Posts Tagged → United Nations
The Blair doctrine
On Thursday morning UK time, Tony Blair delivered a speech in Chicago on his “doctrine of international community”. It is worth a read because it sets out precisely the basis for a genuine “ethical foreign policy” for the centre-Left: a policy based on the international community being prepared to intervene, including militarily, to defeat and remove regimes which attack and oppress their civilian population.
Too many on the traditional Left believe that it is better to excuse and explain away oppressive regimes that stand in opposition to the USA rather than to argue for intervention in the interests of their people. Their anti-Americanism outweighs their internationalism.
Too many on the traditional Right believe intervention should only be considered if it is in their own direct national interest or to safeguard a special interest with which they allign themselves.
So, for example, many on the British Conservative Right were lukewarm or hostile to intervention in Kosovo but are pretty John Bullish about intervention in Zimbabwe. 
Too many liberals believe that intervention can only be supported if international institutions like the UN sanction it. This fails to recognise that the Security Council veto means that countries which do not accept, as a matter of stated policy, the notion of international action to overcome oppressive regimes because it represents “interference” in internal politics of a nation state will wield that veto come what may.
Worse, many on the liberal Left argue that it is wrong even to countenance action to deliver democracy and freedom for the population of Muslim fundamentalist countries in the mistaken belief that democracy and Islam are somehow incompatible.
So, the traditional Left, the liberal establishment and the traditional Right, all coalesce around opposition to action to safeguard the human rights and freedoms of oppressed peoples.
The Blair Doctrine – which the former prime minister reprised in his speech a decade after he first set it out in Chicago – is distinctly different. It calls for action against oppressive regimes based on the values of international solidarity with the oppressed rather than isolationism. It recognises that where action is not taken in the apparent short term narrow ‘national interest’ often, as with Afghanistan, the medium to long term consequences can be at best unpredictable and at worst, disasterous. And it argues for siding with the majority of Muslims against the extremists and fundamentalists and helping them defeat those who would pervert Islam to justify terrrorism.
Today, we rarely hear the case for military action to safeguard freedom. Tony Blair makes that case. It is worth a read.
I disown Bryan Gould
Those like me (and almost no-one else I know in the Labour Party) who voted for Bryan Gould to be both Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party in the same election against John Smith will have been disappointed to read his piece in the Guardian today entitled, ”I disown this Government’.
I helped organise some meetings in Newcastle and on Tyneside for Gould. As a result of being a supporter of his in Nick Brown’s East Newcastle CLP I had to spend a period of two years when I couldnt even get elected to be one of the two constituency auditors – including being beaten by no-one at one AGM!
The reason I supported Gould was that at the time has was a moderniser. He wanted to change the way power in the Labour Party was exercised and by whom. He wanted Labour to have an appeal to the English middle class and to break out of the traditional ghettos of Labour support which had condemned the Labour Party to years of opposition. To me, Bryan Gould was new Labour before it was fashionable. I backed him but he betrayed us. Today’s article is just the latest stage of his own personal betrayal of Labour’s modernisers.
When Gould lost both elections at the same time (to John Smith and Margaret Beckett) rather than stay and fight for what he believed in he flounced out of British politics altogether to live on the other side of the World. Today, Gould (whose experience actually serving in a government is nil) seems to think that his views about British politics from his ivory tower 12,000 miles away actually still count for something significant. He lost all legitimacy to be taken seriously when he couldn’t stand the heat and got out of the kitchen.
I disagree with the content and tone of Gould’s article: the language of ‘betrayal’, which so peppers his writing, is reminiscent of the ritual denunciations of the Trotskyite Left (he should remember because they accused him of precisely that in the 1980s when he called for wider share ownership in Britain and was all but booed off at Party conference); his analysis that the Labour government has rejected “any decent and civilised values” is simply hysterical.
Others no doubt will want to challenge his economic argument. I just want to comment on his international one. He denounces the Iraq War as a contravention of civilised norms, based on a lie, which undermined the UN and destroyed Iraq. Wrong, wrong and wrong again.
Firstly, the Iraq War was waged to remove weapons of mass destruction and, as a positive byproduct, end the fascistic regime of Saddam Hussein, his psychopathic sons and their henchmen. Would it have been more ’civilised’ to let the regime continue to torture, kills and commit genocide against its own people?
Second, the war was fought because Saddam refused to comply with UN resolutions. Governments across the World believed that he possessed WMD. Yes, there were differences of opinion on the actions that should follow. Yes, there were errors of intelligence, perhaps even of presentation. But no, the governments that were part of the Coalition of the Willing did not lie. And none of the (too) many inquiries have shown that they intended to.
Third, the UN was not undermined by the Iraq War. There was an effort – led by Tony Blair – to achieve a second resolution but it was vetoed by President Chirac who made clear he would oppose military action whatever. No-one knows if that resolution had been passed if Saddam would have woken up and smelled the coffee and started to properly comply with the UN resolutions. What is clear though is that what undermines the UN is the failure of its Security Council members to properly enforce its resolutions – and the failure of the UN to be able to resolve anything at all, as with Kosovo.
Fourthly, Iraq was not destroyed. Iraq today is a democracy where record numbers of people participate in peaceful elections. There have been challenges, failures in the initial period after the liberation to ensure security for all but, Iraq today is rebuilding itself and showing that democracy can flourish in a majority muslim country in the Middle East.
Those of us who stayed and fought for the creation of New Labour, the successful election victories of 1997, 2001 and 2005, who contributed to the success of Labour in government, who continue to support this government in the difficult economic times since Tony Blair left office do not need Bryan Gould to disown us. He was never part of us when it happened. He never owned it in the first place.
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