Libya - Pride & Prejudice

A few weeks ago, London PR agencies were stunned to get an anonymous e-mail from what purported to be the Libyan Government requesting PR support in the current crisis.

It turned out that it was genuine but what is more interesting than the sudden and uncharacteristic discovery of ethics by many in the PR industry in rejecting the offer was the amazing naivete of the Libyans themselves.

One of the first lessons that should be taught to any small country seeking to influence the UK, which is one of the few genuinely powerful centres of soft power in the global community, is that its culture is not one of truth-seeking or even of fairness but one of posturing and the rush to the middle ground.

Libya's population is a little smaller than that of London, even half that depending on how you define London, spread along the coastal strip of a country seven times the size of the UK.

We like to think that of the internal strife inside the country as the rise of Hampstead liberals against some monstrous regime straight out of the pages of Alan Moore's 'V for Vendetta' but the situation on the ground is always going to be far more complex than this.

In this context, some things are appropriate for arguing through on fair and truthful terms and some things are not. The pompous gut reaction of the UK PR industry in its trade journal is not much better ethically than the naive propagandism of a dictatorship beyond its sell-by date.

Western 'group-think' mentality, in which elites rush forward like lemmings to assess every situation as good or bad according to the lights of their own dinner party network, is precisely the blindness that led to a failure to predict the riots, the consequences of other military actions and economic crises.

We might make better decisions as a culture if, instead of posturing, we opened the door to others and listened to what they had to say on matters of context and fact, even if we draw the line at justification of removal of essential freedoms and brutal operations.

Indeed, it goes both ways. A dialogue over facts and context permits a more determined complaint over oppressions and brutalities when justifications based on security and order are no longer viable. We badly need that dialogue in our own country as rank injustices take place in the wake of the riots.

This may be a dreadful thing to say and hear, but oppressive and brutal actions may be the 'lesser evil' because of a reasonable interpretation of facts and context. A discussions of those facts and context may well help create new facts and new contexts that then make oppression and brutality absurd.

It gets better. A dialogue based on honest representation (not that one might trust a malign alliance between government propagandists and our PR industry) might well define facts and contexts that remove the justification for bad things at all - on the facts instead of bar room opinion.

These are some of the issues that do need more serious discussion before we simply takes sides:-

• Have international law and the UN been manipulated by a few dominant powers in order to ensure the use of force?
• What are sovereign rights nowadays and what justification and risks are there for Western liberals in over-turning them on universalist principles when these principles have not been fully debated in the official international community?
• What precisely is the tribal and social construction of Libya and what would be the consequences in terms of sectarian strife of removing the post-colonialist structures of Khaddafi?
• What is the importance of Libya in terms of Western energy policy and strategic control of Africa?
• What are the costs and actual material consequences of what amounts to a civil war where the West is maintaining a deliberate policy of assisting one side?
• What, in the real world, is the most likely outcome in terms of freedom and security (and sovereign independence) of a rebel victory?
• What are we honestly prepared to sacrifice ourselves (given the growing desperation of our own poor) to ensure that a situation partly of our own making in terms of destruction and loss can be rectified?
• And by what right can we (in effect) thieve assets from one place to hand over to another and not risk the very system of trust in international affairs that is at the root of London's cultural and economic power?

These are serious points that cannot be left to a ridiculous war of postures between anti-war beardies, cynical politicians and liberal ideologues. These are questions every subject of the Crown needs to ask of the Crown before giving his or her allegiance in this matter.

They relate to debates about international order, sovereign rights, the rights of peoples, the struggle for resources, the expenditure of national resources, government competence, public accountability and political governance that our elite will do anything rather than have.

That elite desperately fears that if it does so and takes decision-making out of the hands of a very small community of 'experts' who are clearly out of their depth in the world created by international capitalism and the fall of the Soviet Union, then it will not get the 'right answers' for its own survival.

But regardless of these criticisms of our own mode of undertaking policy, the real point here is that Libya is on a hiding to nothing in seeking PR support in the West. Its image is 'bust' because the elites of the West have come to a view based only on a few general principles.

No one who decides policy will speak to them until their Leader is removed. Western Governments will do everything in their power, with the connivance of their own media, to deny them any platform and what they say will not be reported in detail or entirely fairly.

The Governments of the West are investing considerable sums in PR operations against them and any 'one-to-one' meeting with a Western Editor will be structured entirely around a pre-set 'liberal' ideological agenda which the Editor and his readership will consider self-evident (though it may not be).

