The meeting last week between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi has been hailed as the moment that the Libyans were brought in from the diplomatic cold. While Libya’s WMD programs might have presented a marginal international threat, Libya has long abandoned its sponsorship of terror groups like the IRA as being entirely counterproductive. Qaddafi’s regime meanwhile has even less time for the fanatical violence of Al-Qaeda than did Saddam Hussein’s.
To claim that the much-analyzed handshake between Blair and Qaddafi means that part of the “axis of evil” has been won over to the “war on terror” thanks to British efforts is nonsense. This was a deal about money.
Even before the British delegation arrived at Qaddafi’s reception tent, a $1 billion contract was being announced between the Libyans and the Anglo-Dutch oil major Shell to explore for gas off Libya’s coast. Tripoli’s hotel rooms are filling up with British businessmen advancing projects from major civil engineering works to tourism complexes along the country’s Mediterranean coast. Libyan army cadets are to be trained at the British military college at Sandhurst, and in the offing are arms orders for everything from aircraft to weapons, tanks and other equipment. The British are no doubt trying to steal a march on their American competitors and replace Libya’s former commercial connections with the Italians and French. And why shouldn’t they?
But the Blair government does not want to admit that it is all about business. Former British leaders have been much more frank — Winston Churchill echoed sentiments first expressed by the Victorian prime minister, Lord Palmerston, when he said that the British have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. This is as true now. Britain is a still-wealthy second-class power as when she was in her imperial prime.
It is characteristic of the Blair government, nominally rooted in Labour politics as it is, to wrap up its international activities in a veneer of morality. Blair’s first foreign minister, Robin Cook, boasted that the new government would be following an “ethical foreign policy”. But Cook did not stay at the Foreign Office and resigned from his next government job because of Blair’s insistence on invading Iraq side-by-side with Americans.
In other words, it is in the area of its ethics that the Blair government has taken the most comprehensive beating in the wake of the Iraq war and the suicide of former weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly. Of course it must now seize any opportunity it can find to repair its image. That it has seized on something as transparent as its newfound love for Qaddafi to do so may be an indication how desperate it has become.
