Libya

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

What didn’t happen in 2011

In the run-up to every New Year, newspapers and the blogosphere are full of articles about what happened in the year just gone. 2011 was a particularly eventful year so there will be much to pick from. But what about the things that did not happen, though they were widely expected? Here are five things that did not take place — though, as the year unfolded, many people would have bet on their occurrence: 1) Algeria’s revolution. As one North African dictator after another fell to pro-democracy protesters, everyone expected Algeria to be next. But it wasn’t. there are many reasons for this, as Hakeem Debouche and Susi Denison argue

Thursday

David Blackburn

Woolf tucks into perfidious Albion

Yesterday night’s news that a senior FCO official lobbied Oxford University on behalf of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi adds more ordure to the already fetid story of Britain’s role in Colonel Gaddafi’s rehabilitation. The Woolf Inquiry into Saif’s dealings with British universities and businesses found that, ‘It was made clear [to Oxford] … that the FCO would appreciate help in this case since Libya was opening up to the West again.’  Oxford resisted; but this episode has hardly covered Britain’s elites in glory: the civil service, BAE and august universities are all criticised in Woolf’s report. Murmurs of disquiet about the Labour Party’s relationship with the Gaddafi clan continue to sound in certain quarters

Wednesday

Daniel Korski

Paying for justice

To British ministers, the role that the International Criminal Court played over Libya was key – it made clear that Colonel Gaddafi’s actions were unacceptable and would be subject to international law. Tory MP Dominic Raab even wrote a piece in The Times about the need for Libyans to rely on the ICC in The Hague, rather than seek retribution and revenge against Gaddafi and his loyalists. And it wasn’t only the British government. German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi should be tried by the ICC: ‘Gaddafi should have a trial according to the law, something he never did with his opponents,’ Merkel said when

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

Now will we learn the truth about Saif’s British ties?

Now that Saif Gaddafi has been captured, the race will be on to interview him from a prison cell and ask what his business was with the various figures of the British establishment with whom he was so close. CoffeeHousers will remember the 2009 party at the Rothschilds’ manor in Corfu: Saif, Mandy and Nat Rothschild. A little later, Charles Moore revealed in The Spectator that the trio were later reunited in a shooting party at Lord Rothschild’s Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. I spoke to Lord Mandelson a few weeks after the piece appeared, and thought CoffeeHousers may be interested in the transcript. The noble lord was outraged at Charles’

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Saif Gaddafi captured — but what now?

Remember when Saif Gaddafi was the Anointed One of those who wanted a freer, more liberal Libya? Now, he’s at the mercy of militiamen in the city of Zintan, having been captured today. It leaves Abdullah al-Senussi, the former intelligence chief, as the most infamous member of the old regime still on the run. The details of the capture are still hazy, like so much else during Libya’s revolution. What’s striking is that, unlike his father, Saif Gaddafi appears to have been unharmed by the process. Reuters are sure they spoke with him earlier today (although the man wouldn’t confirm his identity), and the only wounds he was carrying were,

Tuesday

Jonathan Jones

Gingrich to the fore

Yesterday saw three national polls and three different leaders in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Politico’s Battleground poll (conducted early last week) shows Herman Cain leading Mitt Romney by two points. CNN’s latest (conducted over the weekend) has Romney narrowly leading Newt Gingrich, with Cain down in third. Most eye-catching of all is the PPP poll (also conducted over the weekend), which has Gingrich in first place, followed by Cain and then Romney in third. These polls do have one thing in common: they’re good news for Newt Gingrich. Whether he’s actually in the lead or not, he’s certainly well ahead of where he was last month. He’s

Sunday

Daniel Korski

American isolationism and its consequences

I’ve spent the last couple of days in the United States, far away from the brouhaha in Europe. What has struck me most during meetings with US officials is how low down their list of priorities Europe — and indeed Britain — comes. This is an Asian Century, and the US means to focus inwards and eastwards but not elsewhere. As an official put it to me, “we see Britain moving away from Europe and being distant to us.” There is even talk of closing down US European Command. This new focus will have a number of consequences. Take Libya, for instance. The UK and France could have fought the