The Libyans' letter suggested help in commissioning academic studies - actually not a bad idea except that any academic who gets involved will be ignored and will probably be kissing goodbye to his career while any findings will appear far into a future when the regime has probably been crushed.

Similarly, the desire to communicate with Western non-interventionists is tantamount to discrediting a community which contains the usual mixture of highly intelligent critics, obsessive activists and downright loons. The one alternative voice is thus marginalised by its own interlocutor.

That's it, basically. The Libyans have a snowball's chance in the desert of doing anything other than destroying the credibility of the very few people who just might be able to balance things up on facts and context - no wonder those who aren't grandstanding for war are running for cover.

But this is a Western own goal in its way. This urge to exclude all alternative opinion and drive the intellectual establishment into group-think on the basis of general principles means that key facts and context no longer guide policy.

We saw this in Iraq. We are seeing this in Afghanistan. We saw this most egregiously over the succession of recent economic crises. We are seeing this in the primitive and stupid populism coming from Government over the English riots. We will no doubt see this over Syria.

The inability of the British Establishment as a whole and the PR industry as a Uriah Heep-ish component of it to differentiate between the necessary exchange of facts and context in open dialogue through honest representation and a lemming-like need to adopt postures to please their masters is tragic.

The right response to the Libyans would be to courteously point out why they are stuffed and to suggest that, while making facts and context available, they have a simple choice.

Either they simply win their war as quickly as they can, show magnanimity in victory and try to build relations with the West on their own terms until the standard 'Nixon moment' or just get rid of Khaddafi and kneel at the feet of a NATO far superior in resources, if an intellectually challenged opponent.

In short, the honest PR would not laugh at the Libyans or moralise or posture about ethics but simply say that the ethical thing is not to take their money until they have either won the war or come to terms with the West. Wartime situations are not about PR, they are about propaganda.

This Libya whose civil servants have clearly failed to understand how power in the West actually operates, which is lashing around like a dinosaur at sections of its own people and which insists on holding on to the type of personal dictatorship that is now an insult to the aspirations of the young ...

... such a Libya is doomed in the eyes of the 'West' and it may as well save its money for a war thar should never have happened in the first place.

Al-Megrahi, Lockerbie and the British

If there is one thing that is clear about the sordid business surrounding the release of Al-Megrahi, it is that compassion is unlikely to have been central to his release last week - or rather that it is an odd sort of compassion that places the interest of a convicted mass murderer ahead of that of 270 families.

The problem for an analyst is the connection between the claimed independent decision-making of the SNP Justice Minister and the 'logic' of UK Government interest. Coincidence, shared logic or collusion? What information, if any, in this case, flowed between London and Edinburgh.

Let us assume, without prejudice and just for the sake of argument, that Minister MacAskill's position was 'aligned' with that of London. Why might London be pleased to see Al-Megrahi released? Why does London get delivered a stroke of luck by a political enemy?

Stripping Away Claim and Counter-Claim

Strip away the claims and counter-claims and the meaning of the release may lie where few journalists seem keen to go - in the fact that the Foreign Secretary has issued a Public Information Immunity Certificate stating that to publish certain material would be detrimental to national security.

We are also being led down the garden path by those who wish to portray this as a national security concern related to the so-called war on terror. Yes, the Libyans have taken themselves off the WMD circuit. Yes, there is an historic and current issue over the risks of Islamist terrorism in North Africa.

But the WMD issue did not need al-Megrahi's release after the fact and Ghaddafi and the West have a shared interest in suppressing Islamism whether or not you believe conspiracy theories about the alleged MI6/fundamentalist attempt to take the man out in 1996.

National security in this case can mean only one of two things - the interest of the British in Libya for geo-political reasons or as cover to avoid embarrassment. Remember - this 'Certificate' relates to the disclosure of documentation at Appeal that even the defence has not yet seen.

The secret politics of Anglo-Libyans relations, involving the UK's relations with the US, other major regional states and the politics of Africa, have become so complex that any revelation of the 'truth' (whatever it may be) may result in a PR and diplomatic 'lose/lose' for Her Majesty's Government.

We can either speak positively - of the reasons why the UK might want to cut some slack to Libya - or negatively - the reasons why the UK really wanted this man off its books - but the salient fact remains that HMG is actively suppressing information about its own conduct.

