[BronUVT]

Robin Shepherd: Libya’s a quagmire because our war aims were defined by liberal-left prejudices

Back in Libya, it is perfectly arguable that the end of Gaddafi would plunge that country too into bloody internecine warfare. It’s also perfectly arguable that Libya is a strategic irrelevance, and that if we’re dropping bombs on anybody in the Middle East it should be Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But that’s not the point, which is that the fetishisation of international law by Messrs Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy means that without a change of course we’ll never know whether the Libyan people were capable of building something which looks like Denmark, or whether the best they can manage is Iraq circa 2005.

The price of getting the hallowed UN resolution past the Russians and the Chinese was that we were forbidden from decapitating the regime or providing direct support to the rebels (not that we have any real clue who they are) via the use of ground forces.And what that means is that Gaddafi is more likely than not to die in his bed many years from now while his country settles into de facto partition ruled by him and his cronies on one side and by God (but not Obama, Cameron or Sarkozy) knows who on the other.

So it breaks down like this: plant your flag atop the gigantic dunghill known as international law and a dictator lives; pay lip service to said dunghill, get some sort of resolution that just about does the job, but go in there “shock and awe” style with the clear aim of regime change and a dictator dies.

What bothers me is why we have to persist with this whole charade just to please the Guardian and the BBC. If it was right to go in in the first place – and there are strong arguments both for and against that proposition – we should have gone in with war aims designed to achieve a real-world objective.
http://www.thecommentator.com/articl...eft_prejudices