THE Libyan war, which began in earnest in February and edged towards a ragged conclusion on Thursday in the dusty, blood-specked alleyways of Sirte, was, in its most hyperbolic aspect, a victory for democracy, freedom, and the Arab spring.

This is how the British foreign secretary, William Hague, who reported to the UK House of Commons in London on the Qadhafi regime's death throes on Thursday, habitually chooses to portray the nine-month struggle to oust Libya's dictator-in-residence since 1969 and his Addams family of murderous retainers.

This is the uplifting narrative that carries Washington's blessing, despite Barack Obama's initial, chronic ambivalence about the Nato intervention.

And this is why the British Conservative party strategists will do their utmost to present Libya as a triumph of British leadership abroad, and, more particularly, of the prime minister. The intervention was a success, they will say, and it was the prime minister's success. Libya 2011 was David Cameron's war.

British politicians have long understood, as does their Libya comrade-in-arms, France's Nicolas Sarkozy, the value of a short, sharp, not-too-costly foreign war in boosting national amour propre and personal standing. But call him “Lucky Dave”. All the self-congratulation, deserved and undeserved, cannot hide the fact that Cameron's war was a high-risk adventure, long on aspiration and desperately short on tactical aims, planning and material. The embarrassing arrest of a British special forces infiltration team early on had more than a touch of the amateur about it.

More broadly, Cameron and Sarkozy's Libyan policy managed, in a few short months, to expose and magnify the conflicting political, military and diplomatic faultlines that render international interventions of this sort so materially hazardous, morally questionable, and financially fraught.

And now that military victory has supposedly been secured, as in the doom-laden case of the “fall of Kabul” in November 2001, new questions arise under the title: who will win the peace?

Rebels in eastern Libya started fighting Gaddafi's forces in February after the arrest of a human rights activist, Fethi Tarbel, sparked riots in Benghazi. Calls for a no-fly zone to protect the rebel enclave, first voiced by Australia's Kevin Rudd, were taken up at the UN despite Russian and Chinese misgivings. After the National Transitional Council (NTC) declared itself Libya's sole representative government, and Gaddafi threatened to hunt them down and kill them “house by house, room by room”, the security council on March 17 authorised “all necessary measures” to shield civilians under its rarely activated “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Arab League backing was crucial in ensuring the resolution passed. In effect, the league — many of whose leading members had old scores to settle with Gaddafi — had given unprecedented, unconditional support for western intervention in a Muslim country.

Nato started flying missions into Libya within days and, just as quickly, Arab League members began to get cold feet. But the mandate was in place, and was soon being very liberally interpreted, giving rise to cries of “mission creep”. To be given such latitude, with all the legal boxes ticked (unlike in Iraq), was Cameron's first great piece of luck.

The Libyan intervention split Nato down the middle, with Germany in particular arguing it was dangerous and ill-advised, not least because of previous fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Obama administration, too, initially refused to get involved militarily.

Cameron's second stroke of good fortune was to find in Sarkozy a man who, like him, was a relative lightweight in international affairs keen to make his mark as a matter of principle as well as politics.

France was only too happy to show that “European” militaries could act decisively on the world stage without the Americans. Like London, although this is fiercely denied, Paris had its eye on Libya's oil, lucrative business contracts, and other potential spoils of war.

And Cameron stayed lucky as the Pentagon relented and provided vital logistical support to the Nato operation.

Having hastily thrown their lot in with the NTC's irregular forces, Britain and other participating states could only look on, offering support from the air as street battles raged for key cities such as Misrata and, eventually, Tripoli.

All agreed that putting western military boots on the ground was out of the question. But at times, the rebel forces, despite a growing supply and training effort by the French and British, appeared disorganised and ineffective.

Meanwhile, the cost of British operations, put by the defence secretary, Liam Fox, at about GBP300m, was adding to the pressure on Cameron.

With the exception of Moussa Koussa, Libya's foreign minister, who arrived in London in March, and one or two others, the predicted mass defections from the Gaddafi regime did not materialise.

Doubts began to grow about the staying power of the NTC leadership and, more disturbingly, the potential influence of radical Islamists opposed to western interests on a future Libyan government. Soon, American neoconservatives were suggesting Libya was being saved for Al Qaeda, and that the war was destabilising neighbouring, pro-western regimes in Algeria and Tunisia. It was not a big jump from these concerns to predictions that Libya, now belatedly revealed as a patchwork nation of rival tribal, clan, ethnic and religious affiliations, would fall apart, much as Iraq nearly did.

Worst of all, perhaps, as spring turned to summer, temperatures rose, and the holy month of Ramazan approached, Qadhafi remained on the loose, mocking the coalition and the rebels in radio broadcasts and vowing eternal defiance.

But Cameron's luck held. An unexpectedly coherent rebel advance from the south triggered the sudden fall of Tripoli in August and the flight of Qadhafi's family to Algeria. On Sept 13, the interim government chief, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, made his first speech in Tripoli and, two days later, Sarkozy and Cameron travelled to Benghazi and Tripoli.

It was not exactly a Roman triumph. But the television pictures of grateful pats on the back gladdened UK Conservative hearts. By now, Qadhafi was rumoured to be holed up deep in the southern desert.

With the imminent fall of Sirte, Cameron appears to have achieved the relatively swift victory that was, for him, after risking so much, the only acceptable political outcome.Cameron's war in Libya was a one-off. It established no new doctrine. Rather, it set a limited post-Blair, post-Iraq precedent for selective, “do-able”, feelgood interventionism.

For the seriously oppressed peoples of Syria, Burma, Belarus, Zimbabwe and North Korea, for example, it was a meaningless exercise. And in the end, Cameron was lucky to get away with it.—Dawn/Guardian News Service