Libya - Liberal Interventionism Revisited

Just what the rest of the world, including the UK and our allies, should do, or will have to do, about the situation emerging in Libya is far from clear. On 8 March, Sir Christopher Meyer, formerly UK ambassador in Washington, wrote in the Daily Mail about the UK government’s foreign policy in reaction to the Arab Spring:

The very foundations of British foreign policy need to be examined, because all is muddle and confusion. We don’t seem to be able to think straight about when, if at all, it is right to intervene in another country. In an echo of Tony Blair’s doctrine of liberal interventionism, we appear to have foreign policy ambitions that once again outstrip our military capabilities.

This post revisits the origins of Blair's “liberal interventionism”, and, interestingly, it was in his 2005 book, DC Confidential, that Meyer had provided a well-informed view of the speech (‘The Doctrine of the International Community’) which Tony Blair had given in Chicago on 24 April 1999, and to which the concept now seems to be attached:

Blair delivered a speech of some significance. It completely blindsided the Foreign Office. Against the background of Kosovo he promulgated a doctrine of international community and humanitarian intervention, almost pre-emption: that it was justified to violate the frontiers and sovereignty of a state if within its borders genocide was about to be, or was being, carried out. This was not a million miles from one of the main arguments used to justify the attack on Iraq in 2003. They say, though I could not corroborate this myself, that the ideas underpinning the speech were borrowed from the foreign policy analyst and academic Lawrence Freedman.

The speech made a lot of people sit up. Some even went as far as to say that the basic principles of the modern nation-state, established after the Thirty Years War in the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, had been overturned. In fact, it was not that radical. The right to intervene on human-rights grounds in the internal affairs of another country had, to all intents and purposes, been ceded in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the grand bargain between the western and communist halves of Europe, which became one of the pillars of détente.

The speech, eloquently delivered in Blair's evangelical style, was received with a thunderous standing ovation from the hundreds of Chicagoans who filled the cavernous ballroom of one of the city's largest hotels.

Sir (now) Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies and Vice Principal at King’s College, London, and a member of the Iraq Inquiry Committee. On 18 January 2010 he wrote to the Inquiry chairman, Sir John Chilcot, enclosing a memo, ‘Chicago Speech: Some Suggestions’, that he had sent to Jonathan Powell, Blair’s Chief of Staff at the latter’s request on 16 April 1999. (Powell was to give evidence to the Inquiry on 18 January 2010).

With a few changes, Freedman’s memo provided the International Security section of the Blair’s speech. It is interesting to examine the non-trivial alterations (underlinings below are mine). Blair began following Freedman closely:

We now have a decade of experience since the end of the cold war. It has certainly been a less easy time than many people hoped in the natural euphoria that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Our armed forces have been busier than ever – delivering humanitarian aid, deterring attacks on defenceless people, backing up UN resolutions, and occasionally engaging in major wars, as we did in the Gulf in 1991 and are currently doing in the Balkans.

but then omitted Freedman’s subsequent cautionary sentence:

In the search for a peace dividend the armed forces of the west were cut back, but they can be cut no further and we are starting to worry about overstretch.

and that was in 1999, before current Western cuts/savings and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan! Later Freedman pointed to enlightened self-interest as a rationale for intervention:

As we address world problems, at the NATO summit and G8 meetings, we might be tempted to think back to the clarity and simplicity of the cold war. T here were arguments about the right strategy to adopt to contain the Soviet threat but the threat itself was well understood. Now we have the luxury but also the dilemma of choice. Our most vital interests demand very little of us these days. They are not at risk. Yet we can see values that we cherish being violated daily and images of humanitarian distress that touch our hearts and our consciences. We know that these are often symptoms of political upheavals that could have knock on effects that will eventually be felt at home.

Blair took only the first sentence here, and chose a more moral tone for value-spreading:

As we address these problems at this weekend’s NATO Summit we may be tempted to think back to the clarity and simplicity of the Cold War. But now we have to establish a new framework. No longer is our existence as states under threat. Now our actions are guided by a more subtle blend of mutual self-interest and moral purpose in defending the values we cherish. In the end values and interests merge. If we can establish and spread the values of liberty, the rule of law, human rights and an open society then that is in our national interests too. The spread of our values makes us safer. As John Kennedy put it “Freedom is indivisible and when one man is enslaved who is free?”.

