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Ministry of Defence

When I first entered the House in 1997, it was not long before the bright, shiny new Labour Government came out with a bright, shiny new Labour foreign policy. That foreign policy was to be an ethical foreign policy. We do not hear too much about that these days, not because we think that our foreign policy is not ethical, but because the experience of office has shown the Government that foreign policy and, by association, defence policy, is often not a matter of positive ethics but of deciding which is the lesser of two evils. That has been illustrated by a number of speeches today, not least that of my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt), comparing the differing objectives between wishing to clean up the trade in opium from Afghanistan, and not wishing to forge an alliance between the local farmers who depend on growing opium and the Taliban and other extremists and insurgents who were not normally in any form of prior alliance, but who could be forced into an alliance if we are heavy-handed about achieving the anti-drugs objective. In other words, one must sometimes choose the least worse policy. That was also implicit in the speech of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) when he said that it looked as if Iraq were ending up with a Government far more pro-Iranian, in terms of the alliance of the two adjacent countries’ Governments, than one would ever have wanted. He did not say this explicitly, but I detect an underlying belief that the policy that was followed for years, and subsequently denounced on so many occasions—the policy of supporting Saddam Hussein—was completely unethical, which it probably was. It is likely, however, that when discussions were held in the Foreign Office in his day, the argument would have been, ““Yes, but what is the alternative—some sort of axis, nexus or alliance between extremist fundamentalist Governments in adjacent countries?”” It is not easy to choose between those two evils. The point is that a choice between evils must often be made. There is no morally free ““get out of jail”” clause that can be invoked by those burdened with the responsibility of deciding on a foreign policy or a defence policy in the modern world, which is peopled—as no doubt were the mediaeval and ancient worlds—by some very nasty regimes.