Month: November 2016

Isolationism in Britain The Mirror 2 December 2015

The Mirror 2 December 2015

 

 

Often we approach the next conflict in the shadow of the last one. Labour crucify themselves on the altar of guilt over Iraq and right wing Tories conjure up its ghosts to add to their agenda of isolationism. The public reeling from the deceits of that war, are in sceptical mood – and properly so.

 

But this is not another Iraq. Then we had no UN resolution. Today we have one which places a duty on us to act, not stand idly by. Then we lacked an international coalition. Today one is being assembled in Vienna including our European neighbours, Russia, and all Syria’s Arab neighbours. Then we had to accept Mr Blair’s word on the weapons which threatened us. Today we have seen them on our streets and the sands of our holiday resorts.

 

If we will not act now, then when?

 

Three years ago the Commons refused to punish Assad for his use of chemical weapons. I feared then that the men of evil would be encouraged to do worse. They have. I worried that Britain was moving towards isolationism. We are.

 

Seventy years ago we did more than any other nation to give France back her liberty. Now we seem reluctant even to support her in her pain.

 

Then Britain was not afraid to stand alone. Now some want to stand aside, while others do our fighting for us

 

Britain has always engaged in Europe. Now our mood is to leave it. Since when have our interets been advanced by sheltering behind our island walls, shouting insults at foreigners?

 

The last Government led the world in tackling climate challenge. This Government retreats into climate selfishness and leaves the leadership to others.

 

Britain has always welcomed the desperate and the threatened. Now Germany’s Angela Merkel rises to the challenge of 800,00 refugees, while we shrink in horror from 3,000 knocking on the Channel Tunnel doors. It comes to something when the Britain of Winston Churchill, has to be taught a lesson in humanity and leadership by a German Chancellor.

 

On the face of it tomorrows Commons vote is about whether to extend our fight against ISIL in Iraq, over the border into Syria. But it is also about something else. Whether we will return to Britain’s great tradition of engagement, or retreat further into an isolationism which diminishes our role, our standing and our security in a dangerous world.

 

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So, we have started bombing. What next? – The Times 30 September 2014

 

 

So, we have started bombing. What next? – The Times 30 September 2014

 

 

Almost exactly 275 years ago, after the article in question was paraded round Westminster in a pickle jar, the House of Commons voted to go to war over the severed ear of an English sea-captain. The War of Jenkins Ear rewrote the borders of America, killed thousands and convulsed Europe for nine long years.

 

Egged on by our modern obsession with kinetics, rather than context, it seems we still cannot see a problem without reaching for a rocket or a bomb to solve it. We have forgotten the Clausewitz dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. And so last Fridays’ Commons debate was much more about war and weapons, than the politics and diplomacy that lie behind it – or needs to, if we are to succeed.

 

In defeating the ISIL convulsion in the Middle East, diplomacy will have a bigger part to play than military action. Western bombs alone will not do it. Indeed, unsupported by strategic diplomacy they may even make ISIL stronger. In this fight our key ally is, not American air power, but Muslim engagement.

 

Here we have at present, a parson’s nose of good and bad. The good is that an Arab anti-ISIL coalition exists, including some Gulf States who foolishly funded the Jihadism that now threatens them and some of Iraq’s moderate Arab neighbours (such as Jordan). But, as a coalition, this is too small, too narrow and, in a Middle East teetering on the edge of full scale religious conflict, far, far too Sunni.

 

The crucial backdrop to the ISIL crisis is the Sunni/Shia conflict which now reverberates across the Middle East, down into Africa, up into the Russian Islamic republics and even to Indonesia and the Uighur population of China. This is what makes the barbaric provocations of ISIL so potentially explosive. The danger is that we, the West, will get drawn in to the Sunni side of this divide, while Russia is drawn into the Shia one. Then we would have a regional war with global consequences – think the Balkans in 1913.

 

Here again, there is good news, and bad. Listening to Shia voices in the last few days, it is possible to discern two coalitions emerging, one in the visible spectrum and the other in the invisible. The silence – or at least restraint – of Tehran and Damascus, perhaps even Russia too, in the face of US bombing in Syria has been deafening. We seem to have a participating Sunni coalition against ISIL. And an acquiescing Shia one prepared, for the moment to wait and see. But how long will this last in the face of the inevitable accidents and stupidities of war?

