The Overthrow of Gaddafi Has Been Messy and Is Likely to Get Worse

But this is what the future probably looks like. Better get used to it. Like it or not, the ramshackle rebel army is, with the support of the Nato-based coalition, creating a new way of intervening and giving strength to a new strand of international law. Farewell Gladstonian liberal intervention with its gunboats; hello people's liberal intervention with its Ray-Bans, T-shirts and hastily converted pick-ups.
Of course, Libya isn't over yet.

The last days of Gaddafi could be just as messy as the long days that led to his downfall. He is more than mad enough and self-declared martyr enough to do something foolish at the end. But even if the battle ends soon and cleanly, the peace that follows is likely to be just as confused and chaotic as the conflict.

How could it be otherwise? We have intervened to prevent a massacre and let the Libyan people shape their own peace, rather than to seek to impose ours something which, by the way, we ourselves weren't very good at.

So, as we watch the National Transitional Council struggle to build a government (security should be its first priority), it would be in order to remember with humility that when we tried to do the same thing in Baghdad we didn't exactly make a roaring success of it or in Kabul either. Or, indeed, in many places where we have tried to create a Western peace after a foreign conflict.

We should now do all that we can to help the rebels to bring about order and government in Libya. But we will need to do so with understanding and patience. Better for the mistakes that will inevitably be made to be local ones, rather than our mistakes that they have to pay for, as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 1997, before the Kosovo war started, I was in the little Albanian villages south of Pristina being bombarded by the main battle units of the Serb Army. The following day I met one of the Serb artillery commanders and found that he was more worried about being indicted by what was then the infant Yugoslav war crimes tribunal than he was of Nato's bombs.

The point about law is that it exists not just to deliver justice after the event but also to govern behaviour beforehand. After Kosovo, the world summit of 2005 gave form to a new international legal concept: the responsibility to protect (R2P for short). This asserted that, under international law, there ought to be an obligation (note "ought" and "obligation") on a government to protect its people, not abuse them. Many of us thought R2P would never be more than a piece of well-meaning rhetoric. But Libya has given R2P both form and precedent.

How R2P is carried forward post Libya will also not be smooth or free of contradictions. R2P will be applied with force in places where it can be Libya for example; but not be so applied in others, where it can't be Syria probably. But then this was true of classic liberal interventionism too.

International law does not spring from a single pen or a single piece of paper; it evolves over time confusingly, inelegantly and often in contradictory fashion. Libya has placed us slap-bang in the middle of that messy process.

Many of us, me included, feared that, after the Iraq debacle, the multilateral system might never be able to be used again for good ends. But it has been and triumphantly.

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