As Qaddafi’s forces rounded on the rebels in the town of Benghazi and a slaughter seemed imminent, Cameron and French president Nicolas Sarkozy cobbled together a United Nations coalition of the sort-of-willing, including a hesitant Barack Obama. Cameron then put the UN-approved commitment to Libya to the House of Commons, and received overwhelming support. Only 13 of the 570 members of Parliament present rejected the motion. Of 280 Conservatives, only one dared say no.

Defense chiefs recall Cameron being in such a rush to engage that he was unwilling to listen to problems. He summoned the National Security Council and informed them “intervention in Libya is in the British national interest.” When the then head of the Secret Intelligence Service Sir John Sawers disagreed, insisting that the prime minister wanted to act for humanitarian reasons, which was not quite the same thing, Cameron looked puzzled and said: “Yes, yes, but it is important that we do these things.”

“There were some very real difficulties that Number 10 didn’t really want to hear,” said General Sir David Richards, the then Chief of Defence Staff.

Cameron set up a committee to look into how Libya might function post-Qaddafi. He asked Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, to draw up “stabilisation plans.” But it seems to have been a token effort. Mitchell made some upbeat-sounding statements to the press about “lessons learnt” from Iraq and Afghanistan, but nobody seemed able to draw up a comprehensive proposal for an ideal and workable Libyan settlement.

Qaddafi himself contacted Number 10 through Tony Blair, offering a compromise through which he would demote himself to the position of “monarch without power,” but his approach was shunned. Cameron apparently convinced himself that the risk of deposing Qaddafi altogether was worth taking. Whatever his advisers said, he decided that Libya could turn itself into a stable democracy with only a modicum of Western aid.

At first the idea seemed to work. Qaddafi soon fell and was murdered. Western intervention had been pivotal, though as usual it was Uncle Sam’s might that proved decisive. British defense chiefs complained that they had been forced to “improvise” because military funding was so short: they had no aircraft carriers from which to conduct the strikes, and the stock of those precious Brimstone missiles had been reduced to single figures.

Nevertheless, Cameron played a crucial role in the war, and he felt vindicated. In the aftermath of the conflict, he visited Libya in triumph. He knew well enough not to make a “mission accomplished” speech, but he couldn’t stop himself from basking in the role of liberator. “Colonel Qaddafi said he would hunt you down like rats,” he told a cheering crowd in Benghazi,

“but you showed the courage of lions. Your city was an inspiration to the world as you threw off a dictator and chose freedom. . . . Your friends in Britain and France will stand with you as you build your country and build your democracy for the future.”

FAR FROM BEING an example of successful intervention, however, Libya has turned into a study in how the West makes things worse. It is now a failed state, a vast ungoverned space. The World Food Program says that 2.4 million Libyans are in need of humanitarian assistance; the country’s population is 6.2 million. Its economy is at one quarter of its capacity. Instead of fostering democracy in the Maghreb, Libya has become a breeding ground for Islamist terror—security analysts call it “Scumbag Woodstock”—and a springboard for the refugee crisis into Europe. Towards the end of 2015, Abdullah al-Thani, one of Libya’s competing prime ministers, wrote to Philip Hammond, Cameron’s foreign secretary, offering to cooperate against ISIS and the people-smuggling rackets that bring so many migrants across the Mediterranean into Europe. He didn’t receive a reply.

The Cameroons ignore the reality of Libya in favor of congratulating themselves on a job well done. As one Cabinet minister put it to the journalist Matthew D’Ancona, “whenever things get bad, and the press are saying what a rubbish government we are, I remind myself that there are people alive in Benghazi tonight because we decided to take a risk.” In a Christmas interview with the Spectator magazine, Cameron insisted that

“Libya is better off without Qaddafi. What we were doing was preventing a mass genocide. Then, as you say, the coalition helped those on the ground to get rid of the Qaddafi regime and it’s very disappointing that there hasn’t been an effective successor regime.”