 

There is an opportunity here, if grasped quickly, for a wider, more balanced coalition and we should seize it.

 

Some of this will be subtle, some straightforward, some very difficult.

 

Turkey should be brought in. We need to decide soon whether the currently faltering nuclear talks with Iran can be allowed to fail, just when there is so much to gain from a deeper engagement with the reformists in Tehran. We should be encouraging recent attempts to improve relations between the two giants of the Shia and Sunni worlds, Iran and Saudi Arabia. And finally, a settlement in the Middle East strong enough to resist the contagion of Sunni Jihadism, of which ISIL is only the latest example, requires a solution to the question of illegal Israeli settlements as the necessary prelude to any Israeli/Palestinian peace based on a two state solution.

 

Perhaps most difficult of all, the West needs to recognise that Russia too has a dog in this fight – arguably a much bigger one than we have. Sunni Jihadism is roaring away in the Russian Islamic republics of Dagestan and Chechnya, too. We in Europe may be concerned about Jihaddis returning from the battlefield. But Russia is one of the battlefields.

 

So why are we so reluctant to draw Russia in? Washington friends tell me that the reason is the personal animus between Putin and Obama. If so, get over it. A wider coalition which includes the Russians, actively or passively, could open the way to a Security Council Resolution, provide the best means of limiting the spread of the Middle Eastern crisis and vastly enhance our horse power in resolving it.

 

We cannot compromise on Ukraine, where Putin invites us to dig up the foundations on which the peace of Europe has been built for fifty years. But, with Russia, the best policy is not isolation, but balance; tough where necessary, partnership where possible. The current Middle East crisis offers us just such an opportunity. We should take it.

 

The War of Jenkins ear started with a provocation and ended in a catastrophe. It showed that military action is not a substitute for diplomacy, but an adjunct to it. It would be a pity, if 275 years later we have to learn that lesson again.

Bombing ISIL The Independent 21 July 2015

 

The Independent 21 July 2015 Bombing ISIL

 

Towards the end of the 1960s jungle war Britain fought to protect Sarawak against rebel incursions, I received orders to cross the border and take the fight to the insurgents based on the other side of the Indonesian frontier. It was a controversial policy, but an effective one– the war ended not long afterwards. Britain claimed legality for these operations under the provisions in international law which, in some circumstances, permit a nation to pursue its right to self-defence onto the territory of a second state, where that state harbours or supports those who threaten its security.

 

It is no doubt this provision which the Prime Minister has in mind when he says that Britain, as part of the “coalition” who has been “invited” by the Iraqi Government to help defend its territory, is now legally justified in joining other coalition air-forces already bombing ISIL in Syria. Whether this is in fact so is a matter for lawyers, not me.

 

But whether this action, even if legal, is wise, is a different question.

 

Does it make military sense for Britain to pursue ISIL into Syria? Probably. Is it legal to do so? Possibly. Is this the most effective thing Britain can do to defeat ISIL? Definitely not.

 

We are not losing the war against ISIL because we do not have enough bombs – we are losing it because we do not have enough diplomacy.

 

The great military thinker Clausewitz famously said that war was the extension of diplomacy by other means. One of the reasons we in the West have suffered so many defeats in recent years is because we always seem to remember the war, but forget the diplomacy. We see a problem in the world and our first instinct is to bomb it. We have become obsessed with high explosive as an instrument for peace. George Bush senior knew better. He carefully constructed a Middle East Coalition before Gulf War one, making it seem Western forces were the instrument of Arab will – and he won. George Bush Junior ditched diplomacy in favour of Western “shock and awe” – and lost. We repeated the mistake in Afghanistan, using high explosive as a substitute for the kind of patient diplomacy to create a regional framework for peace with the neighbours, as we did in Bosnia – and lost. In Libya we could have created a regional coalition with countries like Turkey to first liberate the country and then rebuild it afterwards. Instead the West chose to blast Gadhafi out of office and then abandoned the country to chaos afterwards.

 

And now we are doing it all over again. Only this time it is much more dangerous. Some of us have been warning for three years that the real event taking place in the Middle East is a widening Sunni/Shia war which threatens to engulf the region. ISIL is only part of this. But we have become so obsessed with the small picture and the short-term threat to the West, that we cannot see the bigger threat to peace on a wider scale.

