A coalition of confusion

The newness and arbitrariness of the attack on Libya is also exposed in the fact that it is being spearheaded, not by seasoned foreign policy hawks or serious diplomats, but by a new breed of rank amateur who knows next to nothing about geopolitical reality. Cameron has made himself spokesman for the military mission, yet this is a politician who has an utterly dysfunctional relationship with international diplomacy. In less than a year as British PM, he has isolated Islamabad and irritated the Israelis through his clueless, emotionally incontinent style of international politicking, which seems unanchored by anything so old-fashioned as a carefully worked-out geopolitical plan. He has also overseen a bizarre and hapless SAS venture in the very country – Libya – that he now claims to be saving. In France, two-bob philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy apparently played a key role in coaxing President Nicolas Sarkozy to take action in Libya, while in America former author of turgid tomes on genocide turned national security adviser, Samantha Power, was a key agitator for an attack. Never in the history of mankind has such a collection of know-nothings and narcissists led a military excursion into a sovereign state’s affairs.

The almost overnight formation of a Western ‘coalition’ against Libya does not spring from lingering colonialist instincts in Washington, London or Paris. Rather it speaks to a new and extremely dangerous reality. It reveals the incoherence and self-doubt at the heart of the West, to the extent that Western governments will go to quite extraordinary lengths to give the impression that their attack is not a Western initiative. It shows that foreign offices across the West are now staffed by people with little or no grasp of geopolitical reality. It has exposed the inability of the Western powers to drum up serious support or international consensus even for a relatively small-scale military operation: the Arab League, so keenly held up by Cameron as a moral fig leaf for the attack, expressed its concerns after just one night of bombings, while much of the Western media is warning about the possibility of ‘mission creep’ and getting bogged down, once again, in the unpredictable terrains of Africa.