FOGH of WAR

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Secretary General of NATO and a former Danish prime minister, gave an interview to Shaun Ley of Radio 4’s The World at One today that was little short of a disgrace. The interview will be available in the UK for a few days on the BBC iPlayer.

Rasmussen had made himself available in the light of the deaths of nine civilians, including two children, in Tripoli on Sunday. NATO has conceded that a missile overflew its military target. Rasmussen described the error as “a weapons systems failure”. He also accounted it “a very tragic event, a tragic accident actually”. Having found the phrase he wanted – “a tragic accident” – he used it as his default reference to the incident.

There was no acknowledgment in the interview, either by Ley or by Rasmussen, of the 15 civilians Libya says were killed by a rocket attack on the Sorman area of Tripoli in the early hours of this morning. This was certainly a residence, one owned by a close ally of Muammar Gaddafi. Taken to the scene, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen reported Libyan officials claiming that eight missiles had hit the compound and that two of the owner’s grandchildren along with their pregnant mother were killed. NATO has so far declined to comment on the attack but if what the Libyans say is true it can hardly be dressed up as “eight tragic accidents”.

Rasmussen, an accident waiting to happen

Referring to Sunday’s deaths, Rasmussen commented that “obviously the Gaddafi regime will use this tragic accident as part of their propaganda”. This is an extraordinary statement at so many levels. It seems to suggest that only one side in the conflict has any truck with propaganda. It seeks to imply that somehow the deaths are part of the crimes with which the regime is charged. It certainly suggests that the deaths should be viewed as above or separate from the conflict, as though no more responsibility attaches to NATO than if the children had happened to run out into the road in the path of one of its vehicles. And why should the Gaddafi government not make mention of the civilian deaths? If Danish civilians perished in some missile attack, whether or not the strikers called it an accident, would the Danish government draw a veil over it?

The notion that the deaths are fundamentally the fault of Gaddafi develops in Rasmussen’s argument in this passage: “We see the Gaddafi regime … launching rockets from mosques, placing bunkers near children’s playgrounds etc”. Of course, any right-thinking person can see that a country being attacked by foreign troops ought to have the decency to lay out formal battlegrounds away from built-up areas. Indeed, no civilised country ever sites military or intelligence within blast distance of residential buildings. Well, I say that … all around where we live there is a vast network of military and intelligence units including, it has been suggested by specialist investigative journalists, a “top-level NATO command post” that runs “a gigantic US computer system”. No doubt if Britain were subjected to aerial bombardment, such sites would be prime targets and perhaps we would be hit in “a tragic accident”.

Gaddafi, down but not out

It’s not at all clear who sets out the rules for confrontations in which one side claims it is being attacked and invaded by foreign powers and the other side claims it is protecting the people from their own government. Nazi Germany invaded several of its neighbours before and during the course of World War II. I expect Berlin complained that resistance movements – which it would no doubt have dismissed as Communists, extremists, terrorists and Jews – mounted guerrilla attacks on Germany’s brave soldiers in urban areas, using the populace as human shields. It is in the nature of guerrilla warfare, particularly as conducted in the homeland of the resistance, that it challenges the enemy to retaliate without committing atrocities.

Rasmussen said “We have carried out more than 11,000 sorties … we have damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 important military targets". Even if only ten percent of those sorties and those missile attacks were targeted at sites within blast range of homes, the least “collateral damage” they will have inflicted will be the extensive disruption of civilians’ lives. And who will pick up the tab for making good the damage?

Always at risk in Libya

When Shaun Ley questioned Rasmussen on NATO’s objectives in Libya, the Secretary General was at his most slippery. “There is no military solution solely” he said. “We need a political process and as part of that Gaddafi must go”. Now it is clear from this that regime change is part of NATO’s policy, although regime change is not provided for, implicitly or explicitly, in Resolution 1973, the United Nations instrument that enables the imposition of a no-fly zone on Libya. Making regime change a necessary part of the “process” is what commentators feared and forecast when they warned against so-called “mission creep”. We can be sure from this that the mission has crept.

But Rasmussen also said: “We have defined three very clear military objectives for our operation: a complete end to all attacks against civilians; withdrawal of Gaddafi’s forces to their bases; and immediate and unhindered humanitarian access and we will continue our operation until these objectives are met”.

Gaddafi's planes strike back

Each of these objectives has its unclear elements. If Gaddafi were to call a ceasefire and then rebels were to push out of Misrata and start trying to take other towns, what would NATO do? Attempt to halt them? And of course there are implications for the NATO objectives if NATO is itself beginning deliberately to attack civilians, as in the bloody Sorman carnage. If, as Rasmussen claims, Gaddafi’s military infrastructure is being destroyed, what would pass muster as the “bases” to which the troops should return? And as for the “humanitarian access”, how would that be policed except by what are called “boots on the ground”, which Resolution 1973 very definitely does not permit?

Ley did push Rasmussen on the increasing evidence that NATO’s solidarity is fraying and that few participants are looking for a long-drawn-out involvement. NATO has committed to a further three months of policing the no-fly zone, making six months in total thus far. This will mean that its involvement in the action will have cost the UK alone more than £500million. Rasmussen was evidently not prepared to engage with any idea of there being a limit on NATO’s capacity. “We do have the assets that are necessary to accomplish our mission” he declared and otherwise kept restating NATO’s determination.

Rebels swarm over a captured tank

As I read it, NATO has slid into an uncomfortable cleft stick in Libya. The rebels grow restive, agitating for more consistent, coherent and penetrating assistance in their struggle. If and when the conflict grinds to a halt, with whatever result, Libya’s economy will be too damaged for it to be able to rebuild without help from the international community. And certainly a new regime will soon denounce NATO if it is left to pick up the pieces by itself.

And then Gaddafi is not Hosni Mubarak and probably has grounds for his confidence that he has sufficient support to hold out longer than NATO will want to contemplate. But Libya is clearly deeply divided. What is to prevent a bloodbath of the defeated at the hands of the victors, whichever side prevails? Meanwhile, as other demands on governments’ resources start to take centre stage, politicians and the public will increasingly ask whether this commitment of cash and overstretched military might is really worth it. In sum, the whole adventure is a catastrophically badly planned and managed mess. Many of us warned at the outset that it would pan out like this.