 

There is now a real danger that we become the unwitting handmaidens of that wider conflict by creating a so called “coalition” to fight ISIL which is too military, too Western, too small and far, far too Sunni. It is not just the West or the Sunnis Arabs who are threatened by ISIL. Turkey is too. And Tehran. And Moscow, struggling with Sunni Jihaddism in its Muslim republics. For us in the West the threat comes from Jihaddis returning from the battlefield. The Russian republics of Chechnya and Dagestan are the battlefield.

 

There is a real opportunity here, if only our obsession with high explosive would let us see it. We will not destroy ISIL just by killing more Muslim Arabs with Western bombs. And a few more British bombs will not change that. As Clausewitz knew, military action only makes sense where it is part of a wider diplomatic strategy. Our action against ISIL isn’t and that is why it is failing.

 

The new rapprochement with Tehran (achieved, please note, through patient long term diplomacy – no high explosive required) gives us a real opportunity. The best thing Britain could do to defeat ISIL is not to add a tiny quantum to the more than sufficient pile of high explosive already falling on Iraq and Syria, but to use its diplomatic skills, through the EU to begin to assemble a wide diplomatic coalition aimed at smothering ISIL. This should include the moderate Sunni states, Turkey and Tehran. And yes, why not Russia too? We have no choice but to play hard-ball with Moscow over Ukraine. But offering Putin a partnership on defeating the Sunni Jihad which threatens us both, would add huge weight too our ability to succeed and avoid the mistake of pushing Russia into a corner from which she has no route for escape.

 

Our mistake these last decades has been to believe that this is the age of high explosive, when in fact it is the age of diplomacy. If we want to make Britain safer, we will do it better by using our skills to help create the wider diplomatic coalition to smother ISIL which will enable military action to succeed, rather than contributing our tiny portion of bombs to a policy that won’t.

 

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Iraq and Germany 16 Sep 2012

Those of us who, like me, supported the removal of Saddam Hussein by force, now have to face up to the awkward task of deciding what can be salvaged from this mess. Which is what the new Iraq study group chaired by Tom King, Margaret Jay and I will undertake under the Television cameras of Channel 4 starting on XXX.

 

The tragedy is that the military invasion of Iraq was not a failure – it was a success. But what happened afterwards has been a copybook of how to make a mess of the peace that follows. It didn’t have to be like this. And perhaps it wouldn’t have been if only those responsible had not been so determined to ignore the lessons of the past.

 

In 2003, the US administration, aware that there might be were lessons to be learnt, especially from the rebuilding of Germany after World War Two, convened historians to Washington to help spell them out. One was Dr Helmut Trotnow a leading expert on the occupation of Germany. He later discovered that all the recommendations made at the conference were completely ignored by the US war planners.

 

The allies ran Germany for four years from 1945 to 1949. In that period, the rule of law was re-established, human rights respected, robust democratic institutions created and the foundations of Europe’s strongest economy, laid. Much of this happened despite some spectacular blunders in the early days, many of which have been repeated in Iraq.

 

The allies in 1945 planned to remove 180,000 officials from their posts. But they soon discovered that if they did, they would have no-one to run the state. It was largely an accident that this denazification policy was reversed. The western allies gradually came to realise that the future threat came from Russia, not Germany, and that the Germans were essential allies against that threat. Former membership of the Nazi party ceased to be a barrier. Germany’s second President was a former member of the Nazi Party.

 

The situation which the coalition found in Iraq was similar. Most of those responsible for running the country were members of the Ba’ath party. Yet, ignoring the early fiasco of denazification in Germany, the Coalition proceeded to purge all the Ba’athists from their posts. And then found, as in Germany, they were left with no-one to run the state and its services.

 

Then there was the similarly disastrous decision to disband the entire Iraqi army. Here, the coalition did not have to look as far back as Germany. In most more recent international interventions, the soldiers of the defeated army had been given a month’s salary, and then either reintegrated into a reformed army or helped to find a job in civilian life. But in Iraq, the army was peremptorily dissolved, leaving the Coalition with too few soldiers to maintain security and abolishing at a stroke, both the status and the income of an officer corps which numbered 25,000 above the rank of Colonel. For them, joining the insurgency became a very attractive option and that is where many ended up.

