The forward march of the “something-must-be-done brigade” has certainly faltered. The phrase is Douglas Hurd’s, pronounced when he was foreign secretary in the early 1990s, about the demands of human rights campaigners, journalists and opposition politicians that western states must intervene to stop the slaughter in Bosnia. Said with contempt, it’s a reasonable position for a conservative to take and is supported still by at least two contenders for the leadership of the Tory party, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Kenneth Clarke. Its basis is the belief that a state requires security and retains interests and that any effort to impose a different politics on states of whose politics one disapproves is, as Henry Kissinger put it, international relations as social work.
This belief has found increasingly powerful challengers in the past two decades. They included such diverse elements as non-governmental organisations (NGOs), especially Amnesty (based in the UK), Human Rights Watch (US) and Medecins sans Frontieres (France); the liberation theology movement within Catholicism, most powerful in South America; Soviet-era dissidence in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself; the anti-apartheid struggle incarnated in the figure of Nelson Mandela; and a strong, if disguised, trend among journalists to act as the canaries-in-the-mine for oppression.
Governments of large states with diverse interests have largely agreed with the Kissinger option: idealism has been confined to smaller states, such as Sweden, the country that has long played the role of Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, forever hopeful of the world’s capacity for goodness. The large change was Britain’s New Labour - a government which, from 1997, sought to put in place what its first foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, called “an ethical dimension” to foreign policy. Tony Blair, in his famed Chicago speech of April 1999 on the “Doctrine of the International Community”, underpinned this approach with a “qualification” of the Kissinger doctrine that actually undermined it, arguing that “acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter”.
Journalists reveal and NGOs protest; governments act and can act with deadly force. Sometimes, as in the case of the hapless Dutch peacekeepers at Srebrenica, the action can be more of a deadly farce, but where a large state puts well trained armies in the field to give substance to its rhetoric, things change. Stuff happens.
And stuff has happened. The interventions of the 1990s and “noughties” in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and in smaller ways in Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Congo and Sudan, have rarely been without large bloodshed - and not one has been unambiguously successful. Most depend on the continuing commitment of foreign troops to maintain peace. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the opposition to the central government appears to be strengthening. Those who always saw these ventures as sins against realpolitik are grimly confirmed in their views - and find, as Clarke does in his bid to lead the Tory party, that they provide him with a considerable part of his electoral platform.
But what of the liberals and leftists who were the generals, the officers or even the foot soldiers in the something-must-be-done brigade? When push came to shove, most have melted away, without, it seems, a backward glance at the ideals they once espoused. This is most true in the case of Iraq. The sheer bloodiness of the country and the revelation to the British in Basra, as well as to the Americans elsewhere, that a large part of the active population hates them, have amplified the calls made to get out, last week at the Labour Party conference, against the leadership, the week before at the Liberal Party conference, by the leadership.
It is a sad spectacle. Liberals and leftists who spent decades demanding that something must be done to end all sorts of repressions and foreign horrors, and denouncing theirs and other governments for refusing to end them, now denounce the British and US governments for having removed one of the great monsters of the late 20th century because blood was shed (and is still being shed) in the course of it. This isn’t debate about the manner of waging war: it is a smug, I-told-you-so (or I didn’t tell you but I am now) blast against apparent failure - usually oblivious to the consequences of that failure, especially on the ideals and practice that liberals and leftists claim to have espoused.
That the invasion of Iraq, as well as occasioning a long-running terrorist war, should, as the American scholar Thomas Cushman recently pointed out, also have “liberated a people from an oppressive, long-standing tyranny; destroyed an outlaw state that was a threat to the peace and security of the Middle East and the larger global arena in which terrorists operated, sponsored materially and ideologically by Iraq; brought the dictator Saddam Hussein to justice for his genocides [of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs, as Human Rights Watch documented] and crimes against humanity; prevented the possibility of another genocide... restored sovereignty to the Iraqi people; laid the foundation for the possibility of Iraq becoming a liberal republic”, has no place in the charge sheets that liberals and leftists bring to bear against Bush and Blair.
The great betrayal of liberalism and of the left was not opposition to the war but the insouciant, opportunist, morally indignant denunciation of those who, for diverse motives to be sure, sought to give force to the rhetoric of liberation. They have been so content to denounce that they think nothing of what they damage. It is the idea, and ideal, of freedom itself.
