It was not that MPs on the Commons foreign affairs committee pulled their punches. They did not throw any punches at all. Tony Blair’s anticipated roasting over how he cosied up to Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya generated no heat and little light. It was like somebody had forgotten to turn on the grill.
Asked about the period from 2004, when he famously met the Libyan dictator in his Bedouin-chic tent, to 2011, when British and French bombing helped overthrow him, Blair reverted to what is known in interventionist circles as the Iraq invasion defence of last resort. Namely: who knows what might have happened, but if we had not acted, it could have been worse.
“I can tell you today obviously Libya is a real security problem, it is a security problem for us actually here. But I don’t think you can make the judgment as to whether it would be better if we had not intervened. Because you then have got to say how that would then have played out as Gaddafi tried to cling to power and others tried to remove him. You can look at Syria today where we didn’t intervene by the way and say that is even worse,” Blair said.
Blair’s case for engaging Gaddafi was not without merit. The Libyan dictator took fright at the US-British overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003. His resulting decision to surrender his weapons of mass destruction was ironic. He actually had WMDs, whereas Saddam did not.
On the other hand, as Blair admitted, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad saw what happened to Gaddafi after he disarmed, and learned the opposite lesson. He retained his chemical weapons, later using them against his own people. Even then, Assad’s actions prompted no Iraq-style retribution.
Blair claimed post-2004 Libya had become an invaluable partner in countering terrorist violence. Continuing in the realm of what might have been, he argued if Gaddafi had retained his WMDs, those weapons might now be in the hands of Islamic State.
Hypothesis aside, it is true Isis’s expanding foothold in Libya’s coastal areas, adjacent to key oilfields, is prompting predictions the west may soon re-intervene militarily. Lord Williams, the former UN envoy, told the BBC on Friday that Syria-style airstrikes were a distinct possibility.
France is warning of growing Isis links with Boko Haram in northern Nigeria and with Saharan and Sahel Islamists. There is talk of Isis training suicide pilots in Libya to launch air attacks on Italy, while the group is said to be threatening to destroy Roman ruins at Sabratha.
Blair failed to dispel long-standing concerns that bringing Gaddafi in from the cold came at too high a price. Suspicions remain that the Lockerbie investigation, the investigation into the murder of PC Yvonne Fletcher, and into Libyan complicity in IRA terrorism were all to some degree compromised.
This is not to mention the fact that Britain’s then prime minister lent international respectability to a known murderer and torturer of his own people; or that counter-terrorism cooperation led directly to British-Libyan involvement in illegal US rendition. This sort of cynical western collusion with a hated dictator, underpinned by self-interested oil and trade calculations, helped spur the 2011 Arab spring revolt in Libya, as in Egypt and elsewhere.
Blair was wholly correct in one respect: chaotic, largely ungoverned Libya now poses a grave security threat to Britain, in terms both of Isis bases and people smuggling. The UN will host urgent talks in Rome on Sunday in a bid to create a unity government. If it fails, Europe potentially faces a second Syria – this time right on its doorstep.
