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Foreign Policy

My Lords, I shall endeavour to be brief. I have a medical appointment shortly after three o'clock that I am anxious to keep, so I hope that the House will understand if I have to step out early, although my calculations are that I will not. Having said that to the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and my noble friend on the Front Bench, it is perhaps mean of me then to criticise the noble Lord’s opening speech.I congratulate him on organising the debate; it is important. I shall make three quick points. First, the noble Lord made a very party-political speech. I understand why that may be so, but I am not sure that that is the best way to analyse the issue. Secondly, and more importantly, his speech addressed some of the world issues as if September 11, 2001 had never happened. Thirdly—this is very important—one thing that you cannot do in politics is to give full backing, as the Conservative Party did for the Iraq war, and then have the Front-Bench spokesman of the Conservative Party saying that we should not have done it. That is one thing that you cannot do. This may sound slightly surprising, but I want the Conservative Party to recover. I do not want it to win the next general election, but I want it to recover because I think that there is a large constituency in Britain that does not feel spoken for and needs the Conservative Party to do that. You cannot do that if you back a war and then disappear down the street in a cloud of dust when the going gets difficult. That is not convincing. What is the key issue here? A number of speakers have touched on the emerging great powers: India, China and Brazil. That is absolutely right, but in the short term, the issue is the proliferation of unstable, failed and despotic states and of armed groups—terror groups. That is the problem. Some people have said that the problem has come about or got worse because of Iraq. The latter may well be true, but ignores the fundamental fact that those groups were killing people in significant numbers before Iraq and before Afghanistan. Indeed, the organisations behind the killings in Europe, including the London bombings, can be traced back to our failure to intervene in Bosnia. That is why I am critical of the introductory comments of the noble Lord, Lord Howell. The failure to intervene in Bosnia created some of those groups. White European Muslims being butchered by white European Christians and Europe doing nothing about it was not a convincing sight for the Islamic world. Many of those groups tried to fight in Kosovo. Fortunately, we did intervene then and those groups were marginalised, but they were growing in strength all the time and we in several European countries paid a high price for our failure to intervene. That brings me to my second point, which a number of noble Lords have spoken about and about which they have made some important points—that liberal intervention is important. We should address that issue because, as the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, made clear, up to a point you can work out the circumstances in which you should intervene and when you should not. My next point was touched on by my noble friend Lord Desai. The whole of the Royal Navy’s intervention to stop the slave trade throughout the 19th century was unlawful. To put it bluntly, it was an unlawful war, to coin a phrase. That is where lawyers need to get their act together and think about morality and the inchoate state of international law. We were taken to court and lost cases around the world for intervening to stop the slave trade. I am glad that we did that; I hope that everyone is glad that we did that. Do not forget that this is not just a Western idea. Vietnam intervened to remove Pol Pot. Tanzania intervened to remove Idi Amin. India intervenedto remove what was then East Pakistan to form Bangladesh. Then there is Kosovo, and so on. There were many motives for it at the time, but liberal intervention is an important issue in foreign policy now and we need to discuss it much more than we are. Failure to intervene can be just as destructive as intervening and not getting it right. I have said in a number of speeches that I accept that we made some fundamental mistakes in the post-conflict situation in Iraq. Those speeches are on the record, so I shall not repeat them. The House needs to recognise that we are dealing with despotic, unstable states and armed terror groups. One or two comments that I have heard recently, not just in this House, seem not to recognise that part of the battlefield is the international media. The groups in Afghanistan, in Iraq and elsewhere know that what they have to do to stop democracy, the rule of law and human rights coming into those countries is to kill and terrorise certain people in them: police, teachers and government officials. Killing British or American troops, troops from NATO or from other countries, as they have done in Afghanistan, is part of it, but they do not expect to beat those armies in those circumstances. They want to make it impossible for a Government to develop in those countries who can create security, stability, the rule of law and democracy, as the people want. I am sorry that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry is not in his place, but I think that he is making a fundamental miscalculation whenhe tries to distinguish between cultures on the basisof whether they want democracy. It is true that democracy is a Western word, coming from the Greeks, but it is not true that democracy and the concept of law are only Western concepts. They have been around in different societies throughout time. Stable societies usually have them in some form, although they may not have been codified as theyare now. That brings me to my final point, which is about Islam. We need to address this. We cannot lecture Islam on which way it should go, but I know from my many constituents who are Muslims that there is a very large body of opinion within Islam that wants to do what it regards, and I regard, as modernising. They recognise that there is a problem not in Islam itself but when Islam tries to run a state, to deal with all aspects of the state and society, if you also want a modernised society. The problem is that while people, especially inthe arc around the Middle East, want all the good things that modernisation brings—most notably the economic wealth and the opportunity to have goods and services that they would not otherwise have—it is very difficult to make that happen within the Islamic framework of a state. I do not think that it is impossible, but it is difficult. We need to understand that. That is why Pakistan has more problems than India. They have a similar background, other than the issue of what role Islam plays in the state. Saying that does not challenge or insult Islam; plenty of Muslims will say that to you. We can engage in that conversation, and it is important that we do so. However, it is also vital that we are clearly on their side and not on the side of groups who think that the answer is a much more rigid interpretation of the Koran that would prevent these countries developing the modernisation that their people actually want and demonstrate that they want by their day-to-day actions. This issue is very complex, and the debate held here and in many nations should increasingly take the form of deciding how we reform the United Nations to deliver some of the structures that we need. Secondly, how do we intervene liberally rather more effectively than we have done so far? What do we do when we do not intervene, whether in Rwanda or Bosnia? How do we allow and help nations to develop the modern economic and technological framework that they want, with the freedoms that they demonstrate that they want?