailed in at the end of the account. The casual first-time listener, as I was at 5.30 this morning when I first heard it, will tend to hear the words ‘Islamic State’ and assume the event is in Syria or Iraq.

 

It was only when I absorbed the word ‘Coptic’ that I stopped in my tracks. What were Copts doing in Iraq? Well, of course, they aren't in Iraq. They are almost all in Egypt, as I know very well, having interviewed such a person on the plight of Christians in Muslim majority countries during what I rather hope will be my last-ever visit to Cairo in November 2011. See here

 

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/11/special-report-the-overthrow-of-egypts-despotic-ruler-was-hailed-a-success-but-nine-months-on-peter-.html

 

And of course the victims of this murder (why do many of my fellow-scribblers refer to such crime as ‘executions’, when they are the opposite?) were in Libya, where many poor Egyptians go in search of the work that is so hard to find in Egypt.

 

The whole point of the story is surely that this grisly death cult has now spread to Libya.

 

And that this horrible news came on the same day as fresh reports of migrants having to be rescued in the stormy Mediterranean, from leaking and unseaworthy boats into which they had been crammed by armed smugglers.

 

Where were they coming from?

Libya.

 

Of course, we are perfectly right to pursue those who got us into the Iraq war, an action of incalculable stupidity which was much like the opening of Pandora’s Box, except there seems to be no hope lying at the bottom. The consequences of that ill-considered, ignorant and half-witted action will continue to plague the world for decades to come. It may turn out, in the end, to have been the action which finally brings down the proud civilisation which we rebuilt after the Second World War, and hands the remnants over to the Chinese.

 

But it seems to me to be time for a Chilcot-type inquiry into the Libyan war, likewise sold to us as an urgent and morally good intervention, but which has been disastrous for Libya itself, now a cauldron of murder, fanaticism and gangsterism, and for Europe as a whole, as the Libyan coast, uncontrolled by anyone,  provides a point of departure for an incalculable number of desperate migrants wrongly convinced that a better life awaits them in Europe.

 

This promises to subject our borderless new Europe to a  revolution far greater than the huge Hispanic migration which has in recent years transformed the USA. Turning it in an amazingly short time into a bilingual country whose political leaders must increasingly adapt to a wholly new constituency.

 

The development is so huge that nobody can really think about it.

 

Nobody can blame the migrants, whose bravery is admirable and whose plight in their coffin ships is pitiable, for seeking a better life. But can this development possibly benefit our already-troubled continent? And did those who made it possible, by using Western air power to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi, have any idea what they were doing?

 

Isn’t it time they were called to account? Yet it is barely mentioned.