Whatever Happened to David Cameron’s Libya Success?

An interesting thing about the Libya intervention is how, as the country collapsed into further fighting after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi, it was mentioned less and less by David Cameron. Whereas in 2011 the apparently successful military campaign was used to promote his leadership and dismiss any criticisms of it, by 2014 journalists had to goad him into discussing it. The former Labour leader Ed Miliband was right when he implied that Cameron is partly responsible for the Mediterranean refugee crisis. He was amazingly sanguine about the intervention’s aftermath. I warned at the time that war and peace aren’t sequential; the postwar environment is created on the ground during the conflict itself. You need to shape the outcome you want otherwise it will be shaped by others and you will spend years playing catch-up. It happened in Afghanistan; it’s happened in Libya. Fortunately for Cameron, he hasn’t suffered the sort of scrutiny that he inflicted on Gordon Brown for his handling of the Afghan campaign, but it’s unfortunate for the rest of us. He won a fantastic victory in May; like other re-elected Prime Ministers, he will rely more confidently on his instincts; but his foreign policy instincts during his first term were, frankly, lousy. Britain needs a more careful, contemplative David Cameron, which is why we must always remind him of his ‘success’ in Libya.

Libya’s Great Disappearing Act

I noted its gradual disappearance from his foreign policy statements with a sense of vindication.

When Tripoli fell to the rebels, it was tough being an opponent of the intervention, as the Prime Minister had clearly been proven right. In their speeches to the Conservative Party conference in October 2011, both Foreign Secretary William Hague and Defence Secretary Liam Fox used Libya to proclaim his leadership. We could not have ‘supported human freedom’ there had it not been for his ‘strength, determination and decisiveness’, Hague argued. Fox delivered similar praise: Cameron’s ‘statecraft, leadership and resolve’ had prevented a disaster. Speaking at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet that November, the Prime Minister claimed to have ‘kept the Arab Spring alive’, which was important to his worldview. He wanted ‘a strong and open approach to the world — one that both helps us and helps others.’

The campaign’s success was also used to dismiss criticisms of the government’s defence policies. In the summer of 2011, senior military figures complained that the intervention was stretching resources. When a Labour MP asked if he would reopen the ‘deeply flawed’ Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), Cameron attacked the Opposition’s ‘opportunism’. As hostilities came to an end, ‘we ought to be praising our armed forces and all that they have done.’ In fact, he told the audience at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, the campaign had shown that he was right to cut certain capabilities. We needed ‘fewer main battle tanks’ because we face ‘different kinds of threat’, such as instability in North Africa. ‘Those of us responsible for [the SDSR] didn’t spend a single day of the Libya campaign wishing we had taken things more slowly. On the contrary, Libya underlined the need for us to reshape our armed forces as rapidly as possible.’

As instability persisted after Gaddafi’s fall, however, the apparently successful intervention was mentioned less and less. In the 2012 Lord Mayor’s Banquet speech, which was given shortly after U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered in Benghazi, it shared just half a sentence with other government achievements. It was never used to back up the case for intervening in Mali. And the few times it was mentioned in the debate about attacking the al-Assad regime in 2013 it was to point out that in both cases only a summary of the legal advice had been published. Libya’s fall from grace finally ended with a thud last September when Newsnight’s Evan Davies asked the Prime Minister to name a successful intervention of his and he started talking about Afghanistan. ‘Right,’ said Davies, ‘but the one that was purely, purely yours, was Libya, wasn’t it?’

To me, this sounded like a tacit admission of failure.

Creating the best by preparing for the worst

One of my reasons for opposing the intervention was the absence of a postwar plan for Libya, which I worried would drag us back there.

Like the Bush administration with Afghanistan, the government seemed to be so afraid of a long, costly nation-building project that it didn’t seriously plan for after Gaddafi’s fall. Indeed, the Prime Minister was extraordinarily sanguine. Shortly after the campaign began, the Labour MP Dennis Skinner asked him what steps were being taken ‘to avoid an inter-tribal civil war’. ‘I do not believe that the only alternative to Colonel Gaddafi is some sort of tribal internecine warfare’, he replied. ‘We should be a little more optimistic than the honourable Gentleman sounds in his question.’ This reminded me of what Tony Blair reportedly said before the invasion of Iraq when he was briefed on its sectarian tensions: ‘That’s all history’.

