Watching the television news tonight, I was reminded that a just a few short weeks ago Messers Sarkozy and Cameron were touring the world insisting it was vital for the West to take action against Gadaffi.
I particularly remember Mr Cameron saying, in what I imagine he considered his statesman voice (not unlike Jim Hacker’s attempts at Churchill), that we in Britain could not stand by and watch as a dictator murdered his own people.
He was hailed by the Tory Press as a world leader, quite literally, as he was leading the attempts to force the world into action against the Libyan dictator. The press were, of course, as happy to leave the mention of Sarkozy’s involvement to the 8th or 9th paragraph as they were to point out that President Obama was dithering and indecisive.
Of course they were wrong on all fronts. Mrs Clinton was infact, working on diplomacy behind the scenes, as is the job of the Secretary of State and Cameron and Sarkozy were well out of their depths in involving themselves in matters they didn’t fully understand.
Now don’t misunderstand me. I don’t think that it is easy to leave people to die at the hand of a heartless, cruel and murderous oaf like Gadaffi; and I wouldn’t want the responsibility of declining to get involved, but with my limited knowledge of what goes on in the world, I could see that what we were dealing with here was likely to be more than just Libya.
Tunisia and Egypt had already dispatched their dictator presidents and unrest was already apparent in other Middle East
countries. Last night I mentioned in my ramblings the fact that in the tiny kingdom of Bahrain, whose crown prince will be the guest of the Windsors next week, medical personnel were being 'disappeared' because they had seen the dreadful carnage caused by the Bahraini police and their friends from across the causeway in Saudi Arabia.Today over 50 Syrians have been killed on the orders, Mr Cameron, of their dictator, Bashar al-Assad (who fortunately is not invited to the Windsors’ wingding).
Surely if ordinary people could see that contagion was not only possible, but highly likely, what on Earth possessed Cameron to make such stupid pronouncement? Did HE not foresee that within weeks people would be asking why he was not equally affronted by the death of peoples of other countries at the hands of THEIR dictators?
It would appear that he did not; and neither did his foreign secretary, nor any other his numerou
s advisors in the FCO. Of course Bahrain and Syria are not the only countries to which this has spread. Unrest is rife in Yemen, and has even spread as far as the nailed-down-tight kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to Morocco and to the much easier-going Jordan, where it seems to have been contained by the swift actions of modernist King Abdullah.No one now knows how long we will be involved in yet another war which has nothing to do with us; and in the meantime other poor, pathetically downtrodden people will be crushed by dictators to whom doubtless, our governments sold the wherewithal to do it...
And we simply have neither the money nor the manpower to do anything about it. Cameron’s Churchillian moment, which looked fairly daft at the time, now looks plain ridiculous.
