LIBYA – RATION the RHETORIC

Yesterday, on the eighth anniversary of the Commons vote in favour of the illegal invasion of Iraq, David Cameron laid before parliament the rationale for the United Nations’ resolution to impose a so-called no-fly zone on Libya. From the moral high ground on which Cameron plants his feet, the issue is so very simple. Gaddafi is a bad man and he must be taught a lesson. Primary schoolchildren could articulate the position just as persuasively. It is what I call The Bogie Man Theory of History, or, as the Americans would call it, The Boogey Man Theory.

Not that there is any significant opposition to this in the House. It has been observed before (though I am unable to verify an attribution) that “when the House is united, it is invariably wrong”. Yesterday confirmed that sentiment. Nick Clegg, whose party opposed the Iraq invasion, sat doing the gravely nodding dog act beside his coalition leader. Ed Miliband rushed to sound as resolute and determinedly courageous as Cameron, as if anybody gives a tuppenny damn what the British Labour Party says about the issue. You cannot expect sense from Labour on matters of British imperialism. I can never forget that, just a fortnight after describing himself as “an inveterate peacemonger”, Michael Foot (of all people) was unconditionally supporting Margaret Thatcher’s adventure in the south Atlantic, an exercise that, by itself, almost certainly kept the Tories in power (and so Labour out of office) for the following fifteen years.

Cameron in the Gulf States last month

Britain cannot stand idly by, is Miliband’s argument, while Gaddafi massacres his own people. Well, I want to ask: why not? What do the ambassadors of, for the sake of argument, Hungary, Barbados, Venezuela, Laos and Gabon have to say about the implied criticism that they are indeed perfectly happy to stand idly by? Why does Britain have to be the one who takes it upon herself to punish the bogie man of the sands? Apart from being the most extensive supplier in history of armaments to the country, Britain has no particular historical links with Libya, certainly none comparable to those of Italy, of which Libya was a colony for most of the first half of last century. Yet Silvio Berlusconi’s input into the no-fly zone argument is not widely recorded. Perhaps he has been too busy entertaining under-age women this week (as every other week).

Gaddafi cultivates the Ruritanian look

Throughout the thrilling people’s revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak earlier this year, we heard daily about how wonderful is the Egyptian army. So why didn’t the UN put pressure on Egypt to send its fabled troops over the border to repel Gaddafi? Other member states of the Arab League – Jordan, Kuwait and Morocco, for instance – have disciplined military strength. It makes considerably more geopolitical sense for Arab nations physically to lead the campaign to bring Gaddafi to heel.

Cameron, basking in evidently widespread approval for having played a supposedly canny hand with both the UN and the US, assures that he is not “grandstanding” on this matter. Of course he is. Cameron veers between invoking the “moral” argument that Miliband articulated and reassuring his political base that it is “in Britain’s interests” to lead the world’s reaction to Gaddafi’s rush towards civil war. These interests begin and end with the international supply and cost of oil. At least when he concedes that much, Cameron is approaching a soupçon of candour.

The argument about morality is bankrupt. When, on the BBC News last night, Nick Robinson asked the PM about his position on Bahrain, Cameron waved it away: different problem, different dynamic, different order of morality. Here’s a significant difference: picking a fight with the Saudi forces now called into the Bahraini kingdom to put down the rebellion is much more challenging than picking a fight with Gaddafi’s raggle-taggle air force of conscripted peasants and Saharan mercenaries. Clearly, the military might of a consortium consisting of Britain, France and – in the second wave perhaps – the USA is not going to have much trouble wiping out Libya’s military might.

Gaddafi visiting Berlusconi in Rome, 2009

Or is it? The invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan figured it would be the work of a few weeks at most. Libya might be as straightforward to quell as Serbia or it might not. Gaddafi has not lasted this long in power without being a wily and tough operator. The ceasefire announced yesterday by his foreign minister, the wonderfully named Mussa Kussa, is certainly a sham. But it has already had the desired effect. It has wrong-footed the west and sent governments into a further huddle. There will be more of this.

