Matthew Shaffer: Britain and Libya’s Special Relationship
[Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.]
The British were vocal proponents of international military intervention in Libya. David Cameron was the first Western leader to call unambiguously for a no-fly zone, and he later won accolades as an essential player in securing the U.N. Security Council resolution that implemented it. Then, Cameron’s secretary of state for defense, Liam Fox, became the first to acknowledge the unspoken truth that the real mission went beyond the U.N.’s stated goal of protecting civilians. “‘Mission accomplished,’” he said, “would mean the Libyan people free to control their own destiny. This is very clear — the international community wants [Moammar Qaddafi’s] regime to end.”
But while the Conservative PM and his cohorts are now leading the world in condemnation of Qaddafi, his Labor predecessors and much of the British elite were world leaders in Libya-toadying just a while ago. One of the worst manifestations of this was British arms sales to Libya. Another was the way in which Britain, in particular the London School of Economics, welcomed Qaddafi’s family and money with open arms. And yet another was the U.K.’s release of the Lockerbie bomber.
According to security analysts, weapons in Libya posed three distinct and obvious threats all along. The first was Qaddafi’s long history of arming known terrorist organizations. “Had you asked me four years ago, in 2003 or 2004, whether to sell weapons to Qaddafi, I would have said definitely no,” says Matthew Schroeder, director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). “Primarily because of Qaddafi’s long history of providing weapons to terrorists.” For example, “In the ’70s and ’80s, the British interdicted huge shipments of Libyan arms bound for the IRA.” And “Qaddafi is also rumored to have provided support for similar movements in Africa.”
The second danger was the potential (now all too visible) that arms could be used for brutal crackdowns on Qaddafi’s own people. Since Qaddafi is and has been known to be a lunatic unpopular with his people, it shouldn’t have been hard for Western states to foresee this possibility.
The third danger was that in a long-unstable and now-chaotic country such as Libya, the weapons — for example, those taken from looted armories and defecting military units and now held by rag-tag bands — will slip into black markets and terrorists’ hands. This is what happened after the deposition of regimes in Uganda in 1979 and Iraq in 2003, Schroeder says. And it’s why the allied forces today, though happy to fire their own missiles at Qaddafi loyalists, won’t arm the relatively unknown rebels.
But seemingly responsible nations, including Britain, sold arms to Libya anyway, according to a troubling new report on export licenses from the European Union...
Read entire article at National Review
The British were vocal proponents of international military intervention in Libya. David Cameron was the first Western leader to call unambiguously for a no-fly zone, and he later won accolades as an essential player in securing the U.N. Security Council resolution that implemented it. Then, Cameron’s secretary of state for defense, Liam Fox, became the first to acknowledge the unspoken truth that the real mission went beyond the U.N.’s stated goal of protecting civilians. “‘Mission accomplished,’” he said, “would mean the Libyan people free to control their own destiny. This is very clear — the international community wants [Moammar Qaddafi’s] regime to end.”
But while the Conservative PM and his cohorts are now leading the world in condemnation of Qaddafi, his Labor predecessors and much of the British elite were world leaders in Libya-toadying just a while ago. One of the worst manifestations of this was British arms sales to Libya. Another was the way in which Britain, in particular the London School of Economics, welcomed Qaddafi’s family and money with open arms. And yet another was the U.K.’s release of the Lockerbie bomber.
According to security analysts, weapons in Libya posed three distinct and obvious threats all along. The first was Qaddafi’s long history of arming known terrorist organizations. “Had you asked me four years ago, in 2003 or 2004, whether to sell weapons to Qaddafi, I would have said definitely no,” says Matthew Schroeder, director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). “Primarily because of Qaddafi’s long history of providing weapons to terrorists.” For example, “In the ’70s and ’80s, the British interdicted huge shipments of Libyan arms bound for the IRA.” And “Qaddafi is also rumored to have provided support for similar movements in Africa.”
The second danger was the potential (now all too visible) that arms could be used for brutal crackdowns on Qaddafi’s own people. Since Qaddafi is and has been known to be a lunatic unpopular with his people, it shouldn’t have been hard for Western states to foresee this possibility.
The third danger was that in a long-unstable and now-chaotic country such as Libya, the weapons — for example, those taken from looted armories and defecting military units and now held by rag-tag bands — will slip into black markets and terrorists’ hands. This is what happened after the deposition of regimes in Uganda in 1979 and Iraq in 2003, Schroeder says. And it’s why the allied forces today, though happy to fire their own missiles at Qaddafi loyalists, won’t arm the relatively unknown rebels.
But seemingly responsible nations, including Britain, sold arms to Libya anyway, according to a troubling new report on export licenses from the European Union...