Líbia: A responsabilidade de Cameron

Ed Miliband’s claim that David Cameron failed to secure proper post-war planning in Libya was supported on Friday by leading diplomats including the prime minister’s envoy to the country, who agreed it was a mistake not to have kept a larger western presence there. Their intervention came after the Labour leader was forced to fend off claims that he laid the recent drownings of Mediterranean refugees at the door of the prime minister in a row that followed what had intended to be a serious foreign policy speech. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the former UK ambassador to the United Nations, said no British party had an unblemished record on post-war planning in the Middle East, but said: “I don’t think Europe and North America has been engaged enough in helping the Libyans. “They have left it to the UN; we are supporting the UN in what they are trying to do now but the overall resources committed to it has not been enough. We should not go in with the military unless we have an idea of what the political outcome is going to be”. Earlier, the Conservatives claimed Miliband’s criticisms were provocative and shameful while Cameron, defending his single greatest foreign policy legacy – the bombing mission that turned the civil war against Muammar Gadaffi – described Miliband’s comments as ill judged and raised doubts about his suitability for office. In briefings before the speech, Labour made clear that Miliband’s message would be that “the refugee crisis and tragic scenes this week in the Mediterranean are in part a direct result of the failure of post-conflict planning for Libya”. Pressed repeatedly on the issue by journalists after the speech, the Labour leader dismissed any suggestion that he was implying the PM had “blood on his hands”. He said Cameron had not been sufficiently engaged and had not done enough to support Libya’s National Transitional Council after the conflict: “The international community as a whole, including our government, bears some responsibility for the crisis we see in Libya. I think that is undeniable. “As far as what is happening in terms of the tragic scenes of people drowning in the Mediterranean, that is a result of the people traffickers who are engaged in those issues.” UK former diplomats are divided on the extent to which the planning was adequate. The former UK ambassador to Libya, Oliver Miles, recently agreed with John Baron, a Conservative member of the foreign affairs select committee, who told him “there seems to have been very little detailed, intelligent analysis of what might follow”. Other former ambassadors say hundreds of hours of planning were undertaken in Whitehall in a deliberate effort to avoid the repeats of Iraq. The view was that the country could fill the vacuum left by Gaddafi as it had few ethnic or sectarian rivalries, a rich economy and a small population. Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, who has also criticised UK loss of influence during Cameron’s premiership, said it was “pretty distasteful to reduce this total human tragedy, hundreds of people dying in the Mediterranean, to a political point-scoring blame game”. The Guardian