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Debate on the Address

My Lords, I often agree with the noble Lord, Lord Gilbert; I certainly agree with his praise of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, and his comments about Turkey. However, if there is one department of government in which I could never find myself it would be the one concerned with defence procurement. My comments are therefore on a different set of issues, and follow the very important things said by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and the fact that this has turned to a considerable extent into a debate about Iraq. I am very much a bystander on Iraq. All one can do at this point is to hope that attempts to prevent a swing from tyranny to anarchy and possibly back to new kinds of tyranny will be successful. However, this is the time to think about what went wrong and what might be done to avoid such mistakes in the future. I say that as one who still believes that intervention to bring about regime change can be justified. If we want to live in a world of liberty under law, we cannot tolerate vicious regimes which practise murderous oppression at home and threaten those around them with aggression. The Westphalian era of letting states do what they want within their borders is over. It is no accident that the doctrine of non-interference is today preached primarily by dictatorships from North Korea to Zimbabwe. Action to bring about regime change has to be multilateral. The only universal organisation we have for this purpose is the United Nations. It would have been preferable if more of the recommendations for reform by the high-level group had been adopted, but it is good to learn from the gracious Speech that the Government will contribute to a modern and inclusive United Nations. Inclusiveness is of course both the strength and the weakness of the United Nations. We may have to live with the fact that the wheeling and dealing about necessary resolutions is not edifying, but when it comes to matters of principle, such acquiescence is not easy. It is particularly difficult to accept that those who systematically violate liberty under law sit in judgment over others. This is relevant to the lessons from the Iraq debacle, of which two seem particularly important. One is that there has to be a clear and precise analysis of the causes for intervention. This should not be a negotiated analysis, but one that identifies violations of enlightened values, many of which are embodied in the UN charter and can be further identified with the incorruptibility and persuasiveness which the International Atomic Energy Agency displays in its field. The other lesson to learn is to take a considered approach to the institutional changes needed in the country at issue: what needs to be done and how. Something like the Copenhagen criteria of the European Union may serve as a model for applying the principles of the constitution of liberty under varying and always specific historic and cultural circumstances. There is at this time no organisation or even arrangement to achieve these ends. NATO is regional and primarily military in culture. The Council of Europe is also regional and has been somewhat generous in interpreting the values of its foundation. This is true also of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. I have in mind the political equivalent of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in economic matters, a universal though not inclusive arrangement to bring together those committed to liberty under law, a sort of organisation for political co-operation and development, an OPCD, as it were. In this connection I was interested in an article published in the Guardian on 9 November by Timothy Garton-Ash endorsing a report by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University entitled Forging a World of Liberty Under Law. The report recommends what it calls a ““concert of democracy””. One great risk of the experience of Iraq is that those involved, and indeed the bystanders, conclude that withdrawal and protection are the best way to go. This danger must be avoided if we do not want illiberty and lawlessness to prevail. The way to achieve this is not to return to unilateral action or even to bypass existing organisations, but to add to them the powerful voice of those who realise that liberty under law needs active defence. Formalised or not, we need to bring the democracies of the world together to reach a common understanding of reasons for intervention and methods for making regime change effective.