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Foreign Policy

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont of Whitley. I see that he is in splendid isolation on those Benches, although he belongs to the Green Party. Clearly, the mere whiff of ministerial berths has cleared the Liberal Democrat Benches of those wishing to debate foreign policy. I suspect that it may be down to hearing the words ““Lord Ashdown as Foreign Secretary””—that is the price you pay for power. Before I begin, I wish to say something to the noble Lord, Lord Beaumont, about the human rights index. Fifteen years ago, I was involved in publishinga human rights index for the UNDP Human Development Report. All hell broke loose. Leading members of the United Nations went to the Secretary-General and said not that we were wrong but that the UNDP had no mandate to publish anything about human rights. Therefore, my noble efforts to institute such an index came to nothing. The noble Lord’s party wants a human rights index, and I wish it were in power, but I warn him that it is not easy to publish such a thing. I have already heard two very good defences of liberal interventionism this afternoon and thereforeI do not need to go very far in that direction, as Ihad intended to do. The alternative to liberal interventionism is pragmatic cynicism, but that was the problem in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is very easy to say—you can even clothe it in a sort of cultural garb—that that is how those people out there behave: they kill each other and there is nothing that we can do about it; that is their way of life; they do not like democracy and their religion allows them to do these things. Together with the Prime Minister and many others, I believe that we have to take responsibility for what happens in the global village. If there is domestic violence in the global village and you say, ““That is that couple’s problem””, you may be condoning death. We have to explain why we do not intervene more rather than why we have intervened. From the Back Benches, I supported our policy on Iraq and I still take the view that it was not wrong to go in; nor was it wrong to insist that Iraq could become a democracy. It is not yet time to say thatthe attempt has failed, because Iraq is havingtwo referendums and it has a constitution and a Government. It is not the case that there is mayhem and crisis in Iraq just because we intervened—that would be a very naïve way of looking at the situation. If Iraq were to become a democracy, it would be the only Shia Arab majority state in the Middle East. The tradition over many years has been for Sunnis to rule over Shia Arabs, and therefore attempts are being made not just by the enemies of America and the UK, such as Syria, but also by some of our friends—other Sunni powers—to prevent a majority-based rule in Iraq becoming a reality. We should obviously learn from our long experience in Ireland. Unless you give strong guarantees of rights to minorities, those minorities will be unhappy, especially if they have been used to ruling a country. However, I do not think that we should give up or think that we were wrong. It is true that the situation has been going on for four years but there have been other crises in the world. We should not forget the recovery period after the Second World War, when it took many more years to establish democratic government. I cite the examples of Japan and West Germany. We are too hasty and too willing to abandon our efforts because we think, ““They are strange people out there. They have a strange religion and they wear funny clothes. Let us abandon them and come back to our comfort zone, which does not involve intervening in their disputes””. At the same time, we are very unhappy about Zimbabwe, but is that because it was a former colony and Iraq is not? Even with regard to Zimbabwe, we have to say that we are not intervening because we believe that President Mbeki will bring about a solution to the quarrel. If we did not say that, we would have to ask why we were not intervening. In this interdependent world, we have to do what Wilberforce forced the Government to do 200 years ago. He forced them to intervene in the slave trade of other countries, telling them to stop it. That was an example of liberal interventionism if ever there was one. After all, it could easily have been argued, as it was at the time, that the Christian Church was not against slavery, and certainly Islam was not, but we had to intervene because we believed that slavery was wrong. That is the right way to proceed in this matter. Although I do not have time to say very much, I want to mention the Palestine/Israel issue. I do not think that a two-state solution will work, although a three-state solution may be much worse. We have to see the problem in a very different way. There cannot be a land-for-peace solution in a country where there is a very limited amount of land and far too many people wanting it. Europe—that is, France and Germany—was fighting over land in the 19th century, but we do not fight for land now because we have found that economic prosperity can come from other things. About four or five years ago, the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, and I proposed a sort of common market in which everyone—Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and parts of Palestine such as Gaza and the West Bank—could become part of a trading network, bringing prosperity to the region. If prosperity were to come to the region with capital and the free movement of labour, we might be able to see a way out of the antagonism which threatens to be much worse for the region than it is already. We have to think along those lines because political solutions are not in sight. For all that we may say about our commitment or the commitment of the Group of Four or whatever, it is not going to happen because America does not have the power, the clout or the willingness to make Israel come to the negotiating table. By befriending Fatah and ignoring the democratic success of Hamas, we are repeating what happened in Algeria. If we neglect the democratic success of what may be a terrorist organisation, that will bring more terror and more mayhem, not peace and security. It may not be too late for us to reverse that position but I do not have much hope. I think that bringing economic prosperity to the region would be a better idea.