He then followed Freedman again:

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. Non -interference has long been considered an important principle of international order. And it is not one we would want to jettison too readily. One state should not feel it has the right to change the political system of another or forment subversion or seize pieces of territory to which it feels it should have some claim. But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as “threats to international peace and security”. When regimes are based on minority rule they lose legitimacy – look at South Africa.

except that Freedman had proposed “Non-interference … has long been considered a basic principle of international order”, (and also "foment", not the malapropism “forment”).

Then Freedman’s “five tests”, on the issue of when and whether to intervene, became, in the speech, five concise “major considerations”. Among these, Freedman’s:

2. Have we exhausted all diplomatic options? At times we must negotiate with evil-doers and negotiate seriously. This requires enormous clarity about our concerns and objectives. Of course a desperate desire for compromise can be exploited – but so can a refusal to compromise.

became Blair’s:

Second, have we exhausted all diplomatic options? We should always give peace every chance, as we have in the case of Kosovo.

and Freedman’s:

4. Are we prepared for then long-term? We have perhaps in the past talked too much of the need for `exit strategies’ for the good reason that we do not want our forces to be tied up indefinitely. But it is a matter of fact that once we have made a commitment to these unfortunate societies we cannot simply walk away once the fighting is over. There will always be a job of political and economic reconstruction. Better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than to return for repeat performances with large numbers.

became Blair’s:

Fourth, are we prepared for the long term? In the past we talked too much of exit strategies. But having made a commitment we cannot simply walk away once the fight is over; better to stay with moderate numbers of troops than return for repeat performances with large numbers.

Blair then drew the International Security section of the speech to a conclusion, emphasising the role of the UN and the Security Council, with a similar, but much briefer, argument to Freedman's.

So what is to be done about Libya, particularly by the UK? In his Daily Mail article Meyer suggested:

Nor will the inevitable contradictions in British foreign policy disappear by baldly asserting that our democratic values and our commercial interests go hand in hand, or are, in effect, the same thing, as David Cameron and George Osborne have done in recent speeches. They are plainly not the same. If they were, Britain would do no more business with, for example, the autocracies of Saudi Arabia and China. But we cannot possibly cut our business links with these countries — were we to do so, tens of thousands of British workers would lose their jobs. What Mr Cameron and Mr Osborne would do well to remember is that the first responsibility of a British government is to the security and prosperity of the British ¬citizen — not to those citizens, however deserving, who yearn for freedom in foreign countries across the world.
We have to recognise that change and reform in countries come from within and not through the influence of outside powers. There is very little that we can, or should, do in Libya unless mass slaughter or genocide were to threaten. The last thing on earth Britain wants is to get sucked into a Libyan civil war. It is not a ‘vision’ Britain needs in its foreign policy, but an enlightened pragmatism.

No doubt consideration is underway relating to Freedman’s third test for intervention:

On the basis of a practical assessment of the situation, are there military operations that we can sensibly and prudently undertake?

as echoed by Blair in the Chicago speech, and also to Freedman’s early point about overstretch which Blair had omitted. Presumably, if as seems to be the case, the UK is working closely with partners  on a Security Council resolution on a no-fly zone in Libya on a contingency basis, the UK expects to be able to make a contribution. However, the opportunity cost of committing to Libya and then not being able to act elsewhere could be high. On the other hand, as in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, how long can the rest of the world stand by and watch a dictator turn his armour and air power against a civilian population? The nature and extent of the involvement that the US is prepared to provide will, of course, be the key factor.

Blair and the Iraq Inquiry

Watching Tony Blair’s second appearance at the Iraq Inquiry on BBC News last month, it didn’t seem surprising that Cameron and Osborne are said to call him “The Master”, the soubriquet of another great performer, Noël Coward. It will be interesting to see how the Inquiry treats Blair in its report. Some of the more fanciful ideas put about by his detractors can be put in perspective by reading the Chairman’s statement of the Inquiry Terms of Reference:

"Our terms of reference are very broad, but the essential points, as set out by the Prime Minister and agreed by the House of Commons, are that this is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK's involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country."

At a guess, Blair will be told off a second time for not running a tight enough ship (see below for the first). To judge by their style of questioning, it will come naturally to the Inquiry to put any criticisms in an appropriately oblique and circumlocutious way. Of course, various lessons and recommendations as to how to do better will be offered. It would be surprising if these improvements to the machinery of government didn’t require a couple of new posts at Senior Civil Service Pay Band 3 (Deputy Secretary in Sir Humphrey Appleby’s day), and the upgrading of some others.

