Time for the Left to be brave again
Richard Dell
they can put their blind anti-American (if European), anti-Bush (if
American) prejudice aside for a few minutes.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1860681,00.html
LAST WEEK The Washington Post reported record negative poll ratings for
President Bush and growing doubts about his leadership. As the
Administration's authority is daily sapped, the party is engaged in
anguished introspection to
identify the reasons for its unpopularity.
That's the Democratic Party, of course. Democrats have still not come
to terms with their defeat by an intellectually mediocre and maladroit
President, or benefited from his insouciance on the economy and Iraq.
Last month Peter Beinart, the editor of America's premier liberal
weekly, The New Republic, gave a cogent explanation: it's national
security, stupid.
Beinart recalled the fractious debates over foreign policy in the late
1940s, when American liberals were divided over whether to define
themselves principally as anti-conservative or to put anti-communism at
the heart of their programme. He identified a similar cleavage within
liberalism now in confronting Islamist terrorism, and concluded: "The
fundamental question is again whether the proper prism through which to
view this new world is anti-totalitarianism based on the idea that we
face another totalitarian foe."
Beinart is right. American voters seem intuitively to understand that
the anti-totalitarian struggle is neither temporary, nor a distraction
from bread-and-butter politics, nor the result of Western provocations
against the Third World. It is the cause of our generation and it ought
also to be an instinctive cause of the British Left. A politics that
fails to place national security first cannot serve progressive ends.
There is an authentic tradition on the British Left that understands
that, and that needs to reassert itself.
The precedents date from the 1930s and 1940s. Having taken a long time
to shed its illusions about the power of moral suasion against
aggressive dictatorship, the Labour Party served patriotically in the
wartime coalition. It then played an essential role in defending
democratic parties and trade unions against Soviet expansionism.
The Attlee Government's support for the Truman Doctrine and its
influence in the formation of Nato remain the most important acts in
the Labour Party's history. Clement Attlee and his Foreign Secretary
Ernest Bevin understood that the
totalitarian threat would exist regardless of what policies a left-wing
government adopted. That was the nature of Soviet Communism, and Labour
rightly allied itself with the US. The party also expelled a
parliamentary caucus that explicitly defended Soviet expansionism.
Only in the 1970s was this dominant strain of British social democracy
seriously diluted, to be largely abandoned in Labour's long years of
opposition in the 1980s. The older progressive tradition of Attlee and
Bevin, Kurt Schumacher in
Germany and Harry Truman in the US had maintained that liberalism and
social democracy were communism's worst enemies. Gradually that gave
way to the notion that the Cold War was an artificial division born of
mistrust rather than a
reflection of irrevocable political differences. The height of Labour's
irresponsibility was the election of the veteran nuclear disarmer
Michael Foot as leader in 1980.
Foot is now regarded with the universal affection that is the privilege
of advanced age, so it is worth recalling his record of political
incompetence. Circumlocutory in argument, incoherent in exposition,
almost entirely unfamiliar with economics, and - throughout all his
tribulations - convinced of his place in history, he has never realised
that the critical pasting he received as Labour leader was more
restrained than he had any right to expect. To describe Labour's 1983
general election manifesto as (in Gerald Kaufman's phrase) the longest
suicide note in history is a kindness.
Labour's defence policy became yet more extreme under Neil Kinnock's
ineffectual leadership. Only when the Cold War was almost ended was
Labour's association with the cause of the peace movement broken, and
in language of purest pragmatism.
These earlier debates on the Left contain much that is important for
understanding the politics of the Left today. If you see the threat of
Islamist terrorism as the result of needless provocation in invading
Iraq, or as a long-suppressed cry against Third World poverty, you will
tend to see Tony Blair as an aberrant figure on the Left: the creature
- witting or not - of an obscurantist and aggressive conservative US
administration. As the late Robin Cook maintained: "It seems only too
likely that the judgment of history may be that the invasion of Iraq
has been the biggest blunder . . . since Suez."
But Cook was wrong. The cause of regime change is central to
progressive politics and entirely consistent with Cook's own advocacy
of foreign policy "with an ethical dimension". Long before 9/11 Blair
had commendably abandoned the conservative "realism" - in practice,
feeble and amoral quietism - of the Major Government in Bosnia and
elsewhere. So far from following President Bush's bidding, Blair
persuaded Bush to abandon an instinctive aversion to foreign
engagements and promote global democracy as our defence against
theocratic totalitarianism. For all the failures of postwar planning in
Iraq, that strategy is right. It is a far-sighted security policy that
accords with recent academic thinking and traditional
liberal-democratic internationalism.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1861901,00.html
LAST SPRING, demand for political reform coalesced in a part of the
world so far resistant to constitutional democracy. Nine million Iraqis
voted in the country's first post-Saddam election. Protests in
Lebanon led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops. Plans were made for
municipal elections in Saudi Arabia (though with an all-male franchise)
and presidential elections in Egypt. Syria's dictatorship was
increasingly isolated. It was not yet an Arab spring, but it may yet
mark - in the phrase of one Middle East scholar - the autumn of the
autocrats.