So Britain has embarked on another military interference in the internal affairs of another sovereign nation with consequences just as unknowable as they always are. The hubris – of the very interference, of the self-aggrandisement, of the cloak of proclaimed morality, of the certainty of military superiority – is breathtaking.

And then, seeing as no one seems yet to have asked, I ask it: who pays? Simple. We do. Today’s Daily Telegraph, while busy lining up Cameron for canonisation as a war leader, gaily trumpets on its front page that “some families will have £3,500 wiped off their annual incomes next month because of tax increases and cuts to benefits”. Oh good. How much less pain they will feel to know that this loss of income will now be largely spent on an utterly unpredictable big-willy experiment in the North African desert. How can a government that is in the throes of undermining – in some cases fundamentally undermining – every public enterprise in Britain gaily decide to throw money at a totally unnecessary interference in a foreign civil war?

Intimates no more – Sarkozy and Gaddafi in 2007

Well, you may say, what would you do? Just sit back and let Gaddafi massacre his brave populace? I am not a politician, nor about to be one. I don’t have to have a foolproof bill of fare ready to execute tomorrow. Nor do I have to accept the convention of starting from here. I do have a long-term proposal that, had it been put into effect when I first proposed it five years ago, might have avoided the situation that we now face. Here it is.

We must give the United Nations actual power and that of course means power greater than that of any one member. The UN charter, still almost exactly as written in 1945, needs substantial revision. The permanent members of the Security Council must agree to surrender their veto, the prerogative of the bully over the powerless. No member can be allowed exemption.

The veto means that the UN has no muscle to flex against the US or China or the other elite nations. Which of them will volunteer to forego a veto? It would need a visionary party leader or presidential candidate to carry the case with his own electorate, so as to take a mandate to the other Security Council members; a diplomat of rare persuasive power, who implicitly understands the global gain of a truly powerful UN, to convert even one of the holders of the veto. But someone needs to attempt it. What is political power for if not to change the world?

Tony Blair enjoys a quick two-step with his good pal

The point of this exercise is to create a UN capable of credibly policing the behaviour of all member states. UN peacekeeping forces, made up of recruits from any and every member state, handsomely rewarded by all the members in proportion to their GDP, must be the only troops permitted to move freely across the territories of the disputing nations. And this should apply to internal, tribal and internecine strife as well as that between separate nations. Meanwhile, the remit of the UN’s International Court of Justice needs to be widened so as not to depend on the consent of those states that are party to a dispute, another tough sell.

The UN should assume the power to order the immediate cessation of hostilities between member states. Waging war must be against the UN’s bedrock principles. Any member visiting warfare on another should be suspended forthwith from UN membership. In practice this must mean that all other member states, including those sympathetic to the miscreant’s cause, suspend all trade and other dealings with the suspended member. A blanket economic freeze would soon encourage a government to halt hostilities. The UN must then have the resources to assume control of negotiation of a settlement between the disputatious nations. Warfare must be a gambit that is made impracticable because it makes each of the warring nations an international pariah. If both sides are taken out of benefit of UN membership, the issue of ‘blame’ is largely futile. The UN negotiators can then begin with a level playing field.

Libyan rebels on the Benghazi road

The UN’s power to intervene in a sovereign nation’s internal affairs would be a more complex matter than preventing state-to-state confrontation. The UN’s remit should be truly global and therefore probably cannot be automatically parochial. Matters such as the suppression of a particular tribal or religious grouping within a nation state would have to be confronted on a case-by-case basis. But a case like that of Libya or indeed Bahrain is not so complex as to be beyond a newly-constituted UN to resolve. Moreover, the UN could hold sway over issues other than warfare. It could wield its power, no longer fettered by national vetoes, to impose restrictions on the activities that contribute so catastrophically to the destruction of the environment. But that is a road down which to travel on another occasion.

In the absence of a UN rebuilt along the lines that I propose, we have another potential disaster taking shape in a country that can ill afford to be ravaged by years of war. Today‘s self-satisfied certainties in London and in Paris and, more cautiously, in Washington, may well look rather less confident tomorrow or a week or a month hence. We shall see. But at this particular moment, I feel like invoking an angry cry of just eight years ago: Not In My Name.