The British were vocal proponents of international military intervention in Libya. David Cameron was the first Western leader to call unambiguously for a no-fly zone, and he later won accolades as an essential player in securing the U.N. Security Council resolution that implemented it. Then, Cameron’s secretary of state for defense, Liam Fox, became the first to acknowledge the unspoken truth that the real mission went beyond the U.N.’s stated goal of protecting civilians. “‘Mission accomplished,’” he said, “would mean the Libyan people free to control their own destiny. This is very clear — the international community wants [Moammar Qaddafi’s] regime to end.”
But while the Conservative PM and his cohorts are now leading the world in condemnation of Qaddafi, his Labor predecessors and much of the British elite were world leaders in Libya-toadying just a while ago. One of the worst manifestations of this was British arms sales to Libya. Another was the way in which Britain, in particular the London School of Economics, welcomed Qaddafi’s family and money with open arms. And yet another was the U.K.’s release of the Lockerbie bomber.
According to security analysts, weapons in Libya posed three distinct and obvious threats all along. The first was Qaddafi’s long history of arming known terrorist organizations. “Had you asked me four years ago, in 2003 or 2004, whether to sell weapons to Qaddafi, I would have said definitely no,” says Matthew Schroeder, director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). “Primarily because of Qaddafi’s long history of providing weapons to terrorists.” For example, “In the ’70s and ’80s, the British interdicted huge shipments of Libyan arms bound for the IRA.” And “Qaddafi is also rumored to have provided support for similar movements in Africa.”
The second danger was the potential (now all too visible) that arms could be used for brutal crackdowns on Qaddafi’s own people. Since Qaddafi is and has been known to be a lunatic unpopular with his people, it shouldn’t have been hard for Western states to foresee this possibility.
The third danger was that in a long-unstable and now-chaotic country such as Libya, the weapons — for example, those taken from looted armories and defecting military units and now held by rag-tag bands — will slip into black markets and terrorists’ hands. This is what happened after the deposition of regimes in Uganda in 1979 and Iraq in 2003, Schroeder says. And it’s why the allied forces today, though happy to fire their own missiles at Qaddafi loyalists, won’t arm the relatively unknown rebels.
But seemingly responsible nations, including Britain, sold arms to Libya anyway, according to a troubling new report on export licenses from the European Union. Over the past decade of mild rapprochement with the mad dog of the Middle East — a reward for his surrender of his nuclear-weapons program — the EU loosened sanctions on Libya. In 2004, the EU went so far as to lift its arms embargo, and in the very next year, European countries cashed in. Britain led the way, exporting 58.86 million euros’ worth of weapons to Libya. Much of Qaddafi’s arsenal, the report shows, was stocked with weapons made in the U.K. and other Western, allied nations.
The full report can be found here, but the important data are buried pretty deep. They show EU member nations exporting more than 343 million euros’ worth of arms to Libya in 2009, up from 250 million in 2008. The leaders in these exports were the U.K. — which exported weapons in every major category, including planes, missiles, and tear gas — and Italy, Germany, and France.
The U.K. jumped ahead in the early years — in 2005, it sold more than double any other nation and more than all the other European nations combined — and perhaps deserves special blame for that. This was a time in which Prime Minister Tony Blair was literally giving bear hugs in public to Moammar Qaddafi. However, by the final years for which export-license data are available, that trend had reversed. In 2009, Italy, Germany, and France, exported 111 million, 53 million, and 30 million, respectively, against the U.K.’s 25 million euros’ worth.
Though it is impossible to know which European-produced weapons have been used for what in Libya — thanks to the chaotic situation on the ground, weapons exporters’ desire to cover their tracks, and the lack of EU export data for 2010 and 2011 so far — there are some things we can surmise, and some disturbing circumstantial evidence. Pictures from Tripoli at the time of Qaddafi’s initial crackdown show armored personnel carriers, made in Britain and sold to Libya in 2007 as part of a 5-million-euro package, careening through the streets. Qaddafi’s forces used sniper rifles to terrorize rebels and citizens alike in contested cities including Misurata and Ajdabiya; in the last months of 2010, Britain shipped sniper rifles to Libya.
