Hello my name is Charles Snegglesbottom and I am a junior minister in the Foreign Office. I have been asked by the Daily Waffle to explain why the UK Government has intervened in the Libyan Civil War, er sorry, utilised our armed forces with our NATO partners to protect civilians in Libya.
As I am sure you are all aware the Libyan people have, for decades, been ruled by a brutal dictatorship led by Colonel Gadaffi. Finally this spring the populace rose up in a peaceful rebellion against their oppressors. These protests started out in the town of Benghazi to the east of Libya but quickly spread throughout the nation as the people grew confident that it was only a matter of time before Gadaffi and his cohorts conceded defeat and resigned.
Unfortunately for the people of Libya Gadaffi refused to go quietly and instead the full might of his armed forces against them. Unarmed protesters were shot by snipers, shelled by artillery and bombed by his air force.
Our Prime Minister realised that this was a moment for him to win some easy brownie points, particularly with the Americans who were still mighty peeved with the Scottish Government for releasing the Lockerbie bomber early, so he got together with the French PM, Mr Sarkozy, and they agreed that military intervention was required. A suitably vague UN resolution was passed that allowed NATO to intervene to protect the civilians from coming under attack. That way we could win the war for the rebels whilst under the umbrella of it being a humanitarian mission. The only spanner in the works has been the Americans deciding to take a back foot in this enterprise which meant that we couldn’t bomb the Libyans a new arsehole but merely gradually wear them down using a succession of precision air strikes on anything we could say threatened even the merest threat to anything.
We are now approaching the end game in this war, Gadaffi is on the run and the National Transitional Council are widely recognised as the legitimate rulers of Libya so, to paraphrase Churchill after the surrender of Germany in World War Two, we may allow ourselves a brief period of gloating.
Obviously, when one is involved in actions of this kind, questions will be raised. One of the questions that I hear being raised all the time is why are we intervening in Libya and not elsewhere in the Arab world where the populace are being oppressed. Well, the answer to that is really quite obvious.
Everywhere in the world there a good dictators and bad dictators. For example, Chile’s old dictator General Pinochet was a good dictator as he backed the west in the Cold War, whereas Fidel Castro because he backed the Soviet Union in the Cold War was a bad dictator. A quick word to the wise to any budding dictators out there though, our mood towards you can change. For example, Saddam Hussein in the 1980’s was a good dictator because he was involved in a war against Iran, however, as soon as he invaded kuwait and threatened our oil supply he became a bad dictator. Our mood towards Colonel Gadaffi has flip-flopped on numerous occasions. In the 1980’s he was a bad dictator, then following the war on terror he became a good dictator until this year, when Mr Cameron spotted he an opportunity to put one over the previous administration who had brought Gadaffi back in from the cold, he reverted to being a bad dictator.
So you see decisions to get involved in civil wars are not taken lightly, although it does help if your nation does have an abundant supply of oil and gas we can help to “develop”.
