Very few political reputations, not even former UK prime minister Tony Blair's, have fallen as far and as fast as that of ex-prime minister David Cameron. It is less than 18 months since Cameron pulled off a stunning general election victory against the odds. At that moment, the Tory Party leader appeared invincible. But today he will go down in history as the British prime minister who triggered the country's leaving the European Union, the so-called Brexit, by mistake. His recent decision to quit early as an MP has brought accusations of lying and ugly comparisons with Blair for profiteering after leaving public office. The UK parliament's foreign affairs committee said last week that there was no doubt that “former prime minister David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy.” The report into Britain's intervention into Libya five years ago marks another nail in the coffin of Cameron's collapsing reputation. The report is emphatic that the British and French intervention was an unmitigated disaster and insists that Cameron should take personal responsibility. The committee has accused the Cameron government of overstating the threat former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi posed to civilians, failing to understand how Libya worked, and of pursuing "an opportunistic policy of regime change." Worse still, it states that Britain failed to develop "a strategy to support and shape post-Gaddafi Libya". According to the committee, the consequences of British incompetence could hardly have been more dire. They included "political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of [the Islamic State group] in North Africa.” It has no doubt that "former prime minister David Cameron was ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy.” Cameron has often been compared with his predecessor Tony Blair and with good reason. Both men shared the same modernising analysis, the same style of government, and the same contempt for traditional political structures in the UK. There is another comparison. Both men were truly dreadful war leaders and were up there among British prime ministers with Anthony Eden (the Suez Crisis of 1956), Neville Chamberlain (Munich) and Lord North (the loss of the American colonies in the 18th century). Just as before the invasion of Iraq, a fundamental falsehood lay at the heart of the decision to invade Libya. Blair led Britain into the catastrophe of Iraq. Cameron, along with former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, led Britain into the disastrous Libyan intervention. Libya was Cameron's Iraq. Just as with Iraq, a fundamental falsehood lay at the heart of the decision to invade. Cameron wrongly claimed that Gaddafi was about to commit genocide, while Blair mistakenly stated that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Catastrophic intelligence failures were at the heart of each disaster. The committee notes that "the UK government was unable to analyse the nature of the rebellion in Libya due to incomplete intelligence and insufficient institutional insight… it selectively took elements of Muammar Gaddafi's rhetoric at face value, and it failed to identify the militant extremist element in the rebellion." There is a very troubling echo here of the British intelligence mistakes in Syria, where UK officials have also failed to understand the way that Al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups have come to dominate the uprising against the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. However, the failure of British intelligence to understand Libya is especially puzzling because Britain enjoyed a close relationship with the country's pre-revolution intelligence chief Musa Kusa, as evidenced by correspondence with senior British secret service officer Sir Mark Allen over the kidnap and subsequent torture of Libyan opposition figure Abdul-Hakim Belhaj. The failure to plan for the future was every bit as notable in Libya as it was in Iraq and much less excusable. By the time the UK intervened in Libya in 2011, Britain had had plenty of time to absorb the lessons of the Iraq war, but it proved incapable of doing so. A new security architecture was in place in the shape of Cameron's much-vaunted National Security Council, but it proved to be no more use than Blair's notorious "sofa government." Ironically, Blair emerges as one of the good guys in the Libyan fiasco, or so the committee seems to assert. The former prime minister offered himself as a linkman with the Gaddafi family, opening up the possibility of a political rather than a military solution to the crisis. Unfortunately, the committee concludes that Cameron lacked the wit to exploit Blair's Gaddafi connections. Most of the conclusions of the report are fair enough. However, the committee itself shows grievously faulty judgement when it comes to current events in Libya. “The Government of National Accord (GNA),” it declares, “is the only game in town” in Libya. This is nonsense. The GNA, another doomed initiative of dubious legality, is in a shambles. It commands very little allegiance in the east of Libya where the British ambassador is also persona non grata. Following a series of takeovers last weekend, the eastern government's Khalifa Haftar now controls approaching 80 per cent of Libya's oil production. Curiously, British special forces are on both sides of the political schism at the same time, helping forces loyal to the GNA in Misrata and Haftar to bomb pro-Tripoli Islamist militias in Benghazi. Not even the smoothest of British tongues can remotely claim that helping Haftar is helping the GNA in Tripoli or working towards the unity of the country. Rather this is a policy aimed at the de facto partitioning of Libya. Hindsight is easy, and the UK committee report takes full advantage of it. So perhaps it is worth recalling that only a dozen British MPs voted against the intervention in Libya five years ago. One of them was the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. It is past time that Labour critics such as former shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn acknowledge that Corbyn has consistently shown superb judgement on foreign policy issues. Had he been prime minister for the last 15 years, Britain would not have been drawn into the death trap of Helmand Province in Afghanistan, the horror of Iraq, or the calamity of Libya. As Labour Party members in the UK cast their votes in the party's leadership contest they should bear that in mind. The writer was British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013.
