UK MPs place blame on Cameron's Libya intervention for country’s ‘collapse’

A UK parliamentary report has severely criticised the intervention by Britain and France that led to the overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

The report said that then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s intervention in Libya was carried out with no proper intelligence analysis, drifted into an unannounced goal of regime change and shirked its moral responsibility to help reconstruct the country following the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.

The failures led to Libya becoming a failed a state on the verge of all-out civil war, as well as to the rise of Daesh in North Africa, the report adds.

The UK government said it had been an international decision to intervene and that the action had been called for by the Arab League and authorised by the UN Security Council, the UK Foreign Office added.

The report repeated US president Barack Obama’s claim that France and Britain lost interest in Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown.

Cameron has defended his handling of the situation, telling MPs in January action was needed because Gaddafi "was bearing down on people in Benghazi and threatening to shoot his own people like rats".

But the foreign affairs committee said the government "failed to identify that the threat to civilians was overstated", adding that it "selectively took elements of Gaddafi's rhetoric at face value".

Cameron, who stood down as an MP on Monday, also refused to give evidence to the select committee. In one of his few reflections on his major military intervention, he blamed the Libyan people for failing to take their chance of democracy.

Libya is currently mired in political and economic chaos with competing factions fighting for control of the key oil terminals and no nationwide support for the UN-recognised government based in Tripoli.