Libyan lessons for Labour’s foreign policy

By Darrell Goodliffe

Events in the Middle East and North Africa are both inspiring and terrifying. The commitment and dedication of the people to democracy and willingness to sacrifice is inspiring. Conversely, the actions of the decaying dictatorships, desperate to preserve their power at all costs, are terrifying. In Libya we are witnessing the horrific spectacle of a leader treating his own people like ‘vermin’ in both word and deed, as he uses every means at his disposal to ensure that if he does go down it will not be until he has taken many of his own people with him.

Foreign policy isn’t often top of many peoples’ lists when it comes to their most immediate concerns and indeed it isn’t ‘sexy’ enough to merit that much attention, usually. Nonetheless, there are plenty of lessons from our foreign policy successes and failures in office we need to absorb. Top of the list is ‘you cannot substitute yourself for the people’. Although I totally disagreed with the invasion of Iraq, I am convinced Tony Blair genuinely believed what he said when he argued that what he was doing really would usher in democracy in the Middle East. This showed us more how self-delusional he was at this point sadly, and had no bearing on the real world whatsoever. No ‘short-cuts’ to democracy through Western backed ‘regime change’ exist – indeed, short-cuts in this area make long and bloody delays. It is telling that in the case of Kosovo, regime change was not sought or actively pursued but happened anyway through the agency of the subsequent revolution that occurred in Serbia. This point was visibly lost on a Blair who believed far too much of his own press by the time we got to the Iraq.

Secondly, aspiring to an ‘ethical foreign policy’ sounds very nice and laudable but has one major flaw. Ethics exist in an ultimately abstract and subjective universe. Government and policy making live in the cold and bitter universe of objective reality. Resolving this contradiction is fraught with problems and virtually impossible, at least in the context of how the world currently operates. Ethically, you might argue for closer relations with Libya in the service of a ‘greater good’ like ending a nuclear program. However, the wheels come off that wagon when the arms you sold them instead are used to brutally murder Libyan citizens by the swivel-eyed ‘Colonel’ piloting the ship of state. I suspect to those who are dead and their relatives the finer points of a subjective construct like the ‘greater good’ might be lost in translation. As an aside, governments take weapons to use them eventually, so sending them for ‘experimental’ purposes is either naïve in the extreme or to be complicit in deceit.

This leads to a third point. Ignore totally the arms industry, no matter how much they pay you or how many jobs they threaten you with axing. Britain along with the rest of the West has made a small fortune out of decrying governments in public and then selling them weapons when the rest of the world isn’t looking. Often we have to manage the amazing double act of looking completely mystified and morally outraged when formally ‘friendly’ and therefore acceptable despots actually start using the weapons we sold to them against us. Heaven only knows how David Cameron can muster the sheer cheek to do a ‘tour’ of the Middle East aimed at promoting democracy and human rights with several major arms trading companies in toe. Criticise him, we definitely should, but lets be candid; it’s not as if Labour Prime Ministers’ were radically better in this regard.

In reality, you are going to struggle with implementing an ethical foreign policy while trying to pursue ethically blind goals like maximising profit margins. This is the rub, isn’t it? No matter how much we say we want to change the world and protect ‘sacred values’ the fact is that these are always secondary considerations. Until that is changed, our hopes of changing the world for the better will always be drowned by far less noble considerations; otherwise, the price we will end up paying in the longer term does not even bear imagining.