Prime minister pushed for military action against Gaddafi because he did not want repeat of Srebrenica on his 'watch'
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David Cameron and William Hague received a rapturous reception when they visited Libya with Nicolas Sarkozy. Photograph: Esam Omran Al-Fetori/REUTERS
David Cameron did a pretty good job before the election of convincing foreign policy experts that he would abandon the interventionist era of Tony Blair.
The future prime minister appeared to place himself in the tradition of Douglas Hurd when he used a speech on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in 2006 to say that democracy "cannot be dropped from the air by an unmanned drone". As foreign secretary, Hurd famously rejected the idea of supplying arms to Bosnian Muslims on the grounds that that would create a level killing field.
So the prime minister's decision to push so strongly for military action against Muammar Gaddafi's forces came as a surprise to many. But Cameron's stance in February came as no surprise to members of his inner circle who say that he had no truck with Hurd's position on Bosnia.
One senior figure said that one memory stuck in Cameron's mind: the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995. This took place a few weeks after Hurd had retired as foreign secretary. Cameron was only 28 at the time and working at Carlton Television. But the senior Whitehall source indicated that Srebrenica made a big impression on Cameron:
There was a very strong feeling at the top of this government that Benghazi could very easily become the Srebrenica of our watch. The generation that has lived through Bosnia is not going to be the pull up the drawbridge generation.
The disclosure that Cameron was determined to avoid repeating the mistakes of Hurd, his predecessor but one as Conservative MP for Witney, is one of a series of insights published on Monday in a Guardian investigation into the Libyan war. I have spent the past month with my colleague Patrick Wintour interviewing cabinet minsters and some of the key officials in Whitehall involved in the Libyan campaign.
An image emerges of a prime minister who was determined to avoid the two major mistakes in British foreign policy over the past twenty years – Bosnia and Iraq – by steering a careful course between two extremes. On the one hand Cameron wanted to avoid becoming the "pull up the drawbridge generation" by failing to act. On the other hand he wanted to avoid acting unilaterally and invading a country without the explicit authority of the UN and clear legal approval from the attorney.
Cameron may have performed a delicate balance act. But his instincts were quite hawkish. One minister says of his interventions on the National Security Council (NSC):
The prime minister was always the biggest hawk in the NSC. He was always the person who was pushing and saying: 'How can we get things moving in this way.'
Hugh Powell, the son of Margaret Thatcher's foreign policy adviser Charles Powell, made an impression on Cameron because he pushed the UN security council resolution, which approved military action, to its limits, according to a minister:
The prime minister has confidence in Hugh Powell. He felt this was someone who absolutely got it and who was imaginative and was thinking all the time, within the boundary of the UN mandate, about how to shove things forward.
Our interviews with officials and ministers show that two innovations on foreign policy have produced dividends. A National Security Council, established after the election to avoid what the former cabinet secretary Lord Butler of Brockwell described as the "sofa government" of the Blair era, has given all the key ministers a say and allow the conventions of formal cabinet government to be observed.
But a little noticed aspect of William Hague's approach to foreign policy has also worked a treat. Hague felt that the last government made a mistake by focusing its efforts almost solely on multilateral institutions – the EU and the UN – to the detriment of traditional bilateral relations with other countries.
As he made clear in his Observer interview on Sunday, the eurosceptic Hague is now a fan of the EU in some, though not all, ways. But he believes that the last government neglected bilateral relations with countries outside the obvious circle of the US, China, India and the EU.
Hague showed his approach on this front at the recent meeting of the UN General Assembly when he held 54 bilateral meetings during his week in New York. One foreign office source explained his approach:
Wiliam Hague worked hard to ensure that bilateral relationships help us in multilateral bodies. We did not take those relationships for granted. Countries have to be worked on. It is good to be able to pick up the phone. Multilateral relations at the UN are very important. But these are built on strong bilateral relations. You can't just turn up at the UN and corral people. We spent the first year in office building those relations.
Hague could never have known that the first meeting he had as foreign secretary would pay dividends on Libya nearly a year later. A few days after arriving at King Charles Street he met Amr Moussa, the then secretary general of the Arab League. Ten months later Moussa became a key figure during the negotiations on the UN security council resolution which approved the military action against Gaddafi in March. Hague won over Moussa when he assured him the resolution would rule out allowing foreign troops to occupy Libya.
Moussa's support allowed Lebanon, the only Arab member of the security council, to support the resolution. This took Britain and France towards ten votes, the number which means that a Russian veto becomes less likely.
The success of Libya has prompted speculation that Cameron will adopt a foreign policy doctrine. But ministers stress that it would be wrong to draw up a blueprint beyond the obvious point about the need to ensure that military action is supported by the UN and has regional backing.
Keith Simpson, the former Sandhurst historian who is Hague's parliamentary aide, illustrated this point by pointing out that the outcome of the Arab Spring remains uncertain:
The historical parallel for the Arab spring is not 1989, it is 1848-51. It is the European revolutions which saw in some cases regimes being overthrown and in other cases reactionary forces were able to hold on to power. I think it is the same with the Arab spring. It is mixed.