These developments validate the strategy of "regime change" pursued
since 9/11. Critics dispute this, but they are on weak ground. Altering
the balance of power in the Middle East was the declared aim of the
Blair-Bush approach. If it is premature to say the plan is working,
then at least the plan is consequential - in stimulating political
reform, in Libya's abandonment of weapons of mass destruction, and in
rolling up the A.Q. Khan nuclear network in Pakistan.
The case for regime change is the link between Western security and
political institutions. In the months preceding the Iraq war it was
thought politic to emphasise what turned out to be bad intelligence on
Saddam's arsenal. There was always a more fundamental consideration.
This was the notion of removing the conditions that breed terrorism.
The "root causes" of terrorism became a cliché after 9/11.
Whenever these were stated, they turned out to be whatever the critic
had been campaigning about on and before 9/10 - Third World poverty
and a Palestinian state, among other candidates. Yet recent academic
research suggests that the cause of terrorism is not poverty - if it
were, then sub-Saharan Africa would be the obvious source of
anti-Western terror - but political repression. Societies where
dissent is confined to religious absolutism are incubators of
anti-Western fanaticism. The case for regime change ought to have been
stated in a way at least as succinct as the claims of Saddam's WMDs
and with greater plausibility. Without intervention to remove the worst
of governments and assist Iraqis to build a constitutional democracy,
the pathologies tolerated by autocratic regimes would flourish.
Anti-totalitarianism is our own defence.
Whether Iraq will become a stable democracy is unclear, and those
trying to make it so have been failed by the Bush Administration's
incompetence. But, at a minimum, Iraq can be a state where essentials
of order and constitutionalism are observed. The Left has an important
argument on what those requirements comprise. A liberal state is not
necessarily a lightly governed state. Building a consensual democracy
will be easier if social policies are not left to unregulated markets
and minimal welfare provision.
Regime change has been a political liability for Tony Blair, but he has
been right. His strength is that he has a synoptic view of the struggle
against terror. Critics of interventionism see the attack on the twin
towers as a discrete event to be countered by better law-enforcement,
police work and diplomatic pressure, with force as a remote
contingency. But a juridical approach to fighting terror founders on
the brute fact that international law lacks a sovereign body capable of
implementing it, other than the states that subscribe to it. Swayed by
the sheer unlikelihood of a totalitarian movement dedicated to the
political realisation of apocalypse, critics of interventionism lack a
sense of the gravity of the threat. Peace campaigners too lack a sense
of the ridiculous. Bruce Kent, of CND, declared after 9/11: "I think
we need to pursue bin Laden in different ways . . . I would even go as
far as combing through bank accounts across the world and freezing
anything suspicious." These are dark times indeed if Mr Kent would
even open a bank statement not addressed to him.
Mr Blair perceives that George Bush is a man of common goals. Despite
his realist rhetoric in the 2000 presidential campaign, Mr Bush has
little conservative scepticism about exporting democracy. This is an
important shift in US foreign policy. The enduring weakness of
America's stance in the Cold War was its willingness to ally with
authoritarian governments to resist communist totalitarianism. Bush's
innovation is to recognise the limits of realism.
In the realist model, states are often compared to billiard balls: a
ball's internal composition is opaque and unimportant; what matters
is how the ball interacts with others on the table. The model's
weakness is its failure to address the power of ideas. By contrast,
Bush believes the spread of liberty, not the search for allies in an
eternally shifting balance of power, is the guarantor of Western
security. His reasoning explains the interventions in Afghanistan and
Iraq, but also his distinctive stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict:
pressing for internal reform in the Palestinian Authority while being
the first US President to aim explicitly for a Palestinian state.
The Blair-Bush strategy ought to be a bipartisan cause. In recent
history (notably Bosnia and Kosovo) the Conservatives have argued for
strict constraints on the exercise of national power. Simultaneously
much of the Left (including the Liberal Democrats) has been infected
with a reactionary preference for stability rather than liberty in the
international order. The anti-totalitarian Left has a responsibility to
help to forge a new coalition for the spread of liberty, recognising
that its historic ideals are now expressed in the unlikely trappings of
US strategic doctrine.
Ariadne
Richard Dell wrote:
> Something for the Stop-the-War coalition weasels to ponder over, if
> they can put their blind anti-American (if European), anti-Bush (if
> American) prejudice aside for a few minutes.
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1860681,00.html
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1861901,00.html
>
> The Blair-Bush strategy ought to be a bipartisan cause. In recent
> history (notably Bosnia and Kosovo) the Conservatives have argued for
> strict constraints on the exercise of national power. Simultaneously
> much of the Left (including the Liberal Democrats) has been infected
> with a reactionary preference for stability rather than liberty in the
> international order. The anti-totalitarian Left has a responsibility to
> help to forge a new coalition for the spread of liberty, recognising
> that its historic ideals are now expressed in the unlikely trappings of
> US strategic doctrine.
Brilliant. The work of people who can actually think!