 

One of the ironies of the post war German experience was that it was the US who were the most enlightened and the British and the French the most reactionary. The US military had no truck with the ridiculous instructions of General Montgomery to British troops not to speak to any Germans. The Americans were the first to realise that the policy of dismantling German industry was a mistake; in the interests of lasting peace, it was far better to help to build it up. The British and French held on to counterproductive, even colonialist notions of punishing the Germans far longer, partly in order to protect their own industries from German competition. In the coalition in Iraq, by contrast, the Americans have proved by far the least sensitive to the local population.

 

International intervention has, since the end of the Cold War, halved the number of wars in the world and reduced the number of war casualties by even more. But success depends on following basic rules which were systematically ignored in Iraq. Plan even harder for peace than for war; you will probably need more troops to provide security after the war than you needed to win it; make the most of the “golden hour” after the war ends; creating security should be the first priority; you may have to remove those at the top of the old regime, but you will need the rest to run the state work with the local population and its traditions; you need the help of the neighbours – one of the big mistakes over Iraq was to make enemies of Iran and Syria.

 

Finally, you are more likely to succeed if you replicate what succeeded in the past, rather than repeating what failed.

 

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Iraq – Observer 17 Feb 2007

Whatever your view on invading Iraq, as we move into the end game, there is one thing we can all agree on. Building the postwar peace has been a catastrophe. This is going to sharply influence what the world might look like post-Iraq. Western leaders are now going to be less enthusiastic, their domestic populations less supportive and the wider international community less biddable in providing legitimacy for such enterprises in future.
That may be a good thing if it leads to a renewed understanding of the importance of multilateralism in these affairs. But it would be a tragedy if the response to failure in Iraq were to be not ‘How do we do it better?’ but ‘We must never do it again’.
We live in dangerous times as the world moves deeper into the era of globalisation, scarce resources, global warming and massive shifts in the tectonic plates of power. The revelation of 9/11 still applies: our peace depends on the extent that we are willing and able to work together to prevent conflict or recreate stability in other parts of the world.
Some say that ‘little’ brush-fire wars – there are 74 in progress around the world – are the only wars there will be in future – and that the age of great wars has passed. I am not one of them. There is too much tinder lying around and far too many firebrands. Competition between states, especially in the developing world, is not diminishing it is increasing. And the best structures for fighting wars, the most powerful ideologies for driving wars and the most destructive weapons for using in wars, remain in the hands of nation states.
Since the end of the Cold War, the UN has, on average, intervened in the domestic jurisdiction of one of its members every six months, and six of the last nine of these interventions have been in Muslim countries. What’s more, around 65 per cent of them have been successful in preventing a return to conflict. Overall, the world is safer because we have been prepared to intervene. It will be much more dangerous if we stop doing so. Our failure to intervene in Darfur has only resulted in spreading the conflict, first to Chad, with other nations to follow if we cannot stop it.
The Iraq experience represents the triumph of hubris, nemesis and, above all, amnesia over common sense. We have abandoned experience in favour of a kind of 19th- century ‘gunboat’ diplomacy approach to peace making. And it isn’t working. Getting intervention right is not rocket science and it’s not new. Spend at least as much time and effort planning the peace as preparing for the war that precedes it. Base plans on a proper knowledge of the country. Leave ideologies and prejudices at home. Do not try to fashion someone else’s country in your own image. Leave space for its people to reconstruct the country they want, not the one you want for them.
Don’t lose the ‘golden hour’ after the fighting is over. Dominate security from the start; then concentrate on the rule of law. Make economic regeneration a priority. Understand the importance to the international community effort of co-ordination, cohesion and speaking with one voice. And do not wait until everything is as it would be in our country. Leave when the peace is sustainable.
At present, we intervene as though democracy was our big idea. It is not. We are not even particularly good at it ourselves. Good governance is our big idea; the rule of law is our big idea; open systems and the market- based economy – these are our big ideas. A stable democracy, fashioned to the conditions and the cultures of the country concerned, is what comes afterwards. It is the product of good governance, not its precursor.
Above all, we must remember that we cannot reconstruct states at the point of a bayonet – only with the support of the people. So winning their support for what we are doing is absolutely crucial. Without that, we will fail, as we see in Basra and Baghdad.
What has made the insurgency in Iraq so dangerous for the future is that our enemy understands better than we do that this is not just about winning the battle of armies, it is also about winning the battle of ideas. But this too is not new. The strength of al-Qaeda and its sister organisations lies, just as that of the IRA lay before it, in their potency as a concept, not just in their military capacity. They understand that warfare is carried out not only in the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, but in the hearts and minds of the Islamic community. They understand this and are waiting for us in countries like Sudan, where we might intervene in the future.
For them the battle is not just with the West, but also for control of Islam. I suspect most ordinary Muslims no more want to see their great civilising religion captured by the forces of fanaticism than we, in the past, wanted our religious fanatics to take over Christianity. Yet Western leaders persist in their language and actions to portray this as a great struggle for ‘our Western values’, in language which mirrors and strengthens our enemies’ concept of a global jihad.
This is both stupid and historically illiterate. It was Islam and the Arab universities, especially in Baghdad, which absorbed into Islam the Hellenic thought we regard as the foundation of ‘European values’ and preserved its crucial texts for Europe to rediscover at the start of the Renaissance, while Europe was still sunk in the barbarism of the Dark Ages.
And so we have chosen the wrong mindset to defeat al-Qaeda. We have chosen to fight an idea primarily with force. We seek to control territory; it seeks to capture minds. This is, at heart, a battle of ideas and values. Unless we realise that and can win on that agenda, no amount of force can deliver victory.

