David Cameron damned for unleashing Daesh hell in Libya

HAVING stepped down as an MP, David Cameron’s former Commons colleagues have issued a scathing report on his intervention in Libya, condemning a lack of intelligence analysis and lacklustre efforts to help the war-torn country recover from the violent demise of dictator Colonel Gaddafi. 

 The foreign affairs select committee found that the former prime minister was “ultimately responsible for the failure to develop a coherent Libya strategy” and that “UK strategy was founded on erroneous assumptions and an incomplete understanding of the evidence.”

Those failures contributed to the rise of Daesh, which now controls significant territory across the failed state, giving the terrorist group access to the Mediterranean sea, just a few hundred miles from Italy. 

US president Barack Obama had claimed that the UK and France lost interest in Libya after the overthrow of Gaddafi and denounced the intervention, a key milestone in Cameron’s foreign policy legacy, as a “shitshow” in unusually frank remarks. 

In March this year Mr Obama said: “I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

The country’s descent into chaos has had serious consequences for the refugee crisis engulfing Europe, as thousands of African migrants set sail from its shores, aided by the criminal groups, war lords and terrorists vying for political and military control. 

Writing that:“We have seen no evidence that the UK government carried out a proper analysis of the nature of the rebellion in Libya. It may be that the UK government was unable to analyse the nature of the rebellion in Libya due to incomplete intelligence and insufficient institutional insight, and that it was caught up in events as they developed”, the report concurred with the president’s assessment and noted that the UK government spent more on bombing than on reconstruction efforts. 

Cameron has said that the intervention was “absolutely the right thing to do” but as events develop quickly on the ground, the former Conservative leader faces the very real prospect of his premiership being blackened by Libya, much as Tony Blair’s was by Iraq.