Being a few selected aperçus from his journalism about Libya over the last few months. This is what he had to say on 31 March:
No war can be won from the air. A temporary balance of advantage can be awarded to one side, but pilots can only destroy...
At present Nato strategy appears to be to prolong civil war by bolstering the weaker side.
And here he is on 19 April:
The great lie has once again been rumbled, that air power can deliver any sort of victory.
.....
Cameron watchers are mesmerised by how he found himself up this creek with no paddle...
.....
The resolution [UN resolution 1973] is rotten, based on the false premise that a no-fly zone can determine a civil war.
.....
Britain is helping to prolong the agony of another country's civil war.
He's back with more of the same on 17 May:
For Britain to be spending millions of pounds a night rearranging cement in the Sahara sand must be the daftest use of public money imaginable.
.....
[T]he mission has passed from civil protection to backing a territorial rebellion. Worst of all, it is not winning.
As recently as 2 August, he's saying:
Britain's half-war against Libya is careering onward from reckless gesture to full-scale fiasco.
So, after all that, when over the last few days it seems that these diagnoses and prognostications aren't altogether accurate, how does Jenkins respond? He responds, on 23 August, as follows:
So do this week's events justify Britain's Libya intervention? No, however churlish it may be to say so at this point.
He is perfectly entitled to that view, of course. Just as the failure of an undertaking doesn't always show that the attempt wasn't justified, so nobody is obliged to be won over by a success, as others perceive it. Still, do recent events suggest to Jenkins that he may have gone wrong somewhere? He could, for example, read the following in today's edition of the paper for which he writes:
As rebel forces broke through the frontlines and approached Tripoli, locals were inspired to join them. The surge also forced government troops into the open, allowing allied warplanes to strike.
Gaddafi's forces attempted to hold off the rebels on Sunday by trying to outflank [them] and recapture Zawiya. But Nato warplanes bombed the convoy before it could reach the city as part of a series of attacks on Gaddafi's forces, including bombing raids on bunkers set up in civilian buildings in Tripoli in an effort to ward off allied attacks.
Does it prompt our veteran journalist to reconsider his previous assessments of the futility of air power? Well, you won't know from his most recent column - because it contains not a word, not a single lonely syllable, of any acknowledgement that he might have misjudged anything. So it goes.
There's one determining certainty in the man's moral universe, and this is that it is not Britain's business how other people achieve their liberation from tyranny. Not our business. When, however, the matter of protecting civilians from crimes against humanity on a mass scale shades into the issue of removing the regime that is responsible for those crimes, it arguably is our business. It is, in a manner of speaking, everybody's business. For, since the Nuremberg Trials at least, the international community has taken upon itself the obligation not to stand idly by to mass crimes against humanity, and though this obligation isn't always honoured, that is no reason to pretend it is of no moral account. The view that it is of account is preferable, in any case, to a perspective in which such crimes are the 'business' only of the victims of them and (presumably) the perpetrators; and of others (if Jenkins will allow this) who just happen to be close by, in the same national neighbourhood.