Labour must re-discover ethical foreign policy if it is to exorcise its demons

By Mathew Hulbert

The late, great former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook once rightly called for an ‘ethical’ foreign policy and, equally as rightly, resigned in protest ahead of the invasion of Iraq which he correctly stated had neither “international agreement nor domestic support.”

It was in 2003, when Tony Blair and George W.Bush and their propagandists in the media were trying to convince their respective electorates that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that, to quote Tony Blair, there were “rough linkages between Iraq and Al Qaeda”, that my own faith in Labour was destroyed. I swore then that I would not vote Labour again until Tony Blair was no longer the Premier and Labour finally fulfilled its promise of having that ‘ethical’ foreign policy that Cook was so passionate about.

I’ve not voted Labour again to this day.

Ahead of the economic downturn Labour’s foreign policy crime (for what else can the invasion of Iraq be described as?) was the biggest cause of dissatisfaction between the voters and the politicians. My hope for Gordon Brown was that, when he got to No 10 he’d begin rebuilding that bridge and give us a foreign policy worthy of Cook’s wishes.

And, yes, UK troops have been brought back from Iraq – though not before hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed, along with many, many British soldiers.

But the warfare continues in Afghanistan.

To my eternal shame I once supported the war there, having been horrified by the tragic events of September 11th 2001. That was until I listened to an excellent speech given by the brilliant and award-winning journalist and filmmaker John Pilger, who tells truths the so-called mainstream media wouldn’t dare for fear of ‘losing access’ to the political elite.

In that speech (which you can watch for yourself here), Pilger says that far from the war in Afghanistan being a response to 9/11, George W.Bush had, in fact, first decided to go to war there at least two months earlier, in July 2001.

Further to that Pilger also says that the administration of Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, had allegedly helped to fund the Taliban.

This is the same President Clinton who, along with his then British counterpart John Major, failed to act back in 1994 to help end the Rwandan genocide.

And, latterly, the Blair and Brown administrations, along with their US colleagues, failed to act in any really meaningful way to help stop the genocide in Darfur.

So, all that having been said, how on earth can voters believe Labour – or, indeed, the Tories who show no signs of having a more ‘ethical’ foreign policy and who voted for the Iraq invasion?

This isn’t about appeasement – I supported the UN-backed ‘toppling’ of former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević.

It is about supposedly liberal politicians acting in a manner that can only be described as reckless, and who seemingly see innocent victims as ‘collateral damage’ on the way to achieving ‘wider aims.’

The British Government must find its ‘moral compass’, a bit of backbone, and some integrity. An increasingly informed and subversive public will accept nothing less.