There may be some consideration of the size of UK forces to be committed to such affairs in the future (they can only be smaller) and improving the planning including the consequences, but how will the Inquiry deal with one key ‘best interests of the country’ issue: what would the US reaction have been if the UK had declined to participate? The evidence in 2009 from Sir Christopher Meyer (UK ambassador in Washington 1997-2003) suggests that it wouldn’t have been the end of the world (p71-5):

SIR RODERIC LYNE: If we had sat out the war, would it have damaged British interests in the United States if that's what they were saying to us?
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: It is impossible to say, it is impossible to say. We had a very high reputation at the time inside the United States. There was no great popular surge, as far as we could tell, in favour of going to war. Polls weren't particularly encouraging for the administration. I was travelling a lot around the United States at the time. I didn't come across anybody except an oil man in Houston who was keen on invading. I doubt it would have done a lot of damage.
...
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Apart from the applause factor that you mentioned earlier, what benefits to British interests did we gain, did we advance, by the role that we took?
SIR CHRISTOPHER MEYER: That's a great question, and it is one that much pre-occupied me. I said to London, "The key thing now, quite apart from Iraq, is to translate this popularity into real achievements which benefit the national interest", and we failed. We failed, and I'll tell you where we failed. We failed on persuading the United States administration to liberalise air services across the Atlantic, a very big British interest. The other thing which was profoundly irritating was that almost on the day that 45 Commando arrived in Afghanistan to help with the war, the Americans slapped tariffs on exports from the UK of what they called speciality steel.
...
SIR RODERIC LYNE: Just to make sure that I have properly understood this. To summarise what you have just said, it wasn't essential for the defence of British interests that we actually played the part that we did choose to play in Iraq. It wasn't essential, for reasons of British/American relations, that we did so. On the one hand, there wouldn't have been necessarily massive damage if we had not done so, and, on the other hand, we failed to secure specific benefits and in some cases areas you have identified, steel and air services, that we should have done.

While writing his book, The Accidental American, Jim Naughtie seems to have had privileged access to Blair, including an exclusive interview in 2004. He reveals just how heavily the relationship with the US seemed to weigh on Blair (p164-5):

Blair also understood the power of the secret network from the moment in the course of his first week in office when he was inculcated into the secrets of the UKUSA Treaty of 1948, which established the intelligence relationship with Washington, and then signed the papers giving him control of the nuclear missiles that were part of the defence arrangement with the United States. For any incoming prime minister, these arrangements become a matter of day-to-day importance that is often unrecognized by the general public. For example, the government's vast listening station in Cheltenham-GCHQ-is not only the hub of electronic intelligence for Whitehall but a vital part of the listening apparatus of the National Security Agency in Washington. That is why more than half the budget for GCHQ is paid for by American taxpayers, a fact about which British governments have been naturally reticent.

As with all their predecessors, the relationship between Bush and Blair was built on this practical foundation. The niceties of a shared language (more or less), the threads of family history that still span the Atlantic, and the memories of World War II are often portrayed as being the essence of the partnership: in practice, the hard facts of intelligence and defence are the links that pull the two governments together. They are bound together by their weapons, their satellites, and the tentacles of their intelligence networks.

The Inquiry didn’t ask Meyer (or Blair for that matter) about this intelligence/ defence relationship, for example whether he thought the Blair-Bush exchange of letters in 2006 on maintaining Trident would have been feasible if the UK had not stood ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the US in Iraq. The realities of timing (Blair and Bush were aware that their respective departures from office would be in 2007 and 2009) and a different conjunction of personalities might have made securing Brown-Bush or Brown-Obama exchanges at a later date much harder work. Beyond the Inquiry’s remit, of course, it is arguable that Blair’s current ship, The Office of Tony Blair, might not have been such a capable vessel, and in a position to be performing so many good works, if he had been less highly regarded in the US.