The Importance of Libya

What may puzzle some is why this strip off land between the Mediterranean and the Sahara is important at all. Its importance is not reliant on just one policy but on its pivotal position in three different areas:

• Ghaddafi uses his drive, anti-colonialist track record and funds to promote the idea of an African Union that would include the 'Islamic' north and could bring stability to the 'Dark Continent'.
• Libya's energy supplies, especially its gas, are a major piece on the European economic chessboard. A loose relationship between Tripoli, Rome and Russia offers a highly ambiguous opportunity and threat to the European Union, both providing gas and making its supply part of Russia's OGEC aspirations
• More negatively, Ghaddafi is not a great fan of the two-state solution for Palestine and is mercurial to say the least. He has also been an active secularist rival to the Saudis. What is not wanted at this time is Libya being distracted back from African into Middle Eastern affairs.

Trade opportunities are important (we must declare the interest of Tim Pendry being on the Board of the Middle East Association although the opinions here are wholly TPPR's) but they are not quite what they seem on the surface.

It is not just about energy production where the Americans have been hovering around for some time and with probable success once things have settled down again. Nor is it just about general Mediterranean trade and investment where there is a natural post-colonial Italo-Libyan connection.

The UK, including the Scots (though we see no evidence of unwarranted business influence over the Scots Executive), will gain general benefits from energy and trade development but the real gold mine lies in the long-promised modernisation of the Libyan economy.

As with Syria, the City of London sees eventual financial liberalisation as a prime opportunity for the sale of important financial, professional and consulting services in which the British are global leaders.

From London's perspective, this is the economic icing on the geo-political cake. Britain's welfare state has been structured since the 1980s to depend almost entirely on export income from the City. Its manufacturing is in terminal decline and its own energy production is coming to a shuddering halt.

Private attempts to 'sell' into Libya were going on long before the finalisation of the WMD deal, centred initially on a set of business interests with security sector and City links who saw themselves as competitive with American aspirations - that is another story.

The African Connection

The point here is that the Al-Megrahi release has to be seen not in simplistic terms as a trade-off for business (which is what most anti-Government journalists would like the story to be) but as just one component in a very finely drawn Libyan policy that has constantly balanced multiple interests.

In addition to its trade and energy aspirations, the UK has long had a strong position on the settlement and management of Africa that has slowly come to develop a European dimension.

This is related not only to Libya as a gateway to energy (including possible pipelines from Nigeria, although these are likely to go through Algeria) but also as front line in the war against the flows of migration that threaten to destabilise European politics.

But a key plank of Western interest is the creation of a working African Union capable of dealing with failed states. As of today, the African Union's military capability is a joke. Its role in Mogadishu is an embarrassment to the West and the Continent. It need not be so.

If there is a war on terror aspect to the Libyan connection, the fear is not that the Sahara may be dominated by Islamised tuaregs or that Algeria may go the way of Afghanistan (neither truly credible propositions). It is that oil-wealth states like Nigeria might implode from internal sectarian unrest.

A constructive relationship between Libya and the West, extended to South Africa and Nigeria, could ensure sufficient funds for a sufficiently well-trained armed force to ensure strategic liberal interventionism on the cheap without accusations of colonialism.

The American Aspect

Europe and the US do not always have the same interests. Economic competition continues and the Americans are very much more touchy about 'terrorism' - and are culturally more unforgiving of slights, often extending their moralistic security blood feuds for decades.

The UK's entire foreign policy is predicated on the Atlantic alliance. Incredible efforts go into ensuring that the US is not discomfited and yet there is a natural tension between US foreign policy and the aspirations of the British 'Arabist' old guard in the FCO and security services.

Some of those most keen on relations with Libya (and Syria) were also those most privately scathing of the US intervention in Iraq and so, logically, of the extreme Atlanticism of Tony Blair.

Nevertheless, British policies of engagement with key Arab 'rogue states' (though not Iran) started in earnest in the late 1990s, with the aim of slowly bringing the suspicious Americans along with them by stealth. American diplomats were often collusive but well aware that it might be hard to explain at home.

Success in Libya may be matched by success in Syria before too long. There is a great deal at stake for the UK in demonstrating that 'regional rogues' can be turned around through British intermediation - and, ergo, that the British are worth continued investment in by Washington.

And this is where things start to go a little awry and where 'national security' considerations in releasing information could mean anything or nothing. They could certainly mean no more than that sources should not be revealed but we have to consider other possibilities.

