Sep 13, 2016 · BritishLawmakersCondemn2011Interventionin ... issued a damning assessment on Wednesday of the 2011interventionin Libya led by Britain ...
Sep 13, 2016 · British Lawmakers Condemn 2011 Intervention in Libya. ... Libya descended into chaos, and a power vacuum ensued after the Qaddafi government collapsed, ...
14:21 LawmakerscondemnBritish, French interventionin Libya; ... LawmakerscondemnBritish, ... and since the intervention of March 2011 was founded on ...
British Lawmakers Condemn 2011 Intervention in Libya
Photo
A rebel fighter prepared to
tow away a government truck mounted with a machine gun that was hit by a
NATO airstrike near Brega, Libya, in April 2011.Credit
Andrew Winning/Reuters
LONDON — A committee of British lawmakers issued a damning assessment on Wednesday of the 2011 intervention in Libya led by Britain and France,
concluding that the military action had lacked a coherent strategy, had
been based on poor intelligence and had led to a political collapse
that aided the rise of the Islamic State in North Africa.
The report from the foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons directly blamed the former prime minister, David Cameron, saying he “was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy.”
In
echoing many criticisms from another inquiry, published this year, into
Britain’s role in the Iraq war under one of Mr. Cameron’s predecessors,
Tony Blair, the report suggested that lessons from that conflict had
not been learned.
Fearing
civilian deaths, an international coalition assembled by Britain and
France launched air and missile strikes in March 2011, after Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces threatened to attack the rebel-held city of Benghazi.
Libya
descended into chaos, and a power vacuum ensued after the Qaddafi
government collapsed, allowing fighters for the Islamic State, also
known as ISIS or ISIL, to gain a significant foothold in the country,
and the report suggested that Britain had lost interest in the country
after Colonel Qaddafi lost power.
The mission represented a significant shift from the Iraq war, with Britain and France assuming the main leadership role
— Mr. Cameron had pressed for military action alongside the French
president at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy — and the United States taking an
active, but less visible, role.
In many ways, the report mirrored the assessment of President Obama, who offered a candid appraisal of the intervention in an interview published in The Atlantic
this year. “It didn’t work,” Mr. Obama said, citing what he described
as his misplaced faith that “the Europeans” in general would be invested
in the follow-up. He also said that Mr. Cameron had soon become
“distracted by other things” and that Mr. Sarkozy had been voted out of
office the next year.
The report by the 11-person committee,
which included six lawmakers from Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party,
criticized the British strategy as flawed from its inception, concluding
that it “was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete
understanding of the evidence.”
Photo
Former President Nicolas
Sarkozy of France, left, and former Prime Minister David Cameron of
Britain in November 2010. In contrast to the invasion of Iraq, France
and Britain took the main leadership role in the Libyan intervention.Credit
Andy Rain/European Pressphoto Agency
There
had been, they said, no thorough assessment of the nature of the
rebellion in Libya or of the real threat to civilians. Nor, they added,
had there been any attempt at political engagement with the government,
leaving military intervention as the sole focus.
“By
the summer of 2011, the limited intervention to protect civilians had
drifted into an opportunist policy of regime change,” the lawmakers
said.
The
consequence of the military action was “political and economic
collapse, intermilitia and intertribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant
crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Qaddafi
regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North
Africa,” the lawmakers said.
The
document quoted a former defense secretary, Liam Fox, now the
international trade secretary, as arguing, in evidence to the committee,
that decisions had been motivated by a fear of a massacre of civilians,
similar to ones that took place during the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.
Lawmakers
noted that, when asked whether he was aware of any assessment of the
extent to which the rebellion involved militant Islamist elements, Mr.
Fox had replied that he did not “recall reading anything of that
nature.”
The
report was sharply critical of the intervention on that point. “The
possibility that militant extremist groups would attempt to benefit from
the rebellion should not have been the preserve of hindsight,” the
authors wrote. “Libyan connections with transnational militant extremist
groups were known before 2011, because many Libyans had participated in
the Iraq insurgency and in Afghanistan with Al Qaeda.”
Mr.
Cameron declined to give evidence to the committee’s inquiry in March
2016, citing “the pressures on his diary” and pointing out that other
ministers had done so.
His
supporters argued that there had been risks in refusing to intervene,
as demonstrated subsequently by the West’s inaction over Syria. In a
statement, the Foreign Office said that Colonel Qaddafi had been
“unpredictable and he had the means and motivation to carry out his
threats,” and that “his actions could not be ignored and required
decisive and collective international action.”
Emily
Thornberry, who speaks for the opposition Labour Party on foreign
affairs, said in a statement that “far from learning the lessons from
Iraq, David Cameron had in fact repeated all the major mistakes again in
Libya, and with the same catastrophic consequences.”
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