Could next time be different? Blair is not alone in thinking that some sort of confrontation with Iran is inevitable. Cameron or Miliband could find themselves in a very similar position to Blair (if Cameron were leading a Conservative government he would find it easier to take his party with him than Blair did, but not the LibDem part of the Coalition). The officials and the politicians, as might be expected, have opposing views as to whether the existence of a more elaborate bureaucratic apparatus would make any significant difference.  Lord Butler in his report in 2004 (Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction) has already gone over some of the Inquiry’s ground:

609. In the year before the war, the Cabinet discussed policy towards Iraq as a specific agenda item 24 times. It also arose in the course of discussions on other business. Cabinet members were offered and many received briefings on the intelligence picture on Iraq. There was therefore no lack of discussion on Iraq; and we have been informed that it was substantive. The Ministerial Committee on Defence and Overseas Policy did not meet. By contrast, over the period from April 2002 to the start of military action, some 25 meetings attended by the small number of key Ministers, officials and military officers most closely involved provided the framework of discussion and decision-making within Government.
610. One inescapable consequence of this was to limit wider collective discussion and consideration by the Cabinet to the frequent but unscripted occasions when the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Defence Secretary briefed the Cabinet orally. Excellent quality papers were written by officials, but these were not discussed in Cabinet or in Cabinet Committee. Without papers circulated in advance, it remains possible but is obviously much more difficult for members of the Cabinet outside the small circle directly involved to bring their political judgement and experience to bear on the major decisions for which the Cabinet as a whole must carry responsibility. The absence of papers on the Cabinet agenda so that Ministers could obtain briefings in advance from the Cabinet Office, their own departments or from the intelligence agencies plainly reduced their ability to prepare properly for such discussions, while the changes to key posts at the head of the Cabinet Secretariat lessened the support of the machinery of government for the collective responsibility of the Cabinet in the vital matter of war and peace.
611. We do not suggest that there is or should be an ideal or unchangeable system of collective Government, still less that procedures are in aggregate any less effective now than in earlier times. However, we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement. Such risks are particularly significant in a field like the subject of our Review, where hard facts are inherently difficult to come by and the quality of judgement is accordingly all the more important.

The second volume of Alastair Campbell’s Diaries, Power and the People 1997-1999, reveals the gulf between Sir Robin Butler (as he was when Cabinet Secretary) and Blair’s team when they arrived in Number 10. Campbell (40 at the time) records on 28 July 1997: “Butler struck me as very amiable but very out of date” – Butler was 59, Blair 44. “Sofa government” had arrived, not that two of the witnesses to the Iraq Inquiry saw much of a problem with it in retrospect. Here the Iraq Inquiry Chairman (Sir John Chilcot) is questioning Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff (a political post) on 18 January 2010 (p8-9):

THE CHAIRMAN: So turning to another and broader machinery point, much has been written about so-called "sofa government", and I do put that in quotation marks, characterised, perhaps not unfairly, with informality and, indeed, a degree of intimacy with close and trusted advisers and colleagues, and, on the other side, people have asked, "Is there some risk of exclusion of other colleagues still holding and sharing heavy responsibility?", but in particular asking, "Did that mean that action following such discussions characterised to some degree by informality, action points might be lost or lost in translation, as it were, into the government machine?" Would you like to comment on that?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: Yes. We had this criticism of sofa government. I think it is actually misplaced. I don’t think it matters whether a meeting takes place in the Cabinet room, where John Major used to hold meetings, or in the sitting room, where Mrs Thatcher or Tony Blair used to hold their meetings. I think the key thing is that you have the right people there, the people who need to be involved in a decision, that they are properly informed, have the proper material before them, in written or in oral form, and that decisions are taken, then recorded, and then distributed to government to be followed up. As long as that happens, I think it doesn't really matter if someone is sitting on a sofa or sitting round a table.
THE CHAIRMAN: It would be primarily your responsibility to the Prime Minister and the system to ensure that the outcome of such discussions were recorded and were transmitted into the government machinery?
MR JONATHAN POWELL: Inasmuch as it is my responsibility to make sure that everything in Number 10 functioned, yes. Although the notes in such meetings would be taken usually by civil servants who were at the meetings.
THE CHAIRMAN: Right. ...

Over a year later, on 3 February, Jack Straw (Foreign Secretary in the period of interest) was the final witness (his third appearance), and made a closing statement (p151):

[Blair’s] style was less formal than others and certainly less formal than mine but the fact he used soft furnishings rather than hard chairs does not make him a bad person, nor, to make a more serious point, do I believe that a more formal process would have altered either the respect in which he was held by colleagues, the influence he had, nor the outcome of the decisions, but equally the fact the process was, frustratingly for some, less formal than it should have been I don't think necessarily meant the decisions were of a lower quality nor that they lacked the fullest range of opinions in the input.