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foreign policy more generally, as he zigzagged from isolationist arms sales promoter to muscular interventionist.We recognise that there are, in truth, difficult decisions to be made in respect of Libya, the first of which is whether or not the British government ought to be involved at all, beyond the minimal consular services and participation in international sanctions against the Gaddafi regime and its family interests. So far, it is probably right to wait and see, while preparing options to provide assistance to the anti-Gaddafi forces or to use military force, such as a no-fly zone, to inhibit the regime's ability to wage war on its own people.The crisis has, however, thrown up other, longer-term challenges. The embarrassment of what has become known as the Libyan School of Economics has exposed the miscalibration of the Blair government's policy of engagement with the dictatorship.That policy was not totally misguided, but it went too far. The Labour government did "all it could" to free Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the Lockerbie bombing (even if in the end it was a Scottish decision); and persuaded its friends in academia to confer prestige on the Gaddafi clan's blood money. There has to be a third way between invading undemocratic countries and embracing them to sell them arms in the hope that they will welcome western trade and, ultimately, democracy.
More serious, perhaps, is the challenge to Britain's defence capability. We publish a letter today, calling on the Government to reconsider the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). It is signed by 50 senior people from the military, politics and academia. Their concerns are echoed by Lord Dannatt, former chief of the defence staff, and James Arbuthnot, Conservative chairman of the defence select committee.
The Libyan crisis has forced us once again to confront the hard questions about what sort of global military reach we want to have. The SDSR was right to focus resources on special forces and flexible rapid response, rather than, say, aircraft carriers, but the Government failed to back up its words about armed forces welfare, and the whole review process has been badly handled. It was rushed, and widely seen as savings-driven rather than genuinely strategic.
The Government is also paying the price for dithering over Afghanistan, setting a withdrawal date far enough into the future to undermine forces' morale, while ensuring a further four years of expensive and pointless commitment. The disillusionment of troops has been exacerbated by the incompetence of spending cuts, by which serving soldiers in theatre have received redundancy notices by email.
