The war party
Labour's strategy of trying to neutralise the Iraq War as an election issue has logic as well as self-interest behind it. On any reasonable premises (i.e. excluding those of "anti-war" campaigners who in reality campaigned for the victory of fascism), and whatever one's view of the rights and wrongs of US/UK strategy, we have a moral and prudential obligation to support the emergence of democracy and constitutional government in Iraq.
Yet I can see that if you believe, against the evidence and in defiance of historical context, that the Government lied to take us into an illegal war, you would want to make a protest against Tony Blair. I thus also treat the election as a referendum on the veracity, judgement and ethics of the Prime Minister, and I reason this way. The test of statesmanship is to recognise when the international order has ceased to be amenable to previous ways of managing conflicts. Blair perceived even earlier than 9/11 that the traditional distinction between realism and idealism in foreign policy no longer applied. We should promote democracy globally because it provides safeguards from arbitrary power directed against those living under autocracy. We should also promote global democracy because we thereby protect ourselves and our citizens from terrorist groups who receive support and sustenance from anti-democratic regimes.
I am glad that that there is a coincidence of approach between a left-of-centre government in the UK and a Republican administration in the US, and unlike its critics consider that this rests on something greater than the personal relations of the political leaders concerned. The alliance of Bush and Blair is grounded not merely in personality and tactical alliance, but in ideological ends. It is something worse than a tragedy - it's a mistake - that the Democrats and the Conservatives respectively have attacked the premises of this shared stance. But in a way the Conservatives, at least, are being philosophically consistent.
The most abject failure in British foreign policy in my lifetime was the abandonment, under the Conservative Government of John Major, of Bosnia's multi-ethnic democracy to Serb aggression in the early 1990s. The issue - and the state of transatlantic relations - reached a nadir between 1993 and 1995 in the person of Malcolm Rifkind, then Defence Secretary, later Foreign Secretary, now Tory candidate in the safe seat of Chelsea (he lost his Edinburgh seat in 1997, and failed to win it back in 2001), and probable future Tory leader. As related in Brendan Simms' superb book Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, 2001, p. 96, Rifkind refused to countenance a policy of 'lift and strike' (i.e. lift the arms embargo, so Bosnia could defend itself, and for Nato to strike Serb positions directly) being proposed by critics of UK inactivity. At the end of 1994, when Mrs Thatcher was pressing for a pro-Bosnian stance, Rifkind condemned her "emotional nonsense". He also remarked to despairing American senators that, "You Americans don't know the horrors of war." The particular senator he was addressing was Bob Dole, who was permanently disabled and nearly killed in WWII. Dole replied, with commendable restraint, "Don't talk to me about sacrifice." Simms also records that Senator John McCain, a POW in the Vietnam War, became so heated in meeting Rifkind that he almost hit the man (according to a staff member).
I have argued in earlier posts that the Conservatives' position on the Iraq War - first supporting it, and then engaging in embittered criticisms of Tony Blair's supposed duplicity - does not even reach the level of honest opportunism: it's just cynical. But in fact it does have some parallels with this earlier history of Tory indifference to an aggressive dictatorship. In the Bosnian debacle, Rifkind and then-Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd espoused a Conservative tradition of pessimism about the limits of political action in the international order. The consequences were appalling from a humanitarian point of view. It is an approach that would be still more destructive when dealing with theocratic totalitarians who have attacked the American mainland and who seek the literal destruction of western civilisation.
Do I trust the Tories on defence? No, I do not. There are individual Conservative candidates - notably Times columnist Michael Gove - whose election would be a good thing for public policy and the quality of British democracy. But overall the politician who merits support in this election is Tony Blair: the man who joined with our American allies to prosecute a just, necessary and noble campaign to overthrow an unspeakable tyranny.
