FORMER SENIOR British military leaders have expressed grave concerns that attacks on Libyan dictator Muammar Gadafy could leave the United Kingdom open to charges that it is behaving like “oil-starved colonialists” up to “their knavish tricks”.
During a debate in the House of Lords, a series of former high-ranking officers warned that spending cutbacks imposed by the Conservatives/Liberal Democrat coalition had left the British “stretched very thin” and unable to respond to new security threats.
Lord Craig of Radley, who was chief of the defence staff between 1988 and 1991, warned that Col Gadafy will threaten British national security if he survives in power.
“We have certainly ensured that in Gadafy we now have an enemy for life. If he survives in power our national interests will again be under renewed threat from him. Hopefully, however, sooner rather than later, there has to be an exit and an end to our involvement,” he said.
The warnings came as it was confirmed that Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Col Gadafy’s son, Saif al-Islam, held talks with British foreign office officials last week, while a number of contacts with others are still under way.
However, a Downing Street spokesman insisted that the UK had not made any offers of immunity or sanctuary to the Libyan leader to get him to quit power and leave Libya: “There are no deals,” he said.
Meanwhile, former head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and former secretary of state for defence Lord Robertson, complained about the handling of the military operation against the Gadafy regime.
“One of the most despairing aspects of events in the past few weeks has been the disunited and pretty undignified squabble among European members of Nato about how to organise a multinational no-fly zone,” he said.
Welcoming the decision of former Libyan foreign minister Moussa Koussa to quit the Gadafy regime, Lord Robertson said: “Defections, there will be more of them, and more the better. The fighting will ebb and flow and assuredly we will be faced with new dilemmas in the next few weeks. “Are we simply going to stand back even if boots on the ground could be decisive? The boots will assuredly not be American; their people are tired of saving the day. It is still an embarrassing fact . . . We have twice the number of people in Europe than the USA but are only able to deploy a small amount,” he said.
In his contribution, Lord Craig, who grew up in Dublin before leaving for London at 14, warned that “what we might characterise as humanitarian might be seen very differently through Arab and Islamic eyes.
“The switch from destroying Libyan air defences to the continuing night-after-night interdiction of Libyan armour and weapons storage, attempting to impose a no-drive zone and loose talk of arming the rebels, smacks of mission creep.
“We are on a high wire, without any safety net and in the hands of opinion-formers who could quickly turn these developments to our disadvantage. Are we not very close to being accused of involvement and taking sides in a Libyan civil war? Once again, we will face the accusation that oil-starved colonialists are up to their knavish tricks,” he said.
Meanwhile, a former British ambassador to the United Nations, Lord Hannay, said claims by prime minister David Cameron and US secretary of state Hillary Clinton that UN Security Council resolution 1973 permitted the arming of rebels were “fairly dubious and not very convincing”.
