---

Foreign Policy

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, for this debate. I intend to focus on only one aspect offoreign policy since 1997—the willingness of this Government, over the past 10 years, to intervene militarily when it has seemed a pressing necessityto them to do so. As a prelude, I emphasise that I share the Prime Minister’s conviction that military intervention to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe can sometimes be a moral obligation. I intend to look briefly at some of the reasons why we have intervened: in Kosovo in 1999, in Sierra Leone in 2000, with the Australians in East Timor, in Iraq with Operation Desert Fox in 1998, and of course, most recently, in the present war there and in Afghanistan. I do so because I hope to see what lessons might be learnt for the future. We are often told that unless we learn from the mistakes of the past, we are condemned to repeat them. The problem is that we are always in danger of drawing the wrong lessons from those mistakes. Because of the terrible casualties of World War 1, there was a widespread mood of pacifism in the 1930s, which I fear I might have shared. Nothing seemed worse than war. But there was something worse, and only a minority of clear-sighted souls saw it. We did not make the same mistake again in the Cold War but resisted further Soviet expansion so far as we could within the overall restraining factor of the presence of nuclear weapons on both sides. But it is so easy to draw the wrong lesson. My first worry is that we will be tempted to draw the wrong lesson from the present tragic failure in Iraq. What is going on there is indeed terrible, and the e-mails I receive seem to indicate that it is even worse than the media depict it as being. But it is vital, despite this, to keep the military option open in the future. In the world as it is, this will sadly, but assuredly, be needed at some point. It would only compound the tragedy of Iraq if, as a result of what has gone wrong there, we turn a blind eye to some manifest wrongdoing or humanitarian need in the future. The second point that emerges is the need for clear United Nations backing. A particular interpretation of contested UN resolutions when there is very far from being a proper international consensus simply is not enough. Successive Archbishops of Canterbury, from Fisher at Suez to today, have urged our Government to give full weight to the authority of the United Nations, even if it does not always endorse our first preferred course of action. As a result of the recent high-level panel report, the United Nations has an extremely sound ethical and political basis for military intervention under its auspices. We need to support and strengthen this basis and, in the future, except in the most exceptional circumstances, work with and through this. Not unrelated to this is the need for the closest possible co-operation with other European countries where potential military intervention might be involved. This need not be at the expense of our relationship with the United States, as the noble Baroness, Lady Symons, emphasised. But it was the failure of our relationship with France and Germany that was as responsible as anything else for our failure to obtain a second UN resolution before the present Iraq war. In the excellent debate last Thursday on Europe a number of noble Lords rightly stressed the need for Europe to work together on the military aspect of foreign policy. I know that the Kosovo situation is not fully resolved but it seemed to me that at the outset, as now, the Prime Minister was absolutely right to work so hard to persuade other countries not only that we should intervene militarily, but that we should commit troops. It is true that there was no explicit UN mandate for that, but as Sir Michael Quinlan has written, the 1994 Kosovo operation differed from the Iraq instance in at least four pertinent respects. He wrote: "““It was directed to halting an immediate and manifest humanitarian outrage in full swing; it was not a regime-changing invasion; it was supported by the great majority of countries in the region, and by a wide international grouping of major countries, and effectively validated soon afterwards by the UN itself””." Those are four very pertinent differences. Finally, not only do we need a sound basis—a clear set of principles—in addition to the support of the UN to intervene militarily, but we need to apply the principles in a consistent manner. For those of us who are guided by the ““just war”” criteria, it seemed clear that while the intervention in Kosovo was justified, as it was in the very different circumstances of Sierra Leone and with Operation Desert Fox, those criteria were not met in the case of the recent war. Those principles are not the only way of stating the considerations that have to be taken into accountin order to make a right judgment. Early in his premiership, in an important speech in Chicago on24 April 1999, the Prime Minister set out a very clear set of criteria for military intervention: first, are we sure of our case; secondly, have we exhausted all diplomatic options; thirdly, are there military options we can sensibly and prudently undertake; fourthly, are we prepared for the long-term; and finally, do we have national interests involved. There was a further point: if we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the UN as its central pillar. I would have liked to see that as a further specific criterion. As I have already indicated, I believe that working for the maximum consensus, internationally and more specifically in Europe, is fundamental to the issue of military intervention having a moral basis in the modern world. On the basis of those principles,as well as the ““just war”” criteria with which they significantly overlap, it was difficult from the outset to see the Iraq invasion as justified. I only wish that those of us who predicted disaster had been proved wrong. I still hope and pray daily that I will beproved wrong and that the original purpose of the intervention might succeed. There is no doubt that the failure to have a unified chain of command in the White House and the failure to plan for the aftermath of the invasion are almost criminally culpable.As Barack Obama has put it, with admirable succinctness, "““Iraq was a diversion from the fight against the terrorists who struck us on 9/11, and the incompetent prosecution of the war by America's civilian leaders compounded the strategic blunder of choosing to wage it in the first place””." Towards the beginning of his premiership, the Prime Minister said in his Chicago speech: "““The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts””." That problem has not gone away. Whatever set of principles we finally decide on for the present Government or future Governments, the present Prime Minister or future Prime Ministers, those principles need to be applied in a very rigorous and consistent way.