We've Been Here Before

Friends of mine have a Book Club to which I am a semi-vicarious member insofar that I read the books but don't participate in the dinners-they are all in New York. Two of the more recent readings were "The Best and the Brightest" by David Halberstrom and one of my all time favourites T.E. Lawrence's "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

The former is a clear illustration of how poor geopolitical understandings coupled with populist domestic politics can make a mountain out of a molehill, or perhaps better said, take the relative minor bumblings of the French in Indochina in the fifties and turn them into a full-fledged land war.

Vietnam was not the first time that the US got bogged down in an ideological war-we were in Korea-but it was followed with the abomination of Iraq and the pit of Afghanistan. Now the West is standing at the gates of a land war in Libya after discovering yet again that air strikes are a necessary but certainly not a sufficient action in winning wars, especially when they are as messy as the unraveling of Libya.

Mr Lawrence writes eloquently about the idiosyncrasies of the Middle East in his flowing prose. For those of you less enamoured with musings of a romanticist like Mr Lawrence I would direct you to Bernard Lewis' "From Babel to Dragomans".

Both books discuss the Muslim world although I believe Mr Lawrence's is all the more powerful as in the end he is personally confounded if not outright devastated by the tribalism of the Muslim world. Mr Lewis for his part does give a reasonable analysis as to why the region missed out on the creation of Nations and Nationalism which have defined the West most specifically since the late 18th century, but that is a longer discussion.

What is most bizarre is that it is exactly people like Colonel Qaddafi who have tried to create a nation-state and it is the intervention of the West that exacerbates the resurgence of the underlying tribalism which permeates much of the Arab world.

But I stray. Some four weeks ago as the military forces of the Qaddafi regime were about to crush the rebels in Benghazi which forced the West in general and the UN specifically to create an armed response to the imminent civilian catastrophe.

At the time the Germans were castigated by the West for not only abstaining from voting for the resolution, but were then roundly denounced by their NATO allies for not sending German arms again to the battlefields of North Africa.

Four weeks later, as the limits of air power have been reached the German fears are about to be realised. Specifically they were concerned about the eventual need to send ground troops. Qaddafi's forces are now threatening Misrata. The rebel forces who were so adamant that they didn't want Western troops but welcomed Western air power are now pleading for ground troops.

And the British, despite the fact that they are already overstretched militarily and are in the middle of a severe austerity plan have send advisers.

I can only say we have definitely been here before, and the result were always dog's breakfasts of the highest order.