/ 6 May 2011

The West should watch its steps

It’s the famous fog of war: we cannot yet be sure whether Gaddafi’s youngest son and his three grandsons were really killed on Saturday by a Nato bomb. The Libyan government says Saif al-Arab and the children were killed in an attack on a building where Muammar Gaddafi himself was staying and called it “a direct operation to assassinate the leader of this country”.

Nato denies an assassination attempt, as it has to, because that would break international law. But even through the fog, several things are clear enough. First, if Nato is allowed to attack Libya’s command and control system and if that command and control system is the Gaddafi family, then the line between bombing logistics and bombing them is barely visible. Second, many people will approve of trying to kill the colonel and whoever happens to be around him.

It is a brutally simple argument that has a brutal logic to it. If Gaddafi, his family and their henchmen are responsible for continuing the war against the rebels and thus for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people in Misrata and other Libyan towns, and if Nato’s job is to protect civilians, then isn’t it morally right to target the Gaddafis?

Why should wicked leaders be immune from the threat of imminent death while their people kill and are killed all around them? Wouldn’t it have been morally better to have assassinated Saddam Hussein rather than to have launched the full-scale invasion of Iraq that resulted in so many deaths? If, as the historian Simon Schama said this week, we revere the German officers who plotted to kill Hitler, what’s so problematic about trying to kill Gaddafi — or Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad? Finally, isn’t the agreement that leaders of countries don’t kill one another fine for them but, in the wider perspective, morally disgusting?

I think these arguments are wrong but I can’t deny that they are powerful and need to be taken seriously. Had Gaddafi, rather than his son, died at the weekend and the regime had then collapsed, how many of us would have wept? If it was assassination rather than targeted command and control, so what?

The overwhelming answer must be just two words — international law. The law may sometimes be an ass, and particularly when we are dealing with bloody and complex global issues, riven with hypocrisy and double standards. But it is all we have. The United Nations may be an infuriatingly slow, compromising and mealy-mouthed confederation of tyrannies, democracies and kleptocracies. But cast it aside, cast aside international law and there is nothing but might is right, arms, oil and profits.

Well, you might say, but isn’t that where we are already? Not quite. Many of us may feel great cynicism about some of the West’s war-making and the strange coincidence of military intervention and oil and gas reserves. I do. And yet shrugging off international law as a result leaves you where? In a worse, possibly much worse, position.

So, the terms of UN resolution 1973 that established the no-fly zone and authorised “all measures” to protect civilians, without permitting invasion (never mind assassination) really matter. Like most UN resolutions, there is a bit of fuzziness which international lawyers argue over. But killing the Gaddafi family to hasten an end to the fighting is way out of line. The same goes for sending British troops or supplying the rebels with rocket launchers and machine guns.

Shrugging it off would be legally and morally as bad as shrugging aside resolution 1441 before Iraq. We either think the UN matters or we don’t. There is no third way.

You might argue that all that is a bit theoretical and naïve. If it is in our interests, and in the interests of the Libyan people, for the rebels to win quickly then should we not at least turn aside — blink — while the necessary actions are taken and argue the legal points later?

Here again, the Iraqi example, and the earlier Afghan one, should haunt us. Interventions in countries we only half understand rarely go according to plan. Nobody thought that arming the Taliban and mujahideen against the Soviets would in some way lead to 9/11 and the “war against terror”. Few people — not enough people, certainly — thought that toppling Hussein would lead to a civil war on the bloody scale that happened.

In this case, too, although Gaddafi is clearly a kind of monster, who supported terrorism around the world and repressed his own people for decades, we cannot be sure what the effects of our intervention will be.

We need modesty and caution. I wonder whether United States President Barack Obama’s reluctance to get too involved partly reflects the US intelligence information about Islamist activity in the very same areas of eastern Libya now in rebel hands. Al-Qaeda documents that came into American hands in 2007 showed that many anti-Western jihadists had been recruited from this area of Libya. The WikiLeaks disclosures of US cables included a very worried report a year later about the role of radical imams and jihadists from eastern Libya who had gone to fight in Iraq.

I’m not saying that most, or even many, rebel Libyans are like that. I suspect a majority just want to be free of the Gaddafi tyranny and live easier, better lives. But I am saying that just because Gaddafi says there is al-Qaeda influence in Benghazi doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And isn’t it time that we cast aside the lethal, naïve belief that our enemy’s enemy is always our friend? We need to tread warily and take nothing for granted.

Beyond that, is there anything more useful to be said? Keeping going as we are looks like a recipe for a long and bloody stalemate. It is more than likely that Gaddafi’s endless offers of a ceasefire and peace talks are to be taken cautiously, weasel words from a dangerous man at the end of his tether.

Still, if there is any way to cajole him out of his Tripoli compound and into exile, it is likely to start with more talking. The biggest problem is the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, which means he has almost nowhere to flee to. If I’m in favour of international law shouldn’t I welcome that. ICC justice is waiting for all dictators, everywhere.

Yes, but getting him out without more bloodshed would be much easier if there was some — any — alternative. We have stuck the Gaddafis into a rat trap from which there is no escape, so it’s hardly surprising they won’t budge. Would it not be better to find a place from where he won’t be extradited and buy the ageing maniac a plane ticket? —