Who is more rational — Gaddafi or the Western allies bombing him?

THERE has always been a special relationship between Ireland and France going back to at least 1798. The French, unlike the brutish Brits, are a civilised, rational people, right?

Any such notions have been dispelled recently. Whoever thought the French were soft — “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” even — has been proved very wrong by the attacks on Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

Actually, the French never were the effete beings of American caricature or the high-minded rationalists of Irish imagining. The first Indochina War and the Algerian War both saw France fight with ferocity, frequently employing torture.

The difference between then and now is that, whether or not they were morally right, the French did at least know what they were fighting for in the 1940s and 1950s — holding on to their colonies.

Their war aims now — shared with Britain, Denmark and, er, Qatar — are nothing like so clear (I exclude the US from that list because after less than two days as part of the “coalition of the willing” America couldn’t wait to hand over responsibility to NATO or Britain and France jointly — or to anyone who was prepared to accept it, quite frankly).

France and Britain say that they hope their bombs are sending a message not just to Gaddafi but to other tyrannical regimes across the region. For a decade after 9/11, Western warfare was focused on safeguarding its interests. Now, in the wake of the rebellions across the Arab Middle East, the West’s leaders hope their actions will demonstrate renewed willingness to put muscle behind their democratic values.

That looks optimistic, to say the least. In Iraq in 2003, the Allies failed to chart a clear path to democracy before taking action. Having toppled Saddam Hussein, they lacked a ready alternative. Eight years later Iraq has come a long way, but at a very high price in blood and treasure.

The truth is the Libya mission was poorly conceived from the start. A no-fly zone was never going to be sufficient to protect civilians. Hence, air strikes are now targeting Libyan ground forces.

But the fighting persists and pro-Gaddafi forces continue to control much of the country. Embarrassingly, coalition members have bickered about who is participating and what the command structure should look like. Meanwhile, the expected contributions from Arab countries — apart from the token four jets promised by Qatar — have yet to materialise.

How did the West get into this mess? What seems to have been pivotal was the realisation that Benghazi, the rebel’s citadel, was about to come under attack and that could lead to a bloodbath in Libya’s second largest city. But the problem that Benghazi was likely to face was obvious from as early as mid-February. Hence, if the West was going to go with a no-fly zone or military action, it should have intervened sooner. That would have had a higher probability of stopping Gaddafi’s forces, making it more likely that momentum would have gone the other way.

Instead, by waiting until it was obvious that Benghazi was going to come under attack, the chances of success became much lower and more rebel territory was lost. In other words, Libya is now probably in the worst of all worlds. The initial Western reticence was understandable. Events in that isolated land have little bearing on the rest of the tumultuous region. Indeed, it is Gaddafi’s political isolation in the Middle East that, as much as anything, explains the Arab League’s on-off support for the armed effort against him. That none of the coalition partners can state a coherent goal for the Libya campaign is because none of them have any central interest in the outcome there.

They have kick-started a war without a war aim, a military mission with no clear mission, an international game where no one knows what the endgame will be. Is this a war to kill Gaddafi? British ministers think it might be, but British military officials say it shouldn’t be. What does France want? The ousting of Gaddafi, says Sarkozy — or perhaps just a boost to the confidence of the anti-Gaddafi rebels, say his colleagues. Libya, therefore, is a war of choice. Western interests are decidedly less than vital. Not only does it account for just 2% of world oil production but the scale of the humanitarian crisis is not unique either: ask anyone from Cote d’Ivoire.

This kind of drama usually starts, of course, when leaders are seduced by the feeling they must do good. Sometimes, they essentially ignore the killings, even as deaths climb into the hundreds of thousands, as in Rwanda and Congo. At other times, the deaths number “only” in the hundreds, as in Libya — but the guy doing the killing is someone they have good reason to dislike so they want to stop him.

The knee-jerk reaction among so-called liberal interventionists is to see spilt blood and demand action right away. There’s no time to deliberate, they say. But a bit of deliberation might have been no bad thing. And the first question should have been: who are these rebels which the French have recognised as the legitimate government of Libya? How many of its leaders can President Sarkozy name, one wonders? One, two, three? Any of them?

IN a best-case scenario, Gaddafi will be toppled and there would be a constitutional convention, voter lists, political parties and supervised free and fair elections. But there could just as easily be a violent scramble for authority in which the most organised, secretive and vicious elements take over. Paris and London — and Copenhagen — have cheerfully swallowed the notion that Gaddafi’s opponents are secular liberal democrats deserving of support — while the protesters in Bahrain and Yemen are somehow not.

More sophisticated policy circles have been worrying over a piece of research circulating recently which suggested that, on a per capita basis, twice as many foreign fighters went to Iraq to fight the US from Libya — and specifically eastern Libya, the area around Benghazi — than from any other country in the Arabic-speaking world. There are no cuddly bears in this fight. Colonel Gaddafi has used and supported terrorism, murdered hundreds of innocent civilians (Libyan and Western), and repressed his people for 40 years. But until the beginning of last month he was also someone the French, the British and the Americans were all very happy selling weapons to, let’s not forget.

There is one kind of weapon that isn’t in Gaddafi’s arsenal, however. He gave up his nuclear programme. And the one lesson that stands out is that tyrannical regimes with nuclear and chemical weapons don’t get bombed. Libya is being attacked for the not-small crime of shelling its own citizens. But North Korea went unpunished for starving millions and attacking a neighbour. Nor are the Iranians under any kind of threat. Looking back, Colonel Gaddafi probably feels he gave away the goods too soon and is getting bombed for his trouble. So, he will reason, why should he stop pursuing his domestic tormentors if the West says he must leave office anyway — and, as likely as not, face a war crimes tribunal?

True, neither is being very civilised. But who is being rational? The French? Or Colonel Gaddafi?