Wrongly, many people think that war and peace are sequential: you fight the war, then after it you decide what the peace will look like. Cameron seems to think this. In his 2014 Newsnight interview, he separated the intervention’s goals from its aftermath. ‘[O]ur responsibility was to help the Libyan people in that hour of need. We did that; we now need to help them [rebuild]’. Yet helping them rebuild needed to be an essential part of the campaign. If you intervene somewhere, the best way to avoid nation-building is to plan for it and use force to create the circumstances it needs to succeed. If you wait for the fighting to finish, you’ll find that the postwar environment has been created by others and you’ll spend years trying to catch up. We learnt this lesson the hard way in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Libya has taught us it once again.

Miliband was right when he criticised the Prime Minister for assuming that the country ‘could be left to evolve and transform on [its] own’, which created the instability behind the refugee crisis. This is exactly the situation that I worried would drag us back into nation-building — and it may yet do. It wasn’t until five years after the initial conflict that British troops were deployed to Helmand…

War as politics by other means

Miliband was widely condemned for his Libya comments, I think because they came so out of the blue: he never held David Cameron to account in the same consistent way that Cameron criticised Labour’s handling of Afghanistan when he was Leader of the Opposition.

The perception problem that the Conservatives had after 1997 was a widespread belief that they were not a responsible alternative government. Britain is in an era of ‘valence politics’: according to Tim Bale, voters prefer ‘competence and credibility over commitment to a cause or class’. Cameron needed to project an image of the party as ‘a proficient alternative administration rather than an ideologically inspiring but potentially fissiparous crusade.’ By supporting the Afghan war in principle but attacking Labour’s incompetence in prosecuting it, he could portray the Conservatives as responsible on national security.

Ironically, given the above, an accusation he regularly made was that the government failed to plan for the aftermath of the initial intervention. Writing in the Independent in 2007, Cameron argued that we needed to avoid one of the mistakes of Iraq, which was ‘the absence of a proper plan.’ When listing the mistakes made both there and in Afghanistan in a 2008 speech, he mentioned ‘a failure to appreciate that establishing security must be the absolute and over-riding priority from day one.’ After Gordon Brown announced the end of the Iraq mission, he asked if a lesson for Afghanistan was the need for ‘careful planning, not just in the war-fighting but in the post-conflict stage?’ This consistent critique made it easier for Cameron to take advantage of crises without looking opportunistic. In July 2009, when the then Chief of the Defence Staff said that more helicopters would save soldiers’ lives, he was quick to take advantage of the subsequent uproar. Labour ‘have got to realise we are fighting a war.’ It was not simply about money, but ‘about commitment. About rolling up your sleeves and realising we need more of what we’ve got actually on the frontline.’

Miliband’s comments on Libya and the refugee crisis might have received a fairer hearing had he spent the preceding years consistently criticising the intervention and its aftermath. Cameron had more opportunities to talk about Afghanistan as British forces were continuously deployed there, but the real problem — for Labour, anyway — was that Miliband didn’t want to present his party as a responsible alternative government. He wanted to lead an inspiring crusade, and, as a result, was trounced in the election. Labour’s failure to hold the Prime Minister to account over the campaign was fortunate for him, but unfortunate for the rest of us.

Cameron Unbound

I was overjoyed when the Conservatives won in May, but I also worried about the implications for British foreign policy as the Prime Minister’s instincts were fairly lousy in his first term. For example, when he tried to pre-empt criticism of the 2010 SDSR and cuts to the armed forces, Cameron told broadcaster Andrew Marr that ‘we’ve got battle tanks ready to roll into Russia. That’s not what you need today.’ Several years later, Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed its territory, and repeatedly infringed British airspace. Libya is another example of his instincts creating unfortunate long-term problems. As we expand our campaign against Islamic State into Syria, their Libyan branch is taking advantage of the postwar chaos to entrench itself. Few, if any MPs raised this point in the debate last week. Yet I think it’s important that we keep reminding the Prime Minister of his ultimately unsuccessful intervention in Libya because it might sharpen his instincts and lead to better foreign policy.