In the middle of Labour’s last period of opposition I went to the polls for the first time. 1987 was a hard fought and sometimes vicious campaign. One of the Conservative adverts that has stuck in my memory was an attack on Labour’s foreign policy – it was simply a picture of a British soldier with his arms raised in a gesture of surrender. Like all good attack ads is was simple, outrageous and highly effective by exaggerating a concern felt by many voters at the time: namely that the Labour party did not understand the world as it was and by abandoning a consensus on deterrence, did not have the policies to meet the challenges of the cold war.
Full of youthful expectation I cast my vote for Labour. Labour lost. Resoundingly. The party went on to ditch its policy of unilateralism as a matter of urgency, and ensured that in subsequent elections is did not seek to make party political dividing lines on Britain’s national interests.
Since the Labour party voted against intervening in Syria last summer, the internal logic of its foreign policy has, once more, come under pressure. We know Labour no longer supports the muscular liberal interventionism that characterised our period in office. This is presented as learning the lesson of Iraq. However, what therefore are Labour’s objectives in foreign policy and how does it seek to achieve them?
The consequences of non-interventionism are now becoming more apparent. The bloody civil war rages on and the murderous violence has spilled over Syria’s borders to destabilise the whole Middle East. The nature of extremist groups – Hamas firing rockets at Israel’s civilians, Boko Haram kidnapping girls for potential slavery, the ‘Islamic State’ beheading Christians and burying children alive – is that they continue to intervene to reshape the world in their own image, even if we do not.
The same realisation has been dawning on Obama’s White House (and is not lost on hopefully its next occupant Hillary Clinton). The fact is that the rise of extremist ideology, the use by dictators of repression and murder to subdue their populations, and the spread of religious violence cannot be safely ignored.
Traditional methods of diplomacy do not work if your interlocutor has religious certainty, uses suicide bombings against trains, buses, churches, mosques and markets but has no negotiable demands. The growing strength of IS proves the point.
David Cameron has also arrived, late in the day, at this conclusion. It is in Britain’s national interest to contain the threat of IS and similar radical extremists, not just for the threatened Yazidis but for Britain’s domestic security. British forces are now engaged in securing the mighty Mosul Dam, and ensuring the Kurds are not left to face IS with inadequate weapons.
Where does this leave Labour’s foreign policy? It would be a mistake if policy was being driven again by tactical political considerations; if there was an attempt to create dividing lines with the Conservatives, and to prevent dividing lines opening up with the Liberal Democrats, in order to fish in the small pool of voters who care about the detail of foreign policy. The Labour leadership recognise this and would not go there. Nonetheless, there is a danger of ending up on the sidelines, arguing for limited humanitarian aid, but hoping that someone else will do all the difficult stuff. Labour has been here before. Labour supported non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War until December 1937, when Labour leader Clement Attlee visited Spain and called for defence of the Republic. Labour failed to support rearmament in the face of the rise of Hitler, voting against the defence estimates as late as 1938. In both cases, Labour’s foreign policy response was too late.
In Syria and now Iraq, Labour should not stand on the sidelines as the world gets to grip with a global threat. The lesson of history is that the wider electorate look for leaders who recognise the complexity of the world as it is but nonetheless have a clear view of the national interest and are prepared to make the tough decisions with our allies to protect those interests. That was true when facing the Soviet Union or Slobodan Milošević. It is true today when facing Bashir al-Assad or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Labour should lead international opinion and look like a government-in-waiting – otherwise we will be left waiting for a Labour government.
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Dermot Kehoe is chief executive of BICOM. He writes in a personal capacity
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Indirectly knockin’ owd Clem’ [Attlee] when he aint around to defend hisself aint goin’ to enamour Dermot to grass-root supporters in the sticks [Stoke] who aint yet had the chance or opportunity [or money] to peruse political history at their leisure. But Dermot is quite right: if UK allows a rabid dog to run loose biting all in its path then we in the UK deserve what happens next.
We only have two cheeks to turn. Allowing a wild animal on the streets to wantonly kill, maim and eat off people’s heads with impunity must stop sooner the better. The cost will be high in loss of soldiers’ life and innocent ‘collateral damage’ but UK can’t stand around looking the other way.
Shalom is as shalom does: God help our current-day Attlees.
Rather than arguing ‘interventionism or not’, we should intervene when it’s in our interest to intervene. Of course, we need a wide view of this: e.g. removing militant Islamists in Afghanistan was in our interests, but invading Iraq wasn’t, as it was clear that this would inflame such militancy – as we found out on 7/7.
We must stand for peace through wise choices: e.g. condemning the disproportionate scale of Israel’s response to Hamas. 3 Israeli civilians killed does not justify the killing of 1000 Gazans, whose deaths will only recruit suicide bombers who see the US and their military figleaves as their enemies’ allies. Why does Dermot apparently ignore this?
Saddam Hussein was better than what has replaced him. That is simply undeniable. In any case, he would probably have been dead by now. Nor was any of what has happened since his removal unpredictable at the time. It was predicted by everyone outside the weird, cult-like political-media bubble around Tony Blair.
Moreover, our strategic interest was to keep Saddam in place. He kept a lid on everything from what is now IS, to the Peshmerga (internationally classified as terrorists next door in NATO Turkey), to the forces that eventually accrued to al-Maliki. And he balanced Iran, which balanced him while keeping the lid on assorted elements from the PMOI-MEK to Jundullah. As Iran still does where lid-keeping is concerned.
Iran is now our active ally against the IS that we have created. Both our direct ally and, through Hezbollah, our ally by proxy. And there is is Assad. Welcome to the new Coalition of the Willing.
We made an ally of the Tsar. We managed the same for Stalin and Mao. We managed it for Saddam, once. We managed it for Assad the Elder. We managed it for Gaddafi, briefly. Iran, Hezbollah and Assad the Younger should be a doddle.
Insofar as Israel is at war with Syria, Iran and Hezbollah, then she is now at war on the same side as IS. If IS is now our enemy, then the IDF is now a body of our enemy combatants, and British Citizens in it are guilty of treason.
The starting point of the discussion, shows the cynicism of the entire article. The discussion starts from an over-reaction to the debates around unilateral disarmament in 1979-87. We are at the height of the Cold War and there is a real threat to the United Kingdom, and the Tories exploited the line that the party would simply disarm. It bears no relationship to any period when Labour was actually in Government in 1940-79 with labour playing a leading part in the development both of NATO and UK nuclear weapons, when it was necessary.
The reaction now is not there is a potential threat to the UK, but we must look tough to the public because otherwise the Tories will accuse us of being ‘weak’.
The Syrian civil war is terrible, but so was the Lebanon civil war next door, in that one Israel and Syria intervened heavily, and western powers sent relatively small numbers for small periods. The Congo civil war has been horrific with sometimes as many as 6 other African nations intervening, the major powers stayed out.
The reality is Britain is capable of providing token commitments in support of the US, in the Mid East. The intervention in Sierra Leone allowed UK to significant support to a UN operation without any other major power, that was liberal intervention.
Token commitments to make us feel better, to stop headlines of ‘something must be done’ or even worse the cynical defensive crouch of we must be strong as otherwise the Tories will accuse us of being weak are all the wrong reason to intervene.