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.
Why carn't our Political Industry just get things right here first!
R James, Clifton,
Indeed 'Liberal Intervention' is an extraordinary action very much in the ruthless tradition of the empire and colonies. It is all the more extraordinary when action is taken in the name of 'New Labour', which for a while we had thought inherited the mantle of labour morality. New names emerge - 'rendition' - also goes back to the 14th century when taking hostages was thought a sensible policy, often leading to unfortunate hostages being thrown from castle walls. Torture must have seemed quite sensible to Torquemada: after all inflict enough suffering and most of us will say anything. The age of civiisation is apparently over! What will the history books say about us?
Brian Lewis, Manila, Philippines
This article is a shining example of why I read more UK newspapers than any here at home (in the U.S.). Americans no longer have the ability to be curious past the sound bite or headlline and our resulting ignorance is more than apparent. If only we could speak as objectively of the ghastly crew running for President--from both parties--perhaps we could redeem ourselves with the truth about stolen elections and purge the morons--from both parties again--who have made it less than glamorous to be American. Bring back President Gore!
Marv, San Francisco, USA
Well said indeed.
John Chuckman, Toronto, Canada
I think this was one of the most poweful and impressive pieces of journalism I have read in a very long time. Simon Jenkins is one of the most excellent comentators and clear thinkers of our time.
Susan Cazenove, Northampton, England
An excellent article. Tony Blair has been an unmitigated disaser for Britain on the international front that we will have to live with for a long,long time.
On the domestic front, he has unwound constitutional settlements and left them in a state of flux. At the same time, he has introduced an unhealthy authoritarianism to society that could flare out of control under a more engaged and determined leader.
oldasiahand, Guildford, UK
"Liberal Humanitarian Wars". Who decides the moral legitamacy of each intervention? There is a clear case when genocide is occurring such as in Kosovo. But the intervention in Iraq cannot be placed in the same context where our "liberal intervention" has led to a creeping genocide, with the daily car bombs and random killings. And what of the areas where we don't intervene like Darfur, Zimbabwe. is our conduct moral there?
People treat Tony Blair's legacy like a balance sheet weighing the "good" interventions against the Iraq debacle.
Sadly I think Iraq is such a calamity that one cannot mitigate in such a way for Tony Blair. I feel his current tour, trying to explain his interventions and trying to forge a new place on the world stage for himself is doomed to failure. He must address and accept that Iraq is a disaster and apologise. This current detachment from the reality of the problems he has caused serves nobody well including Tony Blair. It is pathetic in the word's true sense
Ashey Mason, Plymouth, UK
Rescuing countries from chaos and tryanny is admirable, providing the cost in lives and treasure is low. Blair initally meant well, and missions like Sierra Leone seemed morally agreeable. By 2003 Blair was trusted, but his hubris, vanity and desire to be a player on the world stage came to the fore. Iraq was a mistake. Saddam was a bad man, but the costs of the war far exceeded the benefits. Blair has failed to come up with a convincing explanation for the war. He didn't seem to understand that in the days of the Wolfowitz and Bush doctrines, UK and U.S. foreign policy interests were often different. The Neocon aim is to maintain U.S. hegemony and offers the prospect of wars without end to install democracies in the Middle East and beyond. Blair's belief that he could channel U.S. foreign policy towards a vaguely defined liberal something else was like his handling of Putin, naïve. The British people didn’t share Blair's new enthusiasms or like his new best friend, c'est la vie.
Mike S, toronto, canada
Great article, Mr. Jenkins.
Almost perfectly aligned with my views. Liberal interventionism is all talk and no morality. And we need not just take my word for it- look at the results in the world today. Who on earth is going to argue that we have made Iraq a better place by our badly thought out cack-handed invasion? According to the Lancet report, there's over 650,000 Iraqis dead. If it was anyone other than us or the Americans, we'd be calling it genocide. Blair would have slightly more credibility if he didn't enforce his ideas so very sporadically. If he believes in the cause, why didn't he intervene in Iraq before? What about all the thousands dead in Darfur? Why has he done nothing about them & the various other huge-scale human rights abuses? Perhaps because they have nothing HE can benefit from.
It wouldn't annoy me so much if it weren't for the fact that Blair thinks he is doing the world a favour. When in reality he has ruined Britain's credibility to global community.
Charlotte Jee, London,
Simon Jenkins has clearly a lack of undertstanding the nature of politics in practical sense. Classical arm-chair philosopher who deludes himself into thinking that the Kantian imperatives could be applied universally and everytime.
The only random adventurism is clealry Simon Jenkins article considering the fact that he exploits the un-popularity of Iraq war to demise Tony Blair.
The article preposturously concludes that British Soldiers are sent 'to fight and die for abstract nouns.'
