The nobility of intention in stopping Muammar Gaddafi doing a Srebrenica in Benghazi in March should not be doubted. As former Nato Ambassador Robert Hunter wrote in the Financial Times, between 1993 and 1995, British ministers worked tirelessly at the United Nations, at Nato and in the European Union to block any effective military action in Bosnia. Slobodan Milosevic’s murder machine rolled on and on as Serbs carried out their deadly designs in Bosnia and Kosovo.
In the House of Commons in 1995, Malcolm Rifkind, Foreign Secretary at the time, made his notorious statement on Srebrenica, explaining why the murder in cold blood of 8,300 Europeans – about half the number killed at Katyn – could not be prevented.
That failure to intervene in Bosnia haunts policymakers. It may explain why Sir Malcolm is now the most hot-blooded of Conservatives calling for the full arming of Islamist and tribal paramilitaries so they can descend on Tripoli.
But strong government knows how to retreat when it can rather than retreat when it must. The art of stopping a war requires as much leadership, bravery and risk-taking as starting one. There can be little doubt now that Britain’s hasty engagement in Libya – its third Muslim war in less than a decade – is a strategic blunder. Strategy is not the same as morality or legality.
The murder of Libyan rebel leader General Abdel Fata Younis by Islamists should serve as a warning. There will always be plausible English or French-speaking representatives or delegations ready to explain to politicians desperate to do something that just one more air strike, one more unofficial squad of trainers or perhaps some helicopters will do the trick.It rarely does. Libya is seven times the size of France, which is twice the size of Britain. Much of it is desert. The people of Tripoli and Benghazi loathe one another. The idea that a Benghazi group would be welcome in Tripoli is silly. Lord Salisbury said that most mistakes in British foreign policy arose from using the wrong-scale maps. Did anyone tell David Cameron and William Hague how big Libya is? The Libyan adventure is costing more than £1 million a day.
The Prime Minister cannot promise more cash for the Ministry of Defence. Labour will not find more money either. The markets are not interested in defence. After two decades when the military were at the centre of politics from the first Iraq war, through the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya, the nation is tired of politicians putting on tin hats and sending out school-leavers to be target practice .
As Tory MP Rory Stewart told the House of Commons, we do not honour fallen soldiers by heaping more dead ones on top of them. Better an unjust peace than a war without end. The question is which politicians or which party can stop the fighting and let the nation enjoy a decade or two of peace. But our leaders stagger from one conflict to another. The mass murders, torture and atrocities in Syria are worse than anything in Libya. But we can do nothing there, just as we cannot launch war to dislodge Robert Mugabe or stop Iran building nuclear weapons. War is the continuation of politics by other means. Perhaps it is time to try other means, as we are no longer succeeding with war.
Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former Foreign Office minister
