Tony Blair’s final gesture as world statesman should be to boycott this week’s G8 summit in Germany and invite his friend George Bush to do the same. These flatulent jamborees began as “library chats” of rich white western leaders with no staff present. They are now a diplomatist’s Olympic Games, to see who can spend the most, strut the best (Silvio Berlusconi’s masseurs and Blair’s rock concerts) and make the emptiest promises.
Two years ago the Gleneagles “awareness raising summit” cost £10m per delegate and pledged soaring aid to world poverty, as did the United Nations’ previous millennium conference on the same subject, which reportedly drained New York of champagne and caviar. As a result, for the first time in 10 years world aid has fallen.
After Gleneagles everyone said they pledged an extra $50 billion only “to be nice to Tony after 7/7” and did not mean it. Do politicians really think the public cannot see through the cynicism that passes for modern foreign policy?
Bush’s undermining of the G8 last Thursday by announcing his own climate change summit in the autumn might be stalling tactics, but at least it called the G8’s bluff. A summit of the 15 top polluters, summoned by the biggest of them all, is more likely to make progress than the G8 or the UN.
Blair has been limbering up for this last extravaganza by touring the world in favour of “liberal interventionism”. His final speech was made, appropriately, in South Africa where, at the height of Britain’s imperial outreach in the Edwardian era, young men in Lord Milner’s “kindergarten” came to spread the Bible, western values and good government among the heathen.
British interventionism has evolved since Blair’s scene-setting Chicago speech of April 1999. In Ethiopia in the 1980s nobody suggested using armed force to topple a government that was starving millions of its people to death, any more than force was used to stop Saddam Hussein’s genocide in Kurdistan or that of the Indonesians in Timor. When the West sent soldiers to Lebanon and Somalia it retreated with a bloody nose. People did not like being invaded, for whatever reason. Only UNapproved wars to repel aggression, as in the Falklands and the Gulf, seemed to work.
The turning point was the arming of aid convoys in Bosnia in 1992 and the resulting mission creep. By the time that civil war had spread to Kosovo in 1998, the idea of bombing cities that offered no threat to the world seemed commonplace, as if the West had reverted to Guernica. America bombed Baghdad, Britain bombed Belgrade, Israel bombed Beirut, Russia bombed Grozny. Blair’s innovation in Kosovo was to persuade Bill Clinton that such bombing was futile if not supported by a ground invasion. He was right but from then on his blood was up.
In his Chicago speech Blair argued for “a new generation of liberal humanitarian wars”, going far beyond what was necessary for national defence or self-interest. He claimed the right to make the world a better place at the point of a gun. Even Henry Kissinger termed the speech “irresponsible”. But it was not until after 9/11 that Blair converted what he had defined as humanitarian intervention into a global crusade, a war for “values” and even for “civilisation”.
As Blair admits in an essay in this week’s Economist, he found foreign affairs more absorbing than domestic. Abroad he could talk of an “international community that is overtly values based” without needing to say what it meant. He found war exciting, having never experienced it first-hand. He pleaded to bomb Kabul before the Americans. He loved chatting to generals and wanted sand trays set up in No 10 to watch operations. Liberal interventionism was no more than a verbal backdrop to what was “feel-good with guns”. It answered those who accused Blair of being all mouth and no muscle.
The prime minister could plead two factors in support. The first was an undoubted public craving for “something must be done” about cruelties long frozen by cold war and now publicised by the mass media. The invasion of Kosovo, although illegal, had such a humanitarian imperative.
Second, internationally sponsored violence by Islamists found a widespread bond of grievance in Palestine. This posed a menace to some western (and eastern) cities but in no way justified Blair equating it to a third world war. It was like treating the mafia as a threat to world capitalism. Blair’s “global war on terror” elevated random bands of criminals to the status of glorious warriors. He might parade as tough on terror but he was anything but tough on its causes. His cackhanded Middle East diplomacy has left a region more unstable than when he took office.
Liberal interventionism talks the talk but can barely walk the length of a red carpet. It has failed the most crucial test of any policy in being neither morally evenhanded nor effective in action. Last week Britons were treated to the sickening sight of Blair shaking hands with Colonel Gadaffi of Libya and even selling him missiles. How does this madcap dictator, sponsor of terrorism and suppressor of his people, pass liberal muster? He had cobbled together some useless bits of tin, called it a nuclear programme and then offered to dismantle it if the West aided his wrecked economy and armed him. Blair and Bush fell for the most blatant con in modern diplomacy.
Where again is the moral content in Britain’s dealings with the authoritarian rulers of Pakistan, China, Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia? When Blair says that the Sudan regime’s actions in Darfur and Robert Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe are “unacceptable” what does he mean? As Kant demanded, a moral diktat applied to one must be applied universally or it is neither moral nor a deterrent.
More serious, Blair’s policy has not worked. He has not withdrawn from a single one of the countries he has invaded: Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. The reason is that he has not installed liberal values, merely invaded and occupied them.
The flagship interventions, Iraq and Afghanistan, have brought death, misery and instability. I cannot imagine a plague spot on earth that would swap its plight for that of “liberally intervened” Basra or Baghdad. Meanwhile, Britain and America must go cap in hand to the dictators of Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to rescue their armies from defeat, a political as much as a military humiliation.
There is, or was, a valid recipe for intervention enshrined in the charter of the UN. Military aggression by one state against another (not just a criminal conspiracy by a group of citizens) should be resisted, by force if necessary. It was valid in Korea and Vietnam and successful in the Falklands and Kuwait. Internal state repression, such as to prevent violent partition, is not normally the business of the outside world until it degenerates into humanitarian atrocity. This may, as in Kosovo, Sierra Leone or Rwanda, justify an attack. But it is most effectively met by the sticks and carrots of diplomacy and charitable relief — as is still the case in most of the world’s trouble spots.
States remain sovereign entities and must make their peace with themselves. As Iraq has shown, the scope for potent politico-military intervention is limited. The message of the past decade is surely that intervention should struggle to be nonmilitary and nongovernmental.
Last week saw another five Britons kidnapped in a country to which we claimed to bring freedom, justice and prosperity. Blair’s response, via the Americans, was not to gather intelligence and seek allies in recovering the hostages. It was to smash into Sadr city in tanks and, when an inhabitant offered to open his door, blast a hole in his wall and beat him up. Such action must have made dozens of enemies and may have cost the lives of the hostages. Probably intended for television, it was utterly counterproductive. I can think of no better metaphor for the gangrene that afflicts British policy.
Insurgency and brutal repression are the normal outcomes of foreign occupation, as occupation is of invasion. For a decade in the 1990s Britain intervened at arm’s length in Iraq, containing a dictator even if immiserating his people.
The new interventionism finds this inadequate for the grandiosity of its leaders. In a reversion to the motivation of the Middle Ages, they must send their soldiers to fight and die for abstract nouns. What is outrageous is for Blair to claim for the liberal cause what has been random adventurism.
Simon Jenkins