Internal Contradictions

At the heart of this mess is the exposure of an internal contradiction that the UK Government must, on the one hand, sustain its regional policy in which it has invested so much and, on the other, never ever step out of line from Washington - ever!

It is widely accepted that Al-Megrahi was a player in a complicated security and intelligence game in which the 'other side' were his Western security service equivalents. It is also widely accepted that the evidence against Al-Megrahi was circumstantial.

The angry passion of Robert Mueller of the FBI over the release argues against any deliberate 'fix' to 'get' Al-Megrahi as the wrong man insofar as the American-backed case (which contains many questions and anomalies) was clearly based on a sincere belief that Al-Megrahi did the deed.

But the suspicion remains that the prosecution case was too bound up in the secret machinations of insiders to be wholly fair. The FBI was not then (though is more so now) the prime prosecutor in security and intelligence cases. Its inexperience may have allowed it to be led in certain directions.

There was prima facie cause for Al-Megrahi to be targeted as a senior security official on the other side and incentive later to ensure that the US made its point in making his handover a pre-emptive sign of good faith on the part of Ghaddafi when he most needed to cut a deal himself.

It is easy to forget just now much energy was invested between 1991 and 1999 in getting Al-Megrahi to trial in a process involving no less than Nelson Mandela.

And there is the determined denial of responsibility of a dying man, the doubts of many (though not all) family members of Lockerbie victims, the fact that new evidence was about to be presented at Appeal and the persistent alternative scenarios linked more directly to the Levant and to Iran.

This is not to say that he is not guilty nor that the trial was unfair, only that the release on 'compassionate' grounds tends to confirm that this case had everything to do with politics and very little to do with justice from the very beginning.

None of this energy was devoted to Iran Air Flight 655 which became 'sorted' as a bilateral compensation deal in 1996 as if it was an industrial accident. Even the fact of that incident and the timing of Lockerbie raise questions as to Libyan motivation that have not been fully answered.

Back to the Public Information Immunity Certificate

Above all, there is the Public Information Immunity Certificate and the timing of the release - compassionate for someone who ostensibly was responsible for the wilful murders of some 270 human beings yet not compassionate in the least for the family members of those who were murdered.

Martin Kettle in the Guardian today is naive. A lack of evidence is proof of nothing. Only evidence is proof of something and, even then, if out of context and with other evidence missing, it may not be as reliable as it appears.

Admittedly such thinking as ours could be in danger of going down the route of that peculiar bug-bear of the modern liberal intellectual, conspiracy, and we are right to be cautious. The state of Libyan-US relations in the late 1980s involved a state terror war on both sides that could provide motivation.

But what is not written down or is not revealed (because it was written down somewhere else a long time ago or is not being revealed by choice) is not unimportant precisely because we cannot tell whether anything is there at all. The silence means that we must remain cautious about Government claims.

As things stand, what was published yesterday by the Government is useful and it does make it clear that there was no crass link between trade and the release of Al-Megrahi. But it also smells of misdirection, even in the attempt to shift the media's ground back on to the irrelevant war on terror.

I hope we have argued plausibly that Anglo-Libyan relations are complex and multifaceted and that the release is inexplicable as 'compassion'. Whether guilty or not, Al-Megrahi is a pawn in a game between two sets of unaccountable security apparat who have both got themselves into a dreadful pickle.

So long as Al-Megrahi's release pre-empted his Appeal and so long as the Government persists in issuing Public Information Immunity Certificates on grounds of 'national security', we are justified in asking whether an Appeal might have exposed things best left unexposed.

From this point, we must remain silent. The Government may have acted correctly in all respects. Al-Megrahi may have been an unrepentant psychopathic mass murderer. Political and contingent fee legal interests may have been muddying the waters with claims and counterclaims.

But if Al-Megrahi's appeal had been successful, would it have raised serious new issues about who actually was responsible, directing global attention to the Levant at the very time a volatile American Congress and an even more volatile Israel are being drawn into the Peace Process?

The possibility (no more) is that the case against Al-Megrahi, if proven false, might have seriously disrupted both Anglo-American and Western-Libyan relations. Until Government 'opens its books' on its Libyan policy, this possibility must be taken seriously.

Only the fact that the Scottish Executive seems to have come to an independent view regardless of central Government protects the latter from accusations of political manipulation. The decision-making process in Edinburgh is where investigative attention must turn now.