@epaulnetPaul Erickson
If there ever more damning evidence of how seriously Britain’s wars in Afghanistan and Libya are being taken, it is the quiet in Westminster. George Osborne is in Hollywood, Nick Clegg is in Spain and David Cameron is in Tuscany. William Hague is left alone in Whitehall. When he took to the Today program Tuesday morning, itself much cut down thanks to another BBC strike, it felt like a formality – another MP filling the airwaves with white noise to fill the space of recess.But then suddenly it becomes clear that this is the foreign secretary and he’s talking about massacres. In Syria, tanks are murdering people in the streets. This, says Hague, who only months ago was talking about how Assad might still be a reformer, “is a very frustrating situation”, but of course, there is nothing we can do. Moving on to Libya, the foreign secretary sounded even more depressed. Gone was the bombast – the calls for Gaddafi to go. Now, Hague seemed to create an artificial divide between the military mission and the aim of British foreign policy:
Now of course we want to see a political settlement in Libya and that of course involves the departure of Colonel Gaddafi… (But the UN resolutions) of course are not regime change, they call for all necessary measures to protect the civilian population
But I ask them to consider first of all what the alternatives would be: to let Colonel Gaddafi simply overrun the rest of his country by force, or to act outside the legal and international authority of the UN resolutions, neither of those things are things that we can do.
This is the unfortunate position that our government finds itself in. David Cameron, who so enthusiastically backed intervention in Libya, did so without fully abandoning his intention to avoid repeating Tony Blair’s wars. He promised not to “drop democracy from 30,000 feet”, but elected to drop bombs anyway. Most of all, we are bound by UN resolutions to “protect” but we have no plan to win. Its hands tied behind its back, our government seems to be a gambling on a miracle. Like a bankrupt buying a lottery ticket, we are hoping for a thunderbolt that will knock Col Gaddafi down, ideally in time for party conference.
For my generation, this is new. We grew up in the era of liberal interventionism. The bombing of Iraq and Serbia, the invasions of Sierra Leone, of Afghanistan, of Iraq – these were the wars that punctuated my childhood. Some of my most vivid memories are of watching grainy footage of streaking lights and explosions in far away towns.
Britain was a great power – a country that did not stand by as children died. What are we now? We’re a toothless tiger, pretending we can change the world. In Libya, we talk about stalemates, but the rebels are winning. A ragtag band of armed young men are taking on a brutal dictator and slowly but surely winning. We are frustrated because it’s taking too long and costing too much.
This feels to me like the end of British power. The Army is being cut back to its smallest size in a century, the RAF is losing its jets and the Navy has fewer ships than ever before. We are learning, finally, that we cannot have power on the cheap – that our politicians cannot change the world without asking us to pay for it. In the future, they won’t even try. I find that rather sad.
