What drivel is gushing out now from assorted progressives, variously blaming Tony Blair, the Blair Doctrine and his ‘hypocrisy’ for propping up Gaddafi.

See this embarrassment posted by Channel 4 by self-styled Gurublog.

And this even worse posting at Liberal Conspiracy by Claude Carpentieri:

Imagine if you had a quid each time you hear the dwindling band of blind supporters of the Iraq war reciting that sorry little line as the best justification for Britain’s biggest foreign policy atrocity of the last forty years.

“At least we removed a sanguinary dictator” is a sentence that oozes hypocrisy from each and every pore, a phrase rendered even more vomitous and hollow when you look at the hateful game of “this dictator good, that dictator bad” that Tony Blair played so well during his reign

Here’s what I have posted by way of reply:

What a feeble piece of work.

 

First, any embarrassment to T Blair is as nothing compared to the calamity of Nelson Mandela’s cosiness to Gaddafi over the long years when Gaddafi was developing weapons of mass destruction.

 

Second, the UK and US worked hard to persuade Gaddafi to stop those programmes, an outcome which was a triumph for intelligent and purposeful diplomacy and a signal contribution to global non-proliferation policies.

 

The natural result of that success was a normalising of relations with Gaddafi by not only the UK/US but also the EU. Again, a widely hailed good outcome for ‘soft diplomacy’ and all that, with a view to edging the Gaddafi regime slowly but surely towards a more pluralistic outcome as part of the wider EU/Mediterranean family. Anyone here have any better ideas? No, I thought not..

 

The core problem is that if Western democratic governments try actively to undermine these dictators they get lambasted at the UN and by smug leftists on sites like this for being nasty neo-imperialist neocons.

 

So Western governments sigh and usually go for ‘constructive engagement’ instead. Inglorious and fraught with risks (not least the fact that these dictators will carry on brutalising their people for far too long), but less provocative. Anything for a quiet life.

 

It often turns out that these dictators are largely divorced from reality, nervous and incompetent. And that their hold on power depends not on the willingness of  ‘the West’ to prop them up, but on the degree of fear among their own people: "the sanction of the victim". In a bad place there are no good outcomes.

 

Now Gaddafi is feverishly clinging on to power and using lethal force to do so. We may or may not hope that the Libyan masses are brave enough to take the heavy casualties needed to finish the job, and then start the very long march towards some sort of honest government. After decades in which Gaddafi in all his repressive horror was feted by ‘progressive’ opinion round the planet, the damage done to Libya and to the wider region by his perverted national socialism is beyond calculation.

 

By the way, which reader of this site knows about the Hama Massacre in Syria in 1983? This was a huge calamity against Muslims which aroused precisely no global interest, as it was just another vile Cold War mass atrocity committed by one heroic anti-imperialist socialist Arab tyranny against its own people. https://charlescrawford.biz/blog.php?single=790 What about a principled if belated campaign led by this site’s principled readers to bring those responsible to justice?

 

In other words, if you want to start a debate about hypocrisy in the history of Middle East policy, bring it on. But you’ll find that there are plenty of more deserving targets than Tony Blair.

So there.