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Libya’s revolution, deflated

Gaddafi was buried this morning, but Libya’s problems remain firmly above ground. The news emerging from the country is mostly grim: a possible massacre by anti-Gaddafi fighters; the hint of complicity on the part of Libya’s new leadership; Saif Gaddafi’s continuing elusiveness, and so on. Revolution and civil war are never done cleanly, sure. But just because the current situation is unsurprising doesn’t make it any less shocking. Unsurprising yet shocking. Much the same could be said of Mustafa Abdul-Jalil’s declaration that Islamic Sharia law would be the “main source” of all legislation in Libya from now on. Unsurprising, because Libya is, on the whole, a conservative Muslim country. Shocking,

Sunday

Jonathan Jones

Gaddafi’s death boosts support for Libya intervention

In August, I showed that the rebels’ success in toppling Gaddafi’s regime had boosted British support for the intervention in Libya – and David Cameron’s handling of it. Unsurprisingly, this week’s news appears to have done the same. Even though Gaddafi’s death was not an explicit goal of the intervention, it seems to have been many people’s definition of success. 62 per cent now say the military action is “going well”, up sharply from 46 per cent last week: As a result, 45 per cent now support the decision to take military action, while only 31 per cent think it was wrong – the lowest opposition since the start of

Saturday

Douglas Murray

The End of a Delusion

The sight of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi blood-stained and bewildered, pulled around by a crowd in the final moments of his life is not a sight that will cause much pity. For more than four decades he had none for those Libyans whom he repressed and killed — anymore than he had for the victims on Pan Am Flight 103, his other multiple acts of terrorism, or his pointless and bloody interventions across Africa. Yet there is something pitiful about it: perhaps most obviously because watching his end is to watch the end of a delusion. Even more than Saddam Hussein crawling out of a hole in the ground and saying

Ben Rayner

Right to reply: How we beat the Beeb

A slight change to the normal rules of engagement for this latest post in our ‘Right to reply’ series. Whereas these posts normally take issue with what your Coffee House baristas have written, this one takes issue with the post by the BBC’s Jon Williams that we put up yesterday. It’s by Al Jazeera’s Ben Rayner: In wars reputations of whole news organizations can be made or broken very quickly. And the spin on the result is almost as important as the reality. Undoubtedly the BBC took a fearful kicking in the press over its coverage of the fall of Tripoli in August. To the British papers, Sky’s Alex Crawford

Friday

Jon Williams

Right to reply: Why the BBC still matters across the world

Reading Fraser’s post last night, you’d be forgiven for thinking the BBC is running up the white flag in terms of its global reporting. Yesterday — as Gaddafi was breathing his last in Sirte — Coffee House was praising Sky and Al Jazeera, and pouring scorn on the BBC’s “stifling bureaucracy”, accusing us of being “short sighted”, “slow-moving” and being constantly “bested” by others in terms foreign news. There’s only one problem with Fraser’s analysis: the facts don’t stand up to scrutiny. Timing is everything. Yesterday the BBC’s Gabriel Gatehouse was the only UK broadcaster in Sirte. On the biggest day of the eight-month story, only the BBC was at

Peter Hoskin

Beyond Gaddafi, America turns its attention to Pakistan

It’s hard to recall a more grisly complement of newspaper covers than those this morning. Only the FT refrains from showing either Gaddafi’s stumbling last moments or his corpse, whereas the Sun runs with the headline, big and plain: “That’s for Lockerbie”. The insides of the papers are more uncertain. There are doubts about the details, such as what has happened to Gaddafi’s infamous son Saif. And there are doubts about the general tide of events too. Several commentators, including Peter Oborne, make the point that the passing of Gaddafi is only the first phase in Libya’s struggle towards democracy — and it is a struggle that might easily be

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Al Jazeera scores another victory in the information war