Well, I and my Family in Kosovo might be abstract nouns to Simon Jenkins but to other people were not, including Tony Blair.
The legacy of Tony Blair is not random adventurism but it has a consistence and foundation something that clearly Simon Jenkins ommits to understand.
The limited amount of words do not do any justice to my response that would have been more detailed.
E.Cana, Rahovec, Kosova
"Blair reinvented the Middle Ages "
Given your passion for rural churches and twee villages, I thought you'd be pleased....
John, Nice, France
Evangelising is not enough, in fact, it is downright dangerous. Once it was the missionaries carrying their alien religions abroad and getting state muscle behind them if their message was rejected. Now we have the world's democrats falling on societies and telling them that salvation lies in the market economy. While America and Britain became stronger states, confirmed in their ideal of political and social existence, after bloody civil wars lasting many years, wars without quarter that purged society of its ills, wars that made those nations stronger and more cohesive, we deny other nations the same process thinking only in terms of markets and raw materials. How many alternative social systems of merit have been expunged by the fevered libertarians and the politically illiterate? Our democracy is now seen as a facade, we accept government that is all but totalitarian That uses Parliament, commits us to a lifestyle of their choosing. Imposes and regulates on a whim.
Malcolm Turner, Alsager, England
Maybe, it comes as a surprise that as a German citizen I wholeheartedly agree with Simon Jenkins. Blair's presence at the G8 summit - and George Bush's in adddition - is totally superfluous.
But so is Britain's presence in the EU. Britain should rather apply to become the 52nd (or whatever no.) state of the US. The majority of the Continentals feel that Brits would be much more at ease then.
By the way: in my opinion, most Germans are totally unhappy with the way how Merkel and her home secretary Schäuble organized the summit in Heiligendamm. It heavily infringes on the civil liberties of citizens in that region. Some of the police tactics (collecting scent samples to pass them to sniffer dogs during demos) are worthy of old traditions in the old GDR . The awful fence around the hotel is worthy of a concentration camp and would have made old Himmler proud!
This is not the impression Germany should present to the outside world!
Bernd Morsbach, Erkelenz, Germany
Bernd Morsbach, Erkelenz, Germany
Well Simon Jenkins has conflated so many issues here it is hard to take him seriously. Maybe he is willing to sit back while genocide and mass murder and rape, those abstract nouns he talks of, take place, but thankfully others aren't. I can imagine him now, intervene in Kosovo? - not in my name. Sierra Leone? - not in my name, and so on. He would obviously rather sit on his pompous high horse of retrospective hindsight doing nothing but sneering at the attempts of others, however succesful or not as the case may be, to do something about the horrific events in these countries. I know his type well, your damned if you try and do something, your damned if you don't.
D Dennett, Oxford,
A one word answer to this column is:
Rwanda
Tom Gray, Mansfield et Pontefract, Canada / Quebec
If this is the best that the top Sunday newspaper can produce then it is very sad.
Charles, Bath, UK
Simon Jenkins - he can take it but he cant dish it out. Britain is always involved in agression in the wider world. We had our aircraft hijacked by arabs, or were on the receiving end of IRA bombing campaigns. In recent years Blair has shown that it is payback time. Brussels EU Comission, "Watch out !" it's your turn next.
chaplain, canterbury,
In a reversion to the motivation of the Middle Ages, they must send their soldiers to fight and die for abstract nouns.
Abstact nouns like Allah, Simon?
RAB, Bristol,
It is always a pleasure to read Simon Jenkins articles, thank goodness sane people still write in the free press. I regret that with the exception of David Davies, who rightly criticises the intrusive nature of the Home Office's current policies, the Conservative Party is too ready to follow the Blair line for lack of confidence in setting out a sensible agenda.
The failure to complete the inquiry into British Aerospace's dealing with the dictators of Arabia, only prove the total hypocrisy of "Liberal Values". Let us get back to the straightforward business of governing ourselves properly and let others observe, rather than telling people how to do it.
Jim Armitage, Singapore, Singapore
However bad the planning, we did bring freedom to Iraq but too many of it's people don't want it and commentators try to blame the difficulties on anyone but the Iraqis. Its likely that the kidnapped security workers will die a terrible death and you question tactics used to find them, but the question should be, what is wrong in a region that turns so many of its population into kidnappers, serial killers and suicide bombers? This kind of self loathing article only encourages the extremists to think they are right and that all the problems of the world are due to us
Our fault was that Blair and Bush had a well intentioned but naive belief that people are all basically the same, if we set them free, they will thank us and get on with life. The Muslim world is different, from Algeria to Pakistan it is ruled by dictators who are necessary to control the extremists. That's the lesson of Iraq, they are not ready for open democratic society and its their fault
Adrian, London,
Michael Bruce repeats an error that actually lies at the heart of the problem the article identifies. We did not go to war in 1939 to "check abuses"; we did so because our interests were threatened. The nature of National Socialism was a minor consideratio. Nevertheless, the notion that this was a 'humanitarian intervention' is useful rhetoric to the likes of Blair.
