007: The MI6 and SAS mission to Libya was not botched

Yesterday, this newspaper’s executive foreign editor, Con Coughlin, wrote how the recent MI6 and SAS mission to Libya was a ‘fiasco’, and how those who were responsible for authorising it were ‘idiots’. Coughlin’s voice is just one of many saying similar. In today’s Daily Mail, Sir Christopher Meyer asserts that the mission was a ‘stonking, copper-bottomed fiasco‘. Such a view is echoed somewhat more diplomatically in the Guardian by Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary.

I think they’re wrong, and that it’s possible to see the mission in a far more positive light. Much journalistic and political capital is being made of this supposed fiasco, and William Hague and the Government are suffering much undeserved vituperation. If anybody should be blamed, it’s not the British, but the Libyan rebels.

In short, the the whole ‘fiasco’ was nothing more than a misunderstanding. The biggest error was made by the Libyans who arrested the team, but of course it is diplomatically impossible for William Hague to say as much.

Let’s not forget, the rebels still want our help, and if we’re going to do it properly, we need people on the ground, and yes, we need the SAS, MI6 and helicopters. We cannot, it should be stressed, always do these things through the front door.

by Guy Walters