Now that Gaddafi has been killed, which television station will the world turn to? I suspect that, right now, Al Jazeera will be on in No.10 and the White House, and indeed television sets across Asia and India. At a time when the BBC is retreating from global news, its Doha-based rival is expanding — and this has harsh implications. The Arab Spring demonstrated the importance of media to world affairs, and the Americans are mindful that they’re losing this battle. The America-style television news formula — celebrity newscasters and short packages rather thin on analysis — go down badly outside America. ‘We are in an information war and we

Daniel Korski

The Colonel’s end

After more than 40 years of murderous rule and months fighting his own people, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has finally been caught, and killed, in his hometown of Sirte. This marks the end of the formal struggle against the Colonel’s regime, and, as such, is a great event for all Libyans. But Col Gaddafi’s death does create some complications for the new Libyan authorities. They have avoided a drawn-out judicial drama — like Slobodan Milosevic’s — which could have rallied people in the ex-dictator’s support. But his death also robs the new Libyan government of an opportunity to show that they are better than he was, by allowing a process of

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Gaddafi’s Warning to Other Dictators: Shoot First & Shoot Them All

Now that Colonel Gaddafi is dead, there’s a lot stuff flying about Twitter along the lines of Are you watching Mr Mugabe/Assad/Ahmadinejad? I’m sure they are. Few people are likely to mourn Gaddafi’s death but one should not, I fear, suppose that his eclipse weakens other distatorial regimes or vastly emboldens their respective opposition movements. It would be grand if this were so but foolish to presume it must be. Indeed, one can plausibly argue that a quite different message has been sent by this Libyan uprising and that this message warns other ghastly regimes to crack down harder and faster to ensure that dissent is suppressed before it has

Justin Marozzi

The post-Gaddafi future | 20 October 2011

We tweeted a link to this earlier, but thought CoffeeHousers would appreciate this Spectator article from August on the future of Libya. The question for Libyans, as they take their first momentous steps into the post-Gaddafi era, is whether they can now build a government and country worthy of their heroic struggle against one of the world’s worst tyrants. For decades, conventional thinking about Arab nations, especially among the experts, argued that they were best ruled by ‘strongmen’, a western euphemism for pro-western dictators such as the deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and his former counterpart in Tunisia Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. According to this line of thought, Arabs

Peter Hoskin

Gaddafi dead?

Let’s keep the question mark in the headline for now, but it does sound as though Colonel Gaddafi’s elusion from his opponents may have come to an end. Representatives of Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC) are claiming that the deposed dictator was captured in Sirte this morning, and is possibly now dead. There has been no independent verification thus far, but the city is said to be echoing to the sound of celebratory gunfire. UPDATE: Still no confirmation from anyone beyond the NTC, although Al Jazeera is showing gruesome video footage of what’s claimed to be Gaddafi’s corpse being rolled around a street in Sirte. And there’s this photo too.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

MoD to-do list

A day into his new job, Phillip Hammond would be excused for sitting back and wondering what he has let himself in for. The job of defence secretary is every Tory’s dream, and the businessman-turned-politician is well-placed to excel in it. But the armed forces and the Ministry of Defence face a number of challenges that would test even history’s greatest defence and war secretaries. Six challenges stand out: 1) To reshape the military’s structures, systems and capabilities. This should be done according to the decisions taken in the SDSR to place defence on a surer financial footing. Much of what needs to be done has been set in train,

Saturday

Peter Hoskin

Fox hunt

This is one Fox who doesn’t have the benefit of a hole to bolt into. He is on open ground, and exposed even more this morning by fresh revelations surrounding his relationship with Andrew Werritty. A business card and a self-aggradising title, that certainly smelt of impropriety. But now we’re talking about sensitive business meetings arranged by Werritty, and attended by both him and Fox. It’s a whole different level of concern. And it leaves Fox in a most difficult position. The FT has the full story, but basically Werritty arranged for Fox to meet a group of businessmen in Dubai looking to transfer “communications technology” to the Libyan rebels.