Stephen Twigg is right to hope that the Democrats’ success in the mid-term elections could spell a more multilateral US foreign policy. The publication of the Iraq Study Group’s report also provides a belated admission of what went wrong in US/UK foreign policy went astray in the last few years.
Denis MacShane, like an old soldier of the Japanese army, is still fighting a war about the rights and wrongs of the invasion. ‘I will listen to all who say the current situation is worse than 2003 but I will only respect those who say they are prepared to live with Saddam still in power’ he says, echoing Blair’s original ‘history will forgive us’ speech. As both must surely know, ‘regime change’ is not a legal basis for such interventions and in fact amounts to the crime of aggression. In a more considered article, MacShane noted the contrast between our former foreign secretary’s position on Kosovo and Iraq:
‘Robin Cook had supported the bombing of a European city, Belgrade, and the invasion of a sovereign state, Serbia-Montenegro, without UN authority, and it is interesting to speculate on what his position would have been if he not been evicted from his post as Foreign Secretary and humiliatingly demoted to a minor cabinet post.’
Politicians can indeed speculate why the rest of us do not hold them in such high regard, but the comparison is still interesting. The claims about ‘genocide’ in Kosovo turned out to be as illusory as Saddam Hussein’s WMD and the international community did just about as bad a job on Kosovo’s post-war administration Kosovo as it has been doing in Iraq. If the sheer incompetence of the first had been recognised, perhaps we could have avoided some of the subsequent mistakes.
The question, as Brian Brivati put it a few weeks ago, is where do we go from here? Brivati argues that ‘despite the difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq, progressives should not abandon liberal interventionism’ and I agree with him. What we must grasp, however, is the scale of the challenges that this involves. Too much of the debate about humanitarian crises, such as Darfur, have been dominated by a short-term desire to ‘do something’ or the caricature of complex conflicts into ‘good and evil.’
Liberal interventionism can only be successful, as a long-term strategy, if it takes place within the framework of international law and strengthens multilateralism. The Kosovo intervention, which took place outside this framework, set a disastrous precedent for the invasion of Iraq.
During the mid-1990s some argued that the UN security council could not be given the last word on when ‘humanitarian interventions’ were justified – due to its failure to authorise sufficiently vigorous interventions in Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the answer must surely be to work for reform of the UN rather than to set ourselves up as judge, jury and executioner. The doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) has strengthened the case for liberal interventions, within the framework of the UN Charter, but British foreign policy must remain based on respect for international law.