Churchill’s words at once spring to mind after the Foreign Office advice to British tourists to flee Tunisia ASAP. There is no doubt that IS, now building up its presence in the collapsed state of Libya, with whom Tunisia shares a porous border, has won a stunning victory. One gunman has all but crippled the Tunisian economy by destroying its vital tourist industry. This blog has never had any confidence in the UK Foreign Office and doubts now the wisdom of this call. Would it not have been better to loan Tunisia a thousand British security forces to make the beaches relatively safe? Clearly the decision to go to such a place would have been taken by tourists who knew and accepted the risks and for families it was a no go area. But for those without ties? And running away?
Tunisia is the only Arab Spring country to appear to make a go of it and deserves better support. Next door Libya, the subject of a very ill advised intervention to topple Gaddafi, has now collapsed altogether. Whatever that dictator’s faults and there were many, his country was an orderly state with good services, with whom other nations could do business. Now we have total chaos, armed gangs at war with each other and people traffickers on an industrial scale dispatching a diaspora of the desperate across the Mediterranean to a discordant EU which is unable to agree what to do with them. Meanwhile IS is establishing a base for its next conquest with little to stand in its way.
This is worse than policy failure. It is a collapse of policy to match the collapse of the outcome of its interventions.