Who rules Libya is none of our business
MARCH 2011:Last week in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the EU’s Foreign Minister, Cathy Ashton (right), led a politically-correct pack of poseurs all trying to outdo each other in denouncing Colonel Gaddafi and the Libyan Government.
This was an embarrassing about-turn as the very same people, and the likes of Britain’s Blair and Cameron, had until the last couple of weeks been fawning on the Colonel, even freeing the Lockerbie bomber at his behest, in return for lucrative oil deals.
Baroness Ashton did at least acknowledge this, saying that Col. Gaddafi had been welcomed in from the cold but now had to be sent out into it again.
Sundry other placemen in the Euro-Parliament fell over themselves to reflect the 180-degree volte-face of their leaders. In scenes reminiscent of the antics of the Party duckspeakers in Orwell’s 1984 when Eurasia was replaced suddenly by Eastasia as The Enemy, those who had praised Gaddafi for his “engagement” and “help in the War on Terror” now denounced him as a bloody-handed tyrant about whom "Something Must Be Done".
No one was exactly sure what was to be done and the EU wasn’t about to agree on any actual policy. Maybe, it was suggested, Brussels could freeze the Colonel’s investment in the Italian football club Juventus, which would presumably prevent it buying more expensive African players than its rivals and thus harm its league chances. How Tripoli will tremble…
The one thing the EU might do, which would hurt itself rather than Libya, was suggested by the leader of the Euro-Parliamentary Green faction, who has changed political colour since he was 1968 student riot leader Danny “the Red” Cohn-Bendit. He called on Brussels to “let the refugees enter Europe”. Thus raising the prospect of literally millions of North (and possibly not so North and certainly mostly not Libyan) African economic migrants, already pushing hard on Europe’s southern flank, pouring into our continent.
How thus further increasing the population pressure on the World’s most densely-populated continent is Green Mr Cohn-Bendit did not explain. But then, like many Greens he is a watermelon – Green on the outside, Red on the inside. And further cramming an alien underclass into the banlieues will raise the revolutionary pressure (though Mr C-B may well find that the revolution thus obtained is not Red but another shade of Green – that of Islam rather than ecology).
The Libyans need not worry unduly about any of this. When the tumult and the shouting dies the 27 countries of the EU are pretty certain not to agree any single line on foreign policy. Even one of them, Britain, has so far struggled to agree a coherent policy, with British nationals left stranded and SAS men arrested by the rebels they were ham-handedly trying to contact. At most one or two countries may send some arms to the Colonel’s internal enemies – exactly the same thing the British Government, quite rightly, objected to when Gaddafi sent arms to the IRA 25 years ago.
Although there remains a small danger the buffoons will blunder by mistake into another war in another remote desert over nothing to do with us. Sending more of our sons and daughters to die far away in another country wrecked by crusading Political Correctness.
Our position is simple. Who rules Libya, or any other foreign country, and how is their business, not ours. We have plenty of our own business that needs minding.
