Veteran Arab journalist Abdel Bari Atwan says that after the Foreign Affairs Select Committee released a report yesterday damning David Cameron’s bombing of Libya in 2011, those who opposed the intervention at the time stand justified.
Bernard-Henri Lévy became irate when asked by an interviewer recently why the 2011 Nato intervention in Libya failed to bring security or stability to the country but instead plunged it into its current state of bloody mayhem. The French “philosopher,” who famously played a key role in persuading then-president Nicolas Sarkozy to start bombing the country, replied that the situation there was better than in Syria where President Barack Obama had declined to order direct military intervention to topple President Bashar al-Assad.
Lévy went on to offer the observation, which Libyans are unlikely to have found reassuring, that it had taken more than a century before things settled down in France after its revolution. But he insisted that the intervention was fully justified, above all to prevent the regime of Col. Muammar a Gaddafi from carrying out an intended massacre of civilians in Benghazi.
This central justification for the Nato campaign – which was uncritically adopted and amplified by most of the Western and Arab media at the time – has now been thoroughly debunked by the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee. Its report on the issue published on Wednesday was fiercely critical of former Prime Minister David Cameron, deeming his government’s actions in Libya both before and since the intervention to have been founded on “erroneous assumptions” and an “incomplete understanding” of the situation and the country.
The report faulted Cameron on a long list of grounds for his decision to follow France in launching an intervention whose ostensible aim of protecting civilians quickly morphed into forcing regime-change.
Among much else, his government failed to carry out a “proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya;” It could not “verify the actual threat to civilians posed by the… regime” or support the claim that it would commit massacres, and indeed ignored evidence to the contrary. Even if the objective was to safeguard citizens in Benghazi, that was achieved within 24 hours of the start of the bombing as the regime’s forces pulled well back from the city. But the British government refused to engage in available options for a political solution, repeatedly snubbing overtures, and focused exclusively on regime-change by military means. In addition, it failed to identify the role played by so-called “militant Islamist extremists” in the rebellion or foresee that they would exploit it.
Mea culpa
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The Committee’s mea culpa on behalf of Britain will not bring back to life all the uncounted Libyans who were killed by the Nato bombing campaign, nor make life easier for the three million-plus who have had to flee their country since.
But it remains important as an admission of error, not least for those who opposed the intervention from the outset for precisely the same reasons cited in the report. At the time, these voices were shouted down by means of a concerted propaganda campaign that was played out in the Arab and Western media, which carried fabricated reports of massacres supposedly committed by the regime and of plans to subject Benghazi to a bloodletting on Benghazi.
I can attest from personal experience, and from having followed developments closely at the time, that French and British PR firms were hired to fabricate and plant stories and mislead the public about the situation, and to silence or slander anyone who was opposed to or sceptical about the wisdom of military intervention.
The Foreign Affairs Committee report made clear that Britain took its lead from France at the time, and cited testimony that the latter was motivated to act primarily to advance French strategic and commercial interests – as well as Sarkozy’s personal political ambitions. Much the same was said in 2013 by the former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, whose country also joined the bombing. He accused Sarkozy of exploiting an internal dispute in a largely peaceful and prosperous country and portraying it as a revolution to justify military intervention as a means of gaining privileged access for France to Libya’s oil and gas and its markets.
As for Lévy, he has made no secret of the motives that drove him to champion the Libyan rebels: namely, his “loyalty to Zionism and Israel” and his belief that Gaddafi’s regime was “one of the worst enemies of Israel.” Before Gaddafi was toppled, Lévy informed the Israeli Prime Minister that he had been assured by the country’s would-be future rulers that they would establish normal relations with Israel if they were to gain power. The offer was later denied, or perhaps withdrawn because Lévy went public with it prematurely.
Tragic situation
The situation in Libya in the five years since has become tragic. The country is in chaos, the displaced have not returned, and its resources – like Iraq’s – have been plundered by its rebels-turned-rulers. Billions dollars of un-frozen Libyan assets were sent back to Libya only to be sent out again into offshore bank accounts.
US, British and French Special Forces are now back on the ground in Libya, this time to wage war against “extremist Islamist groups” – groups empowered by their earlier intervention. Again, we are supposed to believe that they were deployed out of concern for the lives and well-being of Libyans, not in pursuit of Western interests such as keeping migrants away from European shores, and certainly nothing to do with the country’s oil, gas and other riches.
Berlusconi came clean about the real motives for the 2011 intervention. The British parliament conceded it was misconceived. Obama admitted it was the biggest mistake he made in his two terms in office. Yet there are still some in the Arab world who attempt to justify and defend it, while cheering on the next.
It is good to see that the truth about the intervention resurfaces from time to time. Its opponents were not endowed with prophetic powers or extraordinary insight or intelligence. They simply looked at the record of previous neo-colonial military adventures in the Arab world, considered their calamitous consequences, and learned the lessons.
