David Cameron’s statement to the House of Commons on Friday March 18 after the adoption of the United Nations Security Council resolution permitting military action against Libya under the justification of enforcing a no-fly-zone the previous day mentioned:
"[W]e simply cannot stand back and let a dictator, whose people have rejected him, kill his people indiscriminately. To do so would send a chilling signal to others striving for democracy across the region. And neither would it be in Britain's interests."
There are a number of points about the Libyan intervention in light of his comments, including:
- This is the same Libyan dictator who, until the current events, bought many of his weapons from companies in the UK and EU, and whose elite Khamis brigade troops were trained by the SAS (though after recent operational results, it may be the Libyan dictator who feels that he got the short end of that particular deal)
- Until the uprisings of the last few months spreading and continuing across the Arab World, British interests seemed very firmly in backing such dictators, despite a plethora of Human Rights reports covering the last few decades of torture and repression carried out by regimes in the region. Western support for both Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali have not yet faded from memory.
- David Cameron’s recent Middle East tour was all about furthering British commercial interests in the region – specifically arms trades with the region's motley group of monarchs with several representatives of arm manufacturers in tow. At the same time, British defense minister Gerald Howarth was attending the region’s largest arms fair in Abu Dhabi, where another 93 British companies were doing business.
Taking the above into account, it is widely held that the long-time presence of the various collection of Middle Eastern despots was in no small part due to Western support, a fact that automatically negates any altruism on the part of the same governments when extolling the virtues of military intervention. Without the weapons, training, and diplomatic legitimacy and support given to regimes from Libya to Tunisia to Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, it is doubtful that they would have survived up until today given that popular dissatisfaction against them had been brewing for decades.
The obvious contradiction between words and action was plainly on display during Cameron's visit to the Middle East at the end of February after the deposition of Egyptian President Mubarak, stopping off to praise the Egyptian revolution (by meeting with the military junta then left in control) before jetting off to Kuwait to promote British Trade, with a third of the trade delegation made up from the defense and aerospace industry. When confronted with accusations of double standards of promoting democracy in the region while promoting arms deals to erstwhile Gulf allies, Cameron stated “Democracies have a right to defend themselves”. The description of any of the Gulf States, including Kuwait, as a democracy is enough to highlight the emptiness of the ridiculous self-serving rhetoric which came from the British Prime Minister at the time. The fact that the most recent use of weapons by any of the Gulf States has not been to defend themselves, but to brutally crack down on protesters in Bahrain, most recently by attacking hospitals in the capital Manama only adds insult to injury. That the escalation of violence is being carried out with the co-operation of the “Peninsula Shield Force”, made up of members of the Gulf Co-operation Council such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE means that the likelihood of Western weapons being used against the protestors is extremely high if not inevitable. That it is being done under the eyes of the World with relatively mild criticism from the West is also not lost on the people of the region and beyond.
Ironically, one of the reasons why the United Nations Security Council was considered an inappropriate forum in some quarters to discuss the Libya crisis was due to the local nature of the conflict, until the foreign intervention it was considered an internal conflict not affecting any external state. The issue of suppression of the Bahraini protests would at least appear to be an equal candidate for Security Council intervention as the killing of Bahraini’s is now being overseen by the militaries of other Gulf nations, meaning it has now arguably become an international rather than internal issue.
The relative silence and inaction of Britain and the West vis-à-vis the bloody and violent actions of their Bahraini ally (a benevolent monarch or oppressive dictator depending on which side is supported), as well as that of their partner in the war on terror Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh (another of Cameron’s regional democrats ) whose forces killed more than 50 protestors mostly by sniper fire during demonstrations on Friday 19th March, exposes any claims that the West’s intervention in Libya is anything about preventing “a dictator, whose people have rejected him, kill[ing] his people indiscriminately”.
The “chilling signal” that Britain has no real interest in supporting popular uprisings against regimes historically aligned with the West has already been sent to the populations of the region through the support of both Ben Ali and Mubarak until their final moments while working hard to "manage" any process of change which would maintain their interests, and their continued support of the Khalifa family, Abdullah Saleh and the remaining despots in the Arabian peninsula, with growing protests in Saudi Arabia sure to give Western governments further opportunities to demonstrate their inconsistency. This is without going further afield to places like Pakistan, where it is the United States that is currently killing civilians with alarming regularity through the use of their unmanned aerial drones, with the silent collaboration of the Zardari regime. The selective use of the United Nations, the rhetoric of democracy and who is chosen to be condemned, all point towards the attack on Gaddafi's regime being another imperial adventure dressed up as humanitarian intervention.
Which leaves us with Cameron’s last justification, as he also reiterated at the end of his statement on Friday, that intervention in Libya was “above all for the UK's own national interest”. Even this alone is itself highly debatable - with the British population right to ask questions about whose interest this latest foreign military expedition is really in, given that they were sold the same reason for intervention in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