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e are not winning. In those regions of the world where this struggle is fiercest, civilisation is losing and medievalism is winning. We have to reverse that if we are to give ourselves a better chance of building peace in future.
So to be successful, we will need  more than the right structures, good intentions and a warm desire to do something to help. International intervention is a very blunt instrument, whose outcomes are not always predictable. It is not for the fainthearted – or the easily bored.
It needs steely toughness and strategic patience in equal measure. And strategic patience needs strategic vision – and we seem to lack that, too . It also requires a willingness to commit a lot of troops at the start, a capacity to provide sustained international support to the end and an ability to endure a time frame that is measured in decades, not years.
The only reward for success is that all the expenditure and all that pain will be less than the cost of the war that was avoided, or the price of the chaos which would have ensued if the international community had stayed at home. Leaving early, or doing it badly, may end up making things worse – and nearly always means having to return and do it again.
Intervention should not be undertaken lightly or because something must be done and no one can think of anything better. It is important to remember the effect on the interveners, as well as on those subject to the intervention; intervening has a tendency to make the former arrogant and the latter, either angry or dependent – and often both.
The bad news is that, as Iraq shows, intervention is expensive, tough and difficult. The good news is that if we can learn to do it better, we will get our fingers burnt less and, in the process, may make the world a much safer and less painful place than it is now.

Paddy Ashdown, European Union special representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2002 until 2006, will expand on this subject at the International Institute for Strategic Studies on Wednesday. His latest book, Swords and Ploughshares – Building Peace in the 21st Century, will be published by Orion

 

Iraq The Guardian 14 Aug 2014

Guardian 14 Aug 2014

 

Three years ago, when the world obsessed about President Assad, some of us warned that Syria was only one front-line in a wider sectarian war between Sunni and Shia; that the spread of militant jihadism among the Sunni community, funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatr, was a preparation for this. And that, before long this movement, like the 30 years religious war of eighteenth century Europe, would threaten to engulf the entire Muslim world.

 

This is the true context in which the ISIS terror in the Middle East must be seen. It is why we need to understand that though the world watches Iraq today, just as it did Syria yesterday, the actual war being fought is a regional one, with potential to spread across Islam world-wide. It is not an accident that many ISIS fighters are foreigners – many of them not even Arabs. Or that they use the most modern 21st century global communications to evangelise their medieval horrors.

 

Of course, seeing the tragedy on Mount Sinjar, something must be done. But then we said the same about the slaughter in the now forgotten suburbs of Damascus. What we need now is not just a plan for a tragedy, but a strategy for a widening war.

 

What is happening in the Middle East, like it or not, is the wholesale re-writing of the Sykes-Picot borders of Versailles 1918, in favour of an Arab world whose shapes will be arbitrated more by religious dividing lines, than the old imperial conveniences of a hundred years ago.

 

For as long as Western policy makers deny, even tacitly, that this is the most likely outcome of present events, so long will they fail to find solutions to the Middle Eastern conundrums that confront us.

 

And so we come to the case of the beleaguered Kurds and their desperate neighbours, the Yazidis trapped in terror and desolation on Sinjar.