Yet the idea of an imminent Libyan genocide in 2011 seems to have been exaggerated. The International Crisis Group concluded by the end of that year: “There are grounds for questioning the more sensational reports that the regime was using its air force to slaughter demonstrators, let alone engaging in anything remotely warranting use of the term ‘genocide.’”

Moreover, Cameron’s insistence that his intervention saved lives—when in the long run, it did not—and his use of word “disappointing” is telling. It suggests a near pathological unwillingness to accept mistakes. To admit failure in Libya would be to undermine the prime minister’s judgment, and he can’t have that. He would rather blame Libyans for not taking their big shot at democracy. This stubbornness seems to have driven him to be hawkish over Syria. Cameron and his friends want to recapture some of the magic they felt when they rid the world of a tyranny. It doesn’t matter whether Britain is tackling Assad, or attacking Assad’s enemy. It doesn’t even matter that Britain is making a pathetically insignificant contribution. What counts is that the Tory top brass can feel they are fighting the good fight. When it comes to international statesmanship, the Cameroons prefer West Wing–style fantasy to realpolitik.

Cameron is aware of this criticism, which is why he has tried to pretend that he had thought through his latest adventure in Syria. But his strategy didn’t stand up to much scrutiny. The prime minister’s office issues a document claiming that while the immediate motive for airstrikes was to degrade ISIS, there was a medium-term plan to work with seventy thousand “Syrian opposition fighters on the ground who do not belong to extremist groups.” This was an obvious fudge to suggest that destroying ISIS did not mean propping up Assad; that a third force existed in Syria, one which could be brought to the fore, with Western help. Unfortunately for democrats everywhere, this idea seems based on wishful thinking. Experts maintain that the armed opposition to Assad is dominated by ISIS, as well as the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra and the equally Islamist Ahrar al-Sham. The smaller rebel groups might be labeled moderate, but they are able to operate only with the blessing of the jihadists. Besides, as journalist Patrick Cockburn, citing Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi of the Middle East Forum, writes, these groups “commonly exaggerate their numbers, are very fragmented and have failed to unite, despite years of war.”

Cameron’s attempts to look perspicacious in foreign affairs only show him once again to be over impulsive and delusional—proof once again that the prime minister’s foreign policy is, as General Richards had put it, “more about the Notting Hill liberal agenda rather than statecraft.”

A STRONG opposition leader should have been able to destroy his case for intervention. Regrettably, the Labour Party is now led by the strange and divisive figure of Jeremy Corbyn, a man who has energized the Far Left but seems to be tearing his party apart. Corbyn is an antiwar radical. Labour supporters elected him to show how much they despised the stilted centrism of Tony Blair, with its embrace of capitalism and foreign entanglements in oil-rich countries. Yet Corbyn is reviled by a large proportion of his own parliamentary party—especially the so-called Blairites, who are desperate to get rid of him so they can get on with their project of modernizing the party. They spied in the Syria vote an opportunity to move against Corbyn, and they took it.

Corbyn had prompted anger with his reactions to the terrorist outrages in Paris. While Cameron made the statements the public wanted to hear about unleashing vengeance on the perverted Islamists, Corbyn made holier-than-thou statements about not being drawn into “responses that feed the cycle of violence and hate.” He asked the prime minister “not to keep making the same mistakes” and argued that “enthusiasm for interventions has only multiplied the threats against us.” Cameron reassured the public that he had issued a shoot-to-kill order for armed policemen searching for terrorists on British streets. Corbyn told the BBC he was “not happy” with such a dangerous policy.

Corbyn’s stances seemed wholly sensible, and probably supported by a majority of the British public, notwithstanding anxiety about another terrorist attack. Yet for the majority of the political class, they were utterly anathema. One Downing Street source fumed to the Sun newspaper that Corbyn would not vote for military action “even if the Isle of Wight was invaded.” Senior Labour politicians were embarrassed at their leader’s pusillanimity in the face of terror. A Labour shadow-cabinet minister even told journalists that Corbyn was a “fucking disgrace” (British politics, you’ll note, is pretty foul-mouthed these days).