Clik here to view.
Airstrikes and arrest warrants may suggest the jaws are closing around Gaddafi - but they could just as easily be losing their grip
If a vice is indeed closing in around Muammar Gaddafi, as General Sir David Richards, the chief of defence staff claimed, then its jaws have some way to travel before they meet. They could just as easily be losing their grip. In two months the general has swung from justified caution about the aims – clashing with Downing Street over whether the object of the mission was regime change – to the opposite stance of pressurising other Nato countries to escalate the bombing and widen the target list. Why the change? It could be that after 2,000 strikes, 300 of them British, the general realises that the mission is no closer to its achieving its aims and that the performances of his forces in Libya could be subject to the same sort of critical scrutiny that Basra and Helmand attracted, particularly from the Americans. Or his planes could be running out of targets.
The rhetorical vice was given a further twist yesterday by the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court who named Gaddafi, his son Saif and his brother-in-law and intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi as war crimes suspects. In both the targetting of airstrikes and in Luis Moreno-Ocampo's presentation of requests for arrest warrants, a theme has emerged: the west is letting it be known that it is getting help from insiders, either recently emerged, such as Moussa Koussa, who is telling Nato where the bunkers are, or serving officials contacting the prosecutor's office from Tripoli. The subtext of this is that rents are emerging in the tent of Gaddafi loyalists. Let us hope they are. But what if they are not?
Mr Moreno-Ocampo said his investigation into war crimes was continuing, and this could have a deterrent effect on those in Tripoli contemplating life after regime change. But the chief prosecutor is not requesting the intervention of international forces to implement the arrest warrants . He said that the Libyan authorities – whoever they now are – have the primary responsibilty to arrest the three. This means that nothing will happen until either the regime falls or a deal is brokered and the warrants are not enforced – the Sudan model. Either way, we are no further forward in breaking the stalemate.
The third option, expounded by the International Crisis Group, is to sue for a ceasefire. As they rightly argue, Nato's strategy is confused. To insist that Gaddafi must go in a new democratic order, is one thing. But to insist he must go as a precondition for any negotiation is to render a ceasefire all but impossible. To insist he leaves the country and stands trial in the ICC is to ensure he will go down fighting. That leaves only a military option, and with it the prospect many, many more civilian casualties.
