So Boy George reckons the Libya war (we might as well get used to calling it that) is going to cost £2 million a day, and that it will all be over by April.
Bargain!
Unless, of course anything at all goes wrong. When you consider that one Eurofighter Typhoon costs 90 million euros, that figure could quite easily prove to be a little on the conservative side.
Intervention in Libya is bonkers. The UK, apparently, can't afford hospitals, schools etc, but it can afford to play soldiers in the desert all over again.
And for what? At the risk of being an armchair general, surely the best that an aerial campaign can hope for is exactly what it achieved in Kosovo – ie de facto partition that lasts precisely as long as the West sticks around to protect Free Benghazi from revenge.
The West missed its chance to topple Gadaffi during the couple of weeks he was in Venezuela (or "resting" at a mental hospital or whatever), before the repression started. He's not going to step down politely now, is he?
And it's been clear that regime change is not part of the mission - so he'll sit there like a malevolent toad eyeballing his former eastern provinces and waiting for his chance. I suppose the hope is that there will be a mutiny and a military coup. Well, hope springs eternal, eh?
But here this country goes again, imagining that it's a global power all over again. Why won't any governments accept that the 20th century happened? Let's adjust our ambitions to our budgets, not our budgets to our ambitions.
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