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Libya no-fly zone doesn't mean military action, UK minister insists

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Mar 10, IRNA -- Defence Secretary Liam Fox Thursday played down fears that Britain was heading for war against Libya by insisting that imposing a no-fly zone over the country does not require pre-emptive military action.

'In Iraq that's not the way we carried out the no-fly zone. There are alternatives,' Fox said ahead of a Nato meeting with his colleagues to discuss contingency plans.

Rather than 'taking out' air defences in a pre-emptive strike, as warned by the US, he suggested that Nato leaders could say that, if an enemy locked its air defence radar on Nato planes, they could 'regard that as a hostile action and take subsequent action'.

Peace campaigners, led by former veteran cabinet minister Tony Benn and left-wing Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, are warning that the “clamour to intervene in Libya has more to do with control of that country's oil resources than with support for Libya's people.”

“The disaster in Iraq should have taught us that military intervention cannot hasten democracy. The future of Libya and the other states in the region must be determined by the people of those countries alone,” Benn and Corbyn warned in a joint letter to the Guardian signed by other leading peace campaigners.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Fox admitted any action would require international and regional support, but described Libya's use of violence as 'very worrying'.

With France, Britain is pressing ahead with the drafting of a UN Security Council resolution calling for the imposition of an air exclusion zone over Libya.

Foreign Secretary William Hague has also joined his German counterpart, Guido Westerwelle, in sending a letter to EU foreign affairs chief Baroness Ashton, calling for an “ambitious, clear response with a series of concrete actions both for the short and longer term' against the Libyan regime.

Eminent British barrister Geoffrey Robertson says there is a “narrowly prescribed right of humanitarian intervention to stop the continuing commission of crimes against humanity” as was exemplified by the safe havens operation to save the Kurds in northern Iraq and by Nato's action in Kosovo in 2002.”

But “it's unclear, at this juncture, whether these (and other) preconditions exist so as to justify the imposition of a no-fly zone” in Libya, Robertson said in a separate letter to the Guardian.

Analysts also recall former defence secretary John Reid stating when first ordering British troops to Afghanistan's Helmand province in 2006 that the mission was for only three years and he hoped it could be completed “without a bullet being fired.”

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Islamic Republic News Agency/IRNA NewsCode: 30290929