With the west at sixes and sevens, Gaddafi may yet get away with murder. And this in the year of EU unity
So Europeans are from Mars and Americans are from Venus. Those "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" – the French – have led the military charge into Libya. The hamburger-munching crusader eagles have dithered in the rear.
Except that such crude stereotypes are as misleading today as they were at the time of the Iraq war. Now as then, Americans are divided – and Europeans even more so. France and Britain have led the campaign for a no-fly zone and for "all necessary measures" to protect civilians in Libya. Germany has demonstratively dissociated itself from them. The Obama administration initially showed almost German levels of reluctance to get involved with any form of military intervention, but shifted its position in response to Gaddafi's brutal campaign to restore his own power, the remarkable pro-intervention stance of the Arab League, and pressures from many Americans. Among the American voices pressing for action was Robert Kagan, the neocon who popularised the original bon mot: "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus."
So far as France is concerned, we need have no illusions about the personal motives of Nicolas Sarkozy. He surely hopes that cutting a dash on the international scene will boost his ratings and give him a better chance of being re-elected next year. Decisive action in defence of Arab human rights is supposed to cover up his administration's appalling record in cosying up to Arab leaders who trampled on those rights, including Hosni Mubarak, until recently Sarkozy's co-chair of the Union for the Mediterranean, Tunisia's Zine El Abidine ben-Ali and, yes, Muammar Gaddafi.
The British prime minister David Cameron is in a quite different political position; yet he came to a similar conclusion. People's motives are always mixed. What matters is the rights and wrongs of the case, and the realities on the ground.
It is not Sarkozy's illusions of grandeur that persuaded the Arab League to support, let alone the UN security council to sanction, such action. Gaddafi killing his own people, and threatening to eliminate many more – that changed minds. Dr Saif al-Islam Gaddafi (PhD, LSE) ranting on a tank – that changed minds. Benghazi seemingly about to fall to Gaddafi's forces – that changed minds. The decision to intervene, made soberly and without illusions, rests on a single proposition: it would very soon have been worse, fatally worse for many, if we had not intervened.
That was the logic that convinced a majority of the UN security council to vote for resolution 1973 (and, incidentally, led the president of Rwanda to support it). But not Russia, China, Brazil and India; and not Germany. For me, one of the defining pictures of this crisis was that of Germany's ambassador to the UN, Peter Wittig, sitting with folded hands and a pained expression on his face, while next to him, the ambassador of Gabon, Emmanuel Issoze-Ngondet, raised his arm to vote for a resolution to save innocent civilians from a marauding dictator. I wonder what Wittig, a thoroughly decent man, felt at that moment. Mere awkwardness? Or something a little closer to shame?
So much for France and Germany as the inseparable couple at the heart of Europe. Instead, the French and German foreign ministers, Alain Juppé and Guido Westerwelle, are in open disagreement. "I say what I think and he says what he thinks," Juppé snapped after sharp exchanges between them in Brussels this Monday. And Le Monde reports Juppé passing this devastating judgment: "The common security and defence policy of Europe? It is dead." The issue here is not direct German military participation. Everyone would have understood if that was not possible. But how could Germany not support a UN resolution backed by its principal European partners, the United States and the Arab League? Worse still, Westerwelle recently cited doubts expressed about the extent of the military action by the Arab League to defend the German abstention: "We calculated the risk. If we see that three days after this intervention began, the Arab League already criticises [it], I think we had good reasons." While French and British pilots risk their lives in action, the German foreign minister is virtually encouraging the Arab League to make further criticism. A word that springs unbidden to my mind is Dolchstoss (stab in the back).
There are several reasons for this German attitude. Westerwelle is one of the weakest foreign ministers Germany has had for a long time. As the leader of the Free Democrats (Germany's Lib Dems), he is running scared of some important provincial elections – as is Angela Merkel. Like so many contemporary European politicians, they follow rather than lead public opinion. Having gingerly advanced in the 1990s towards taking broader international responsibilities, including military ones, German opinion seems to have sunk back into an attitude of "leave us alone". Let Germany be a Greater Switzerland! And the dynamism of its extraordinary export growth is increasingly outside the old west, in trade with countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China – the very Brics with which it sided at the UN.
Even if you think the German approach to the specific question of the no-fly zone was right, and France's wrong, you must acknowledge that these divisions make a mockery of Europe's pretensions to have a foreign policy. And remember this was supposed to be the year in which the EU finally got its foreign policy act together. "Today's meeting," Catherine Ashton, the EU's high representative for foreign and security policy, said after Monday's punch-up, "showed the EU's determination to react quickly and decisively and with one voice to the events in Libya." She deserves a prize for managing to say that with a straight face.
Don't get me wrong: my criticism of the German stance does not mean I have no doubts about this operation. I have grave doubts about it, like almost everyone I know. I am persuaded that the almost certain result of continued inaction would have been terrible for those civilians being attacked by Gaddafi's forces. Things would have got worse had we not acted. But now we have to prove that things will get better because we have.
Here we are caught in the gap between the clear limits of the UN mandate – to protect civilians – and the necessary condition for securing that end with any confidence: the fall of Gaddafi. The only good outcome is for carefully targeted, limited, UN-sanctioned military action to allow the Libyans to get rid of Gaddafi. For that, the operational compromise towards which this coalition of the willing seems to be edging – Nato command-and-control expertise in a broader political wrapping – is probably the best way forward. Then everything will depend on the people on the ground.
However, many worse outcomes are entirely possible, including an ugly, protracted partition of the country. A divided Europe increases the likelihood of a divided Libya.