What short memories we have; Kosovo was a disaster. there is still absolutely no evidence that any systematic 'genocide' was in progress and it seems Serbian victims of NATO outnumbered Albanian victims of Serbia. The bombing perilously undermined relations with Russia, and it was only through Russian diplomacy 78 days later that the campaign was ended. We didn't even topple the regime; Milosevic lost an election!
The only success was Sierra Leone, and that was not, legally speaking, an 'intervention'. We were invited in and did some successful imperial warfare but NuLab's language cannot allow that....
Michael, London,
The "random bands of criminals" to which Jenkins refers have to date murdered nearly 3000 people in New York, most of the dead in Iraq since 2003 (be it 68,000 or 650,000) and many western tourists in various parts of the Islamic world.
They are currently positioning rockets in southern Lebanon ready for the next deadly attack on Israel, and are terrorising a refugee camp in Northern Lebanon.
They are trying to reinstate their very own version of the "Middle Ages" in Afghanistan, and have a champion (not to mention supplier of weaponry) in the Iranian leader who has threatened to wipe Israel off the map.
It would make a refreshing change if, just once, Jenkins and other critics of Blair and Bush would attack the real problem that faces the world.
arnoldo, Coventry,
Thank god there are people like Simon Jenkins prepared to be critical.The value of a democracy is that Simon is allowed to freely walk the streets, but the downside of the same is that so is Blair. The leader of a democracy it would appear can instigate wars in the name of liberal values and escape the consequences of death, misery and fear that come in the wake of any war. Not only that, he can set up a foundation and earn millions promoting the very same interventionism. There is something wrong with democracy in this case, something that smacks too much of the regimes we opposed during the Cold War. And when the leaders of these western democracies can only meet behind barbed wire guarded by thousands of armed riot police, it doesn't do them much credit. Who will attack them? Strangely, not islamics but their own voters. Is phone tapping, dawn raids, electronic surviellance, opening mail, what democracy comes down too when its leaders put on a show?
john walter, bonn, germany
"Making war on China . . ."What is all this nonsense being written about China? The Chinese people are not oppressed. In fact, there is more personal freedom, and less private intrusion, here in China than I experienced in the UK before I left it last year!
Certainly, it is a Command Economy, but it seems to work for them and it certainly gets things done, with no endless and vastly expensive Public Enquiries.
Certainly, there is economic poverty in the countryside and the Western Provinces. But look a the dispossessed of New Orleans and don't try to claim that they were comfortably off! And, there is no intellectual poverty in China - again, not like the UK or the US.
The ordinary Western citizen - and even some journalists - are being fed a lot of negative propaganda about China by their governments. The reaction of all ordinary people who come to visit China is the same - "It is very different than I imagined."
Bill McCann, Suzhou, China
This is some article & echos my own sentiments closely.
Why do leaders all seem to go mad with power ,? isn't it enough for them to know it's the way they were BEFORE getting the top job, that we voted them in. ?
Who ever it was that said , 'all political careers end in failure ' was pretty much on the mark, certainly for the leaders.
They let us down & in Blairs case he has let us down , big time with his foreign policy. Spin Spin Spin in others words Con Con Con !
Billions of tax payers money spent like confetti at an old fashioned wedding, fluttered into the pockets of arms makers.
My heart goes out to the man & women who are fighting for us, in the name of democracy & up holding British values, ( ?) it must be very hard for them to keep their faith with the principles of war & what they signed up for.
They have been ordered , [ I believe ] to act like the very thug they were sent to depose.
Bring them home, accept failure Mr Blair & you go on your way too !
Maggie Millington, Brittany, France
The major unresolved political/moral issue of out time is: how far is one justified in going to check abuses in other countries, and to spread one's own ideology?
The Islamists have no doubts now. We had no doubts in 1939. We had few in former Yugoslavia. On the other hand, other interventions against brutal regimes get a worse press; Vietnam was unpopular, Iraq hardly less so, Iran unthinkable. Yet the people of those countries suffered under equally nasty regimes, as do the Chinese and the North Koreans. The atrocities in Darfur are well-known. Should we just let them get on with it?
I admit the practical problems. Making war on China would be almost as dangerous as making war on Germany in 1939. Iraq has shown that not everyone even wants to be rescued. Peace and harmony are not, worldwide, top of the pops.
The question remains: how far is intervention - especially intervention on moral, ideological or humanitarian grounds justified?
Michael Bruce, Selby, Yorkshire