So you probably have an opinion on what’s going on in Libya. You may well have discussed it with your friends, argued over the pros and cons of the no-fly zone and attempted to frame the situation in the context of the West’s imperialist tendencies re: everyone else in the world. You probably debated whether removing Gaddafi  by force would be a mistake and you probably feel quite justifi ed in your opinion. I hate to break it to you, but your opinion is a load of shit.

The shitness of your opinion has nothing to do with its actual content. Nor, for that matter, does it have anything to do with the amount of time and effort you’ve dedicated to understanding the situation. Whether you study international relations, politics, engineering or divinity, you have no idea what you’re talking about. For that matter, neither do I.

Not one of us has anything like enough information to even begin to understand what’s happening over there. I mean, we’re talking about a land-war between a silly-putty-faced Colonel with a decidedly limited grip on reality and a mismatched bunch of former soldiers, political dissidents and angry teenagers backed by the West (albeit in a questionable, slightly antagonistic kind of way). We’re talking like arming these people is the best option – a group with no coherent leadership currently trying to hold cities against tanks with toy guns.

There isn’t a best option, just a selection of different bad ones. Stepping up attacks on Gaddafi ’s headquarters and communication centres, bringing the war “to his doorstep”, as US officials have put it, is one option, but there’s always the chance that perceived ‘Western imperialist aggression’ will stoke the Islamist movement for another few years. Oh, and that a bunch of innocent people will be killed in the process. We could just leave them to fi ght between themselves and rightly get called out for arming a despotic nutter and letting him murder his own people. Again, a bunch of innocent people will end up dead, this time while we sit twiddling our thumbs. We could do something in between and get accused of doing both bad things at the same time. People will still die. It’s lose, lose, lose.

This is our fault, of course. We haven’t just been pandering to Gaddafi  these past 30-odd years, we put him where he is and kept him there. He was our guy, that’s why he’s in power. Just two years ago we bent ourselves in knots returning a Libyan prisoner to please Captain Meltyface, never mind that the guy was imprisoned for dropping a plane on Lockerbie under orders from the aforementioned victim of the Ark of the Covenant. We had to expect that Gaddafi  would eventually lose control, that the people of Libya would politely but fi rmly tell him to fuck off . This would have been fine if he didn’t have an arsenal of Western military technology. No organic uprising can beat the guy precisely because we made sure of it, and our involvement in taking him out now runs the risk of giving his supporters the motivation to carry on fi ghting indefinitely. 

At least our leaders want him gone now and have finally readjusted their moral compasses. Or have they? Our dear Mr Cameron may be bumbling around doing his best ‘Tony Blair: World Policeman’ impression but he represents a party which has been more than comfortable with Gaddafi  for longer than anyone reading this has been alive. It’s all just lazy, convenient self-interest. And that’s true of all three parties. And the US for that matter.

No one in the Middle East has any reason to trust us, we’ve been messing with their governments for so long we don’t even know how to stop. If Libya’s Islamist movement balloons at the end of all this I can’t say I'll blame them – we’re the Empire here. Through decades of manipulation and murder on our part they’ve earned the right to think of themselves as the Rebel Alliance. 

The point is, I’m really, really tired of hearing every Tom, Dick and Harry’s view of how the world can be fixed in three easy steps. It’s not Royal Wedding levels of irritation but it’s pretty bloody close. Throw your hands up in despair, complain that we should never have ended up in this situation, work to make sure it never happens again; just don’t pretend you know what you’re talking about. We can’t police the world or make decisions for anyone other than ourselves, we need to start being a lot more humble and listening to the people on the ground. We need to ask the Libyans what they want and do what we can to help. I don’t think that help can include weaponry though, it’ll just start the cycle again. But what do I know?