Libya military strikes bring warning from former defence chiefs

House of Lords told Britain is stretching armed forces very thin, while coalition runs risk of appearing like 'oil-starved colonialists'

Britain and its coalition partners are running the risk of appearing like "oil-starved colonialists" up to their "knavish tricks" in Libya, the head of the armed forces at the time of the 1991 Gulf war has warned.

Lord Craig of Radley, who was chief of the defence staff between 1988 and 1991, said the coalition had embarked on a "highwire" act that could rebound against Britain, the US and France.

Craig was speaking in a House of Lords debate about the military action against the Gaddafi regime in Libya. Former defence chiefs also warned in the debate about the impact of government cuts to the armed forces.

Stirrup, the chief of the defence staff during last year's strategic defence and security review, said: "Let us be in no doubt, we are spreading our armed forces very thin."

Craig told peers: "What we might characterise as humanitarian might be seen very differently through Arab and Islamic eyes. The switch from destroying Libyan air defences to the continuing night-after-night interdiction of Libyan armour and weapons storage, attempting to impose a no-drive zone and loose talk of arming the rebels, smacks of mission creep.

"We are on a highwire, without any safety net and in the hands of opinion-formers who could quickly turn these developments to our disadvantage. Are we not very close to being accused of involvement and taking sides in a Libyan civil war? Once again we will face the accusation that oil-starved colonialists are up to their knavish tricks."

Craig warned that Muammar Gaddafi would once again threaten Britain's national security if he remained in power. "We have certainly ensured that in Gaddafi we now have an enemy for life. If he survives in power our national interests will again be under renewed threat from him. Hopefully, however, sooner rather than later there has to be an exit and an end to our involvement."

Stirrup retired as chief of the defence staff last year after the strategic defence and security review concluded that the Ministry of Defence's �37bn annual budget would be cut by 8% between 2011-15. In the Lords debate he said the Libyan operation had highlighted the pressures on the armed forces.

"They will do what is asked of them but, for all their can-do attitude, they are a finite resource, ever more finite by the month," he said.

The combination of the Libyan operation and Britain's continuing commitments in Afghanistan had left the "locker bare", posing a potential threat if Iran threatened British interests in the Gulf, Stirrup said. "We have to think very carefully about the consequences of our continued military involvement in Libya. Although it has been pushed off the front pages for the moment, Afghanistan still consumes a very great deal of our military capacity.

"Whatever we have left in the locker over the past couple of years for dealing with other contingencies has consisted mainly of air and maritime capabilities. These have largely been consumed by the Libya operation, so that locker is now looking pretty bare.

"Yet we still face huge risks. To cite just one example ? the possibility of Iranian miscalculation in the Gulf, whether provoked by a third party or otherwise, is something we must continue to guard against. The potential consequences of such an event could be very severe in an area where our vital national interests are concerned in a way that they are not in Libya."

Lord Hannay of Chiswick, Britain's former ambassador to the UN, warned that the government had imposed cuts on the armed forces that went too far. "We cannot do it [promote peace and security] without providing our armed forces with the resources they need to do the tasks we ask them to undertake. I fear we may have allowed our preoccupation with the age of austerity to cut too close to the bone."

Hannay was supportive of UN security resolution 1973, which authorised military action in Libya. "Little reference has been made to the watershed nature of the decision taken by the security council in 1973. Five years ago the whole membership of the UN ? all 192 of them ? signed up to the principle that where a regime was unable or unwilling to protect their own citizens the international community had a responsibility to protect them, if necessary, and as a last resort, by the use of force.

"Many believed, and quite a few hoped, that the responsibility to protect would remain just so many words on paper, an empty aspiration but not a reality. Well, now resolution 1973 has given the lie to that and has done so in the most solemnly legal and legitimising way in a resolution aimed at protecting the citizens of Libya who were being grievously repressed by their own ruler. That resolution is every bit as important a rubicon to have crossed as was resolution 678 which authorised the use of force to reverse Iraq's aggression against Kuwait in 1990."

But Hannay dismissed David Cameron's claim that resolution 1973, passed last month, provided a legal basis for supplying arms to the Libyan rebels. "I don't find the assertions that security council resolution 1973 in some way overrides or provides a way round the arms embargo ... I find those arguments fairly dubious and not very convincing."

Nicholas Watt

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