But British toadying to Qaddafi went beyond weapons sales. The London School of Economics hosted the dictator’s son Saif al-Islam Qaddafi, rewarded him a Ph.D. (for a thesis that was likely plagiarized), and accepted a gift of 1.5 million euros to establish a “global governance program” in return. The LSE has backtracked and expressed regret, and it is investigating rescinding the Ph.D.; LSE director Howard Davies resigned.
Of course, many foundations and research institutes accept donations from disreputables, without that implying moral approval. But the LSE went beyond that: WikiLeaks revealed that the LSE was planning to establish a special training program “for elite Libyan civil servants for $3.6 million,” as the New York Times reported. And the LSE actively provided Qaddafi with intellectual flattery.
In a March 2007 article for the Guardian (subtitled “If Gadafy is sincere about reform, as I think he is, Libya could end up as the Norway of North Africa”), Anthony Giddens, formerly director and now emeritus professor of the LSE, described a trip he took with David Frost and Benjamin Barber (an American) to “engage [Qaddafi] in debate.” In doing so, critics allege, they joined a long and disreputable tradition of academics’ legitimizing the unserious ideas of Qaddafi’s Green Book.
British high society went farther in obeisance to Qaddafi’s supposedly liberalizing son, Saif. His vanity artwork was exhibited at the Kensington Gardens in the Royal Parks of London. (A taste from a review: “Christians, dressed in penitents’ robes with pointy hats, carry crosses on an empty, desolate beach. . . . Over them looms the spectral figure of an eagle — and overlooking everything, Libya’s leader, daddy, Colonel Gadafy.”)
But the greatest scandal of all was the U.K.’s release of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, and the peculiar circumstances surrounding it.
By the time of Megrahi’s release in 2009, Labour-party leaders, in particular Tony Blair, had been ingratiating themselves to Qaddafi for years. In 2004, Blair, then the prime minister, traveled to Tripoli and shook hands with Qaddafi over what came to be known as the “deal in the desert” — the first major event in the international rehabilitation of Qaddafi, which opened Libya’s vast oil resources for a 550-million-euro deal with BP and business partnerships with Britain more generally. Blair was accompanied for the deal by the British ambassador to the United States, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, who, according to the sources of the Daily Mail, had showed a “profound interest” in Saif al-Islam Qaddafi and gave him “active assistance” in his Ph.D. dissertation at the London School of Economics. Sheinwald also arranged for Blair to be interviewed by Saif for his dissertation.
After being succeeded by Gordon Brown, Blair signed up as an “adviser” to J. P. Morgan; he was hired especially to broker deals in Libya, including those involving personal interactions with the kleptocratic ruling family. One of Qaddafi’s sons told the Telegraph that Blair had been meeting with the mad dog up through last year. Blair was considered such “a close personal friend” to the Qaddafis, according to a son, that one actually pled with the former prime minister to prevent British intervention in Libya.
The Qaddafis weren’t successful in these pleadings, but they may have had more luck before. Under the government of Gordon Brown, Megrahi was given “compassionate release” from prison — British authorities claimed he had only three months to live — and sent back to a hero’s welcome in Libya, accompanied by none other than Saif al-Islam Qaddafi. Nearly two years later, Megrahi is still alive, his health miraculously restored — and it’s become increasingly difficult, even for the most credulous, to avoid seeing a connection between this, the “deal in the desert,” and Saif’s like-family friendship with key members of the British elite.
David Cameron has carefully condemned Blair’s and Brown’s interaction with the Qaddafis. “That relationship needed to have some clear parameters. Parameters should have been in place when this relationship began,” he said. What began as a rapprochement intended to reward Qaddafi’s cooperation in counterterrorism ended in a reward for a terrorist, and the humiliation of the families of his victims.
Now, the only thing more miraculous than Megrahi’s rejuvenation is the silence of the British elite — particularly Labour members — who were once such friends to the now besieged Qaddafis.
Hopefully the health of their reputations doesn’t recover so quickly.
— Matthew Shaffer is a William F. Buckley Fellow at the National Review Institute.