[A-List] UK state: Blairite faction's rationale

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

This is the same John Lloyd who, as Moscow bureau chief of the Financial
Times, applauded the tanks sacking the Duma in 1993. Little has changed.

------

The left has lost the plot

By defending sovereignty in the name of anti-imperialism, opponents of war
undermine their claim to champion the oppressed.
Guardian Online
John Lloyd
Friday April 11, 2003

A large part of the British left - and the left elsewhere - has made a
fundamental mistake. In opposing the invasion of Iraq, it has shown itself
incapable of thinking through not only the nature of the world as it is
today, but also its own claims to be the leading force in making the world
better. The more vehement sections of the left have succumbed to the comfort
of violently rhetorical attacks on the US and have led the world in creating
an image of Tony Blair and the Labour government as US poodles, incapable of
articulating a British national interest.

The crimes of Saddam Hussein's regime - its support for terrorism, its
aggression toward its neighbours and its brutality against its own people -
are dismissed either by referring to the left's own past protests against
it, or to reminders that a slew of western, especially American, political
and corporate leaders did business with, and supported, that regime.

Even the "moderate" opposition has been couched in tones of exasperation
that Blair "doesn't get it" - about the Arab world, about the Americans,
about his own party's opposition. The conclusion of this view is that,
although Saddam is a nasty bit of work who may have weapons of mass
destruction, he can be contained. Relativism is crucial to this argument:
others are as bad; others have weapons of mass destruction; others have
attacked neighbours. Why pick on Iraq? Why pick on anyone? What moral basis
can the developed west possibly claim?

The argument about this war cannot be readily squeezed into left-right
categories. It is best conducted on the basis of truths, which should be
self-evident and held in common: ·that Saddam Hussein has run a state
unparalleled (as far as we know) in sadistic cruelty, perpetrated by a
Ba'ath party and security apparatus licensed to slaughter, torture and rape;

· that there is good reason for believing he had retained weapons of mass
destruction, and was seeking to develop nuclear ones;

· that the realistic alternative to war was aggressive containment and that
this would have exacted continued suffering on the Iraqi population;

· that, before the US-led intent to invade, the UN will to contain the Iraqi
regime was weakening, not least because Iraq's main trading partners, France
and Russia, argued for its weakening on the UN security council;

· that a constant and credible threat of invasion was necessary to keep the
weapons inspectors in place.

A few of those who have opposed the war have recognised the force of some of
these issues. But few have kept them in mind in developing their arguments.
Opponents of war quote the failings of the US administration, but few
recognise the failings of their own allies in the anti-war camp: Russia's
brutal war in Chechnya; China's vast internal repression, the execution of
dissidents, religious believers and nationalists.

France and Germany, the two leading anti-war states in Europe, baulked at
acting against murderous tyrannies or collapsed states throughout the
1990s - in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, as well as Iraq. Where action to
overthrow dictatorial regimes has been taken in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan
and now Iraq, it has been taken either with US prompting, or with the US
military in the lead. In the first three cases, the result was a lifting of
tyranny and the chance of a better life for the peoples of those countries.

European states are far more active and efficient in providing development
assistance and peacekeeping forces than is the US. But there are times when
peace must be made before it can be kept; and Europe as a whole has seen
such moments as none of its business, relying on the US, and then usually
blaming it for carrying the can.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, UN leaders have spread the message
that their organisation could now enter into its own - as a protector of the
downtrodden who, most often, are trodden on by their own rulers. This
movement culminated, less than two years ago, in a Canadian-sponsored
report, A Responsibility to Protect - a brilliant summation of the arguments
for stripping tyrants of sovereign inviolability. Of the major government
leaders, only Blair has embraced the report, as the logical extension of the
ethical dimension in foreign policy that Labour promulgated when it came to
office.

Most of the left refused to follow this line. For some, it has been enough
to declare all ethical dimensions phoney, since states such as Britain
continued to shake hands with tyrants. For others, state sovereignty seems a
necessary protection against what they see as the largest threat to the
world: US imperialism.

US imperialism, in this view of a now resurgent part of the left, is
composed of a mixture of things: efforts to control energy resources,
principally oil; the repression of the Palestinians to ensure the security
of the US "client state" Israel; a US refusal to tolerate any power that
counterbalances its own; a hatred of all cultures other than its own, and a
determination to destroy such cultures to make the world passively receptive
to American values and merchandise.

Will the end of the war and the effort to rebuild decent government in Iraq
change the view of the left? It would seem unlikely: the anti-US reflex is
too ingrained, the dislike of Blair too great.

Yet the left's programme now should be to argue in favour of committing
resources to those multilateral agencies that work, and to seek agreement
from those forces everywhere in the world that are committed to democratic
(or at least more responsive) government and to an observation of human and
civil rights. The aim, as the US political scientist Michael Walzer has put
it, should be a "strong international system, organised and designed to
defeat aggression, to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, to control
weapons of mass destruction and to guarantee the physical security of all
the world's peoples".

· This is an edited extract of an article from this week's New Statesman,
explaining ex-editor John Lloyd's reasons for resigning as a columnist.