Parliament's unconditional backing for a war against Iraq was an astonishing piece of political history we may soon come to regret, argues Alan Simpson MP.
To bomb or not to bomb? That was the question. Whether 'twas nobler to resolve matters by non military means never really came into it.
War making is a government prerogative. It never has to seek Parliament's approval. In no one's living memory had the House of Commons been able to vote for (or against) going into a war. Yet as US and British forces lined themselves up for an aerial bombardment of Iraq, the House was asked to give the Government support to use "all necessary means" to resolve the dispute over inspection rights for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) team. No level of military response was ruled out. No assurances about what degree of diplomatic initiatives would be exhausted first were ruled in. The reasoning behind this is simple. The Government wants to bind in cross-party support for Anglo-US bombings, to hedge its bets, in case the whole thing goes pear shaped. It's called sharing the blame.
Even more bizarre was that the Labour Government did this under a three line whip, which presumed some sort of manifesto commitment we had all stood on. No government, of any persuasion, or with whatever majority, has a constitutional right to require its MPs to sign up to military conflict they do not believe to be right. I joined a political party not a war party, and I suspect that the 27 MPs who opposed the motion (and a fair number of the 130 who did not vote) shared something of this belief. What was at stake was not just the vote but the constitutional duty of Parliament to act as a check on government rather than a rubber stamp.
Though it would be wrong to argue that a majority of MPs had any great enthusiasm for a war, most seemed happier to ignore that this is precisely where the US is taking us. But what the debate really highlighted is that confusion about the political purposes behind the military plan ranks second only to the military confusion about it. If Saddam does not back down it will be a looming catastrophe. If he does, it will leave unresolved anger amongst those whose only interest is his assassination. The death toll of Iraqi citizens ("collateral damage") is an incidental aside in this pageant.
Leave aside the moral issues for one moment. What do we seriously believe that bombings will achieve? To eliminate Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (chemical and biological stockpiles)? to destroy his delivery systems? The arguments supporting either simply flirt with the absurd.
We were told that "smart bombs" would incinerate chemical and biological agents that they struck. This might be plausible if the bombs were smarter than those used in 1991 when they just killed thousands of innocent civilians; and if we knew where the stockpiles were being stored. Since when has Saddam made things easier for anyone? Britain and the US both know that they haven't a clue what stockpiles Saddam still has, or where they are. The odds against a direct hit (by luck rather than judgement) are remote. The odds of accidental damage are much higher, and once you release the VX nerve gas or anthrax spores into the atmosphere it is a whole new ball game of social and geo-political consequences.
Who would be blamed for such an event? Who would be responsible for those killed, maimed or injured? Who would accept the refugees from lands which might not be habitable for 50 years or more? There would not be a welcome waiting at Dover.
And how wide should the bombing net be cast in pursuit of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons capacity? There are already reports that much of this has already been spirited into the Yemen, Sudan and Algeria. Should we bomb them too? Will the Middle East welcome our bombs with open arms, proclaiming "thank god (allah) for friendly fire"? We must be crazy to think so.
Even the notion of bombing to destroy Saddam's delivery systems for germ and chemical weapons is a fatally flawed one. The reality of the world we now live in is that the most effective delivery system for germ warfare is a suitcase, not a scud missile. This doesn't make the germs any less of a threat. It merely makes bombs less of a solution.
There is growing evidence that the rest of the international community understands this in ways which Britain does not. We should not kid ourselves about just how wide this gap is growing. The Government knows that the resolution it had endorsed by the House of Commons would not get through the UN Security Council. Russia has already claimed that military authority, under UN resolutions 678 and 687, applied only to reversing the invasion of Kuwait. Further military action would require a fresh UN mandate that Russia, France and China would be unlikely to support. Yet Britain has tied itself to the US's claim that there is already full UN approval to pursue military action against Iraq as far as it goes.
