These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping loudly in Tripoli. The news of the rebels’ victory may be a shade premature at time of writing — they have form in overstating their conquests — but it looks as if ol’ Muammar has had his lot.
These are heady days for the proponents of liberal evangelism. Saif Gaddafi had to leave a telephone call because, he explained, ‘There is shooting inside my house’ and a little further away there are people whooping loudly in Tripoli. The news of the rebels’ victory may be a shade premature at time of writing — they have form in overstating their conquests — but it looks as if ol’ Muammar has had his lot. Perhaps Saif, at least, can be given safe passage to his old friend Peter Mandelson’s breathtakingly expensive new house in ‘a select area of London’, or he could bunk down with the Rothschilds and take out his undoubted frustrations on grouse.
Liberal evangelism was the creed espoused, if not by name then by nature, of Tony Blair, once he had tired of the humdrum business of running the NHS and so on. It is not always wrong-headed: there was a good case for our intervention in Bosnia even if it was, at times, under the leadership of the UN, fabulously inept. But it led us to the invasion of Iraq, which was a grotesque mistake, shifted the purpose of our mission in Afghanistan — and its mantle is now worn by David Cameron, who precipitously involved us in what became the Libyan civil war.
It is probable that had we not become involved in Libya, Gaddafi would not now be hunkered down in a rathole prior to fleeing the country. And so our Prime Minister will reflect that this was a job well done: limited engagement with little risk to our own forces and the removal from power of a lunatic. It seems, at this moment, almost pragmatic; we did not involve ourselves militarily in Bahrain, because their despot was western-friendly and we wished him to remain in power. We did not intervene in Syria despite the deaths of almost as many rebels as have died in Libya, because firstly we were militarily unable to do so and in any case the vast bulk of the Syrian opposition — the Islamist block — loathes us far more than it loathes President Bashar Assad and demanded no outside intervention.
That is how it has worked out, so far. But we shouldn’t let this disguise the fact that it was nonetheless a bad case of liberal evangelism which prompted Cameron into action and it still seems to me more likely than not that we will be less happy with the new rulers of Libya, in the long run, than we were with the old one. I suspect they will be less keen on us, less amenable. I certainly don’t foresee any of the triumphant Islamists joining Mandelson and Rothschilds in a shooting party in Sussex unless they have taken the precaution of strapping several pounds of Semtex to their chests first.
Certainly, the manner in which we involved ourselves in Libya was preferable to the manner in which we involved ourselves in Iraq, even if I think both involvements were misguided. The contradiction at the heart of liberal evangelism, as we have seen, is that there is not the slightest indication that the people of the middle east wish, themselves, to establish agreeable secular democracies within their countries. They may, like us, consider their leaders to be brutal despots, but in many if not all cases they wish to replace them with a form of government which is slightly worse – i.e., slightly less liberal. This is particularly the case with those who are attempting to overthrow Ba’athist or Arab Nationalist despots, as in Libya and Syria.
Ba’athism at least had a secular element to it; women were allowed to work, go to school and so on. But both Tony Blair and George W. Bush seemed perpetually amazed that, when offered the chance, the people of the Middle East did not choose amenable liberals to lead them, but the most maniacal of Islamists. You may remember how Blair reacted when the people of Palestine voted (unexpectedly, if you were as deluded as Blair) for Hamas. He told them to have another vote and get it right this time because Hamas was absolutely ghastly. Beneath the skin of every liberal evangelist, then, is someone who is not terribly liberal at all when it comes to allowing people to choose their own government. They are OK only if they choose someone of whom the liberal evangelist approves. In this authoritarianism, Bush and Blair were not so very different to the Islamists against whom they were fighting.
That’s the moral issue we need to sort out if we intend to continue intervening, even in a piecemeal and limited fashion, in other people’s affairs. We either take the pragmatic approach and when a crisis occurs do not intervene at all unless our own interests are threatened, or we intervene in the full knowledge that we will help bring to power a regime which is even more antithetical to our interests than the one which it replaced. There is no halfway house. It will be no use, for example, in David Cameron whining six months from now when women are forced by law to wear burqas in Tripoli and are not allowed out on their own, or when the country descends into either a religious or tribal war. It will have become a disaster partly of his own making.
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