Sarko
back in the dock...
Today Nicolas Sarkozy’s corruption trial begins. One isn’t optimistic that it will reveal most of what was really at stake in NATO’s Libya intervention more than a decade ago. That intervention – defended as a necessary act to save the people of Benghazi – has come to look like the Suez adventure in reverse. With Suez, the British, French, and Israelis failed to overthrow the Egyptian ruler who was, they said, bent on causing them harm. The Americans wisely put an end to the adventure; the Soviets did not object.
In Libya, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded in prodding NATO to overthrow the Libyan ruler who was, they said, bent on killing his own people. The Americans, led by Hillary Clinton, who threatened her own president with resignation before an election, endorsed the plan. The Russians did object, but nobody else much cared, except Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who became the beneficiary of Russian revenge.
It was bad form at the time to suggest that the main motive for burying Gaddafi was to erase the evidence of graft on a rather large scale. But it was hardly a secret that a good many people and institutions, from dear old Reverend Walter Fauntroy to the London School of Economics, were recipients of Libyan generosity.
Will Mr Sarkozy make just the right sort of scapegoat? We shall see.