What other country has to prove it has peaceful international intentions before being freed from sanctions? And who among us would pass the tests required for Iraq? None of the permanent members of the Security Council would, for instance, allow independent inspection of their nuclear weapons research establishments. None of the states which have illicitly developed nuclear capabilities have been threatened with bombing raids to take out their "delivery systems". The contradictions of this situation are not lost on the Middle East, and nor is this response meted out to Israel in response to weapons of mass destruction, breaches of UN resolutions and the illegal occupation of South Lebanon since 1967.
None of this argues for a wider remit for bombing missions. It is simply the case for a rethink of the "special relationship" Britain has with the US if we are to have any prospects of developing an ethical foreign policy or an independent international lead (in Europe or anywhere else). New Labour's new friendship with New Bill has nothing new to it at all. It is merely old style subservience to the hegemony (and whims) of US foreign policy. The current crisis over Iraq merely highlights how far we have boxed ourselves in.
We will never know whether Saddam Hussein was just trying on a ruse when he objected to the predominance of Americans in the UNSCOM investigating teams. The offer to France, Russia and China to send more of their own experts was blocked by the Americans saying Iraq had no right to choose its inspectors. Britain backed the US.
Even more perplexing, while the New Labour Government was happy to send its Prime Minister to Washington to discuss the plans for war, it would not send the Foreign Secretary to Baghdad to attempt to broker peace. Britain may well have played a leading part in attempts to draft a new resolution for the UN Security Council. But peace broker-ing is a face-to-face process, not a paper exercise.
It used to be the left who were criticised for playing "resolutionary politics". It is no help if these merely give way to resolutionary diplomacy. France, Russia and Turkey have all sent their own political representatives to Iraq in pursuit of a diplomatic solution. Yet Britain declined to do so, saying it was the prerogative of Kofi Annan for the UN. We similarly declined to give a European lead (during our period holding the EU presidency) or to support a Middle East initiative which took a regional lead in defining priorities for a stabilising regional solution. There is a cruel irony in a Labour government being willing to share a lead role in preparing for war, but not in direct negotiations for peace, and perhaps this is the rub.
There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein is a cruel, despotic, self-serving tyrant whose greatest crimes are against his own people. Yet the current crisis has little to do with this. Some no doubt see the coming war as the chance to topple Saddam. The debate in the US over the last 18 months has been about who should replace him. Iraq's democratic opposition parties have seen financial support for them drying up. Some sources have argued that the US has concluded that Iraq is not ready for democracy. They now favour a military coup, under a more amenable dictator. There are echoes here of the Noriega doctrine, "he may be a bastard, but at least he's our bastard."
More far reaching is the question of whether a permanently weak and divided Middle East is the precondition for US's support for Israel, and the absence of progress in their own so-called peace process. This may well fit with US foreign policy but there is no reason it should fit for ours, Europe's or the Middle East's.
This is a classic moment at which it should be possible for Labour to define a genuinely ethical foreign policy. It simply has to begin from different presumptions. In the same way that we need policies for an inclusive society at home, so we need an inclusive internationalism. In Iraq's case it means a programme and timetable for dismantling sanctions. This also offers the best mechanism through which societies monitor themselves against the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction.
We are all vulnerable to secret manufacture of such weapons, but the open society is the best way of tackling this. New international mechanisms are no doubt needed to monitor this, but Britain could give a lead in its own openness. At the moment we ourselves are closer to a model of the closed society in concealing the extent to which we still have research (and manufacture) of weapons of mass destruction. What's more, we do so in clandestine co-operation with our US partners.
Someone also has to champion the growth of regional solutions to regional conflicts. Inevitably this would weaken the power of these aspiring to the role of global policeman. But democracy, development and de-militarisation are still the most sustainable underpinnings of UN policies for the 21st century. With or without the permission of Buffalo Bill and the US cavalry, this is also the starting point for any viable solutions in the Middle East.
There are tens/hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens -- men, women and children -- who will not even see such a solution if the missiles start to fly. If New Labour will not lead the demands for a non-military solution to this crisis, then Old Labour must do so. If anything is well past its sell by date it is the presumption that the world can bomb its way towards a peace in the Middle East. This is the vacuum and vacuous belief that socialists have to replace.
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