war on a whim

Yes, precisely: “Just because you can’t intervene everywhere doesn’t mean you can’t intervene somewhere” translates into war on impulse. The decision to send the bombers in to Libya wasn’t a result of any kind of informed analysis matching the needs of the people there with the military capabilities of the West. It happened because we saw the uprising on telly, because Gaddafi is a well known loon, because the Libyan opposition gamed us into thinking it represented some kind of coherent alternative, and, at a guess, because the government wanted to erase the memory of the Blair administration’s practically carnal relations with the Gaddafi family. Libya had the X factor. Cote D’Ivoire never got into the audition.

Comments

[ejh]

And also, I think, because the rebels seemed to be on the point of defeat almost as soon as they'd been publicly backed. Hence panic, panic, we have to do something.

It's not always about winning: often it's about not being prepared to let the enemy win.

[Cian]

I'm reasonably certain that embarrassment was a factor here.

On the British side Hague's repeated humiliation can't help (I have it on the best authority that Ghadaffi is in Venezuela...).

[Guano]

I think that Cameron and Hague wanted to do something a bit like invading Iraq but different enough to be able to say "we have learnt the lessons from the invasion of Iraq". There is a risk that the "lessons learnt" in the report of the Chilcot Inquiry will be spun to justify post-hoc the bombing of Libya.