Benghazi is Not Enough

"A serious misunderstanding", that's what William 'I've never shared any hotel rooms with young homosexuals' Hague says the recent debacle in Libya involving UK 'special forces' and 'diplomats', was. I think that when a group of supposedly crack soldiers get themselves 'arrested' by farmers after being secretly flown in by helicopter, it constitutes a bit more than a 'misunderstanding', serious or otherwise. Cock up, is one description which comes to mind. Actually, I doubt very much that any of the detained men were really from the SAS - I've seen Ultimate Force, and I never saw Ross Kemp surrender to a bunch of farmers. My money is on them being from the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), most likely Double O agents on a mission to whack Qaddafi. The giveaway was when they unloaded an Aston Martin from the back of the Chinook which landed them in Libya. That's probably the misunderstanding Hague was on about - the fact that the SIS still hasn't got the Aston Martin back. Even as we speak, some Libyan farmer is driving it around Benghazi with a couple of goats in the back, inadvertently blowing up cattle sheds with missiles every time he pressed what he thinks is the cigarette lighter.

Quite why they needed to send an entire team into Libya in the first place is a mystery to me, or, indeed, why the government than had to engage in all that humiliating 'diplomacy' to get them back. Unless the world of espionage cinema has lied to me, standard practice is to send in a single man, particularly for retrieval missions. Having watched Taken when it was on TV the other night, I'm left puzzled as to why Hague didn't just send a middle-aged Irishman into Libya to single-handedly beat the shit out of anyone getting in his way as he tried to locate the captured intelligence team. A slight digression here, I was very impressed by the way Liam Neeson never varied hos accent in that film, regardless of whether he was meant to be an former (presumably American) CIA agent, impersonating a French security official and later a French policeman. He played them all with a Northern Irish accent. All power to the man for refusing to do daft accents. Anyway, getting back to the point, I'm betting that the SIS were left wishing that they hadn't already pensioned their top man off as part of the latest round of government spending cuts. Even now, I can imagine their frenzied search for James Bond, formerly 007, in the hope that he'd agree to go into Libya on a one-off consultancy basis to try and retrieve the situation, eventually finding him comatose and trouser less on the floor of some seedy Soho strip bar, P45 clutched in hand, where he'd just blown his redundancy payout. As it turned out, of course, the situation ended up being resolved before they could sober him up.