 

And so, we drop humanitarian aid. But then what? We did the same in Srebrenica. It worked well enough for a few days. But in the absence of a credible Western policy in Bosnia, it only space for mass murder later.

 

So what credible policies are available to us in Iraq?

 

There are three.

 

The first is an all out, long-term Western military engagement to defeat ISIS and save Baghdad. This is favoured by some who have not yet learnt the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, and a few superannuated Generals seeking more spending on defence. It is, by far the least practical and most unwise option open to us. Western populations would not support it and we no longer have the military means to do it.

 

The second is to help the Iraqi state to defeat ISIS themselves. This, it seems is current Western policy. But I fear it amounts to little more than elevating a desperate hope, over any reasonable expectation. It was the collapse of the Iraqi army which gave ISIS the advanced American weapons they now use to drive back the Kurds. And it has been the subsequent absence of any effective Government in Baghdad, which has allowed the jihadists to continue widening their advance on all fronts. The Potemkin reconstruction of the Iraqi Government in the last few days is unlikely to alter a fundamental truth; the Iraqi state is not, and is unlikely to become, an effective instrument for a Western backed attempt to tackle the ISIS insurrection. Unless of course Iran, too gets directly involved. But that would lead inevitably to the creation of a de facto greater Iran extending into Iraq and to a further widening of the sectarian fault-lines. This may not be avoidable – but should we be encouraging it?

 

The third option is to help the Kurds by all means possible – assistance to house the Yazidis, equipment, military training, advice, protective air-strikes – anything short of current operational boots on the ground. The aim would be to make Iraqi Kurdistan the northern bulwark against the ISIS advance. The Government seems at last to be tiptoeing in this direction – but why so half-hearted? It’s a strange scruple that flies in other people’s weapons, but denies access to our own? Is there a difference?

 

But there are downsides here, too – big ones. Whether intentional or not, we will end up acting as hand-maiden to Kurdish ambitions for full independence – and in so doing, effectively assisting in the dismemberment of Iraqi. Part of the deal with the Kurds would have to be an end to interference in Turkey, who have their own problems with Kurdish secessionism. We would also be tacitly accepting the end of the Sykes – Picot borders in the Middle East.

 

So this will only work if it is, not just a short term plan, but part of an integrated long term strategy. A new rapprochement with Iran to act as a counter balance to those who promote Sunni jihadism. Deeper engagement with Turkey. Greater pressure on those Gulf states who fund jihad – (is the Government’s reluctance here, because of Tory friends amongst the Gulf states?). And a new determination to deal with illegal Israeli settlements, as a prelude to a lasting peace in Palestine.

 

None of this will be easy, of course. But better surely, to face up to the realities of the post-Sykes-Picot Middle East and influence it where we can, than lose the moment standing impotently by hoping that yesterday will come back again.

 

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Iraq 17 Nov 2012

There are now no good routes – only painful ones – out of the disaster which the Coalition has brought upon itself in Iraq.

 

Though history may well say that occupation of Iraq was a classic of how to fight this kind of conflict, what happened next has been a classic of how not to build the peace that follows.

We have failed in Iraq. This is not to say that nothing positive can now emerge; or that ignominious retreat is the only outcome. It is merely to state what is now obvious to all – that the Coalition cannot now achieve the ambitious aims it set for itself four years ago. Iraq is a particularly painful example of the hubris which attends over ambitious aims, when it comes to post conflict reconstruction.

 

So what should we do now?

 

Well, the question is no longer shall we withdraw? but how and when and in what circumstances?

 

And here we have a problem. We are no longer in control in Iraq – our actions no longer shape events, they are shaped by them. And that applies to the circumstances of our withdrawal, too.

We are now in that dangerous territory where polices no longer define outcomes, they only give us the best chance of realising hopes.

 

And in the bonfire of hopes and ambitions in Iraq of the last four years, only one has survived as remotely achievable. To maintain a unitary Iraq and avoid, if we can, its dismemberment into chaos.

 

This can be no other aim for our policy now but this. For only if we achieve it can we have any hope of an orderly withdrawal and any prospect of leaving behind relatively stable peace.

 

What this means is a policy with three ingredients – and cutting and running isn’t one of them.

 

First we must continue to strengthen the army. The Iraqi police are a disaster and will remain so. The only force in Iraq with any remote potential for acting as the last bulwark against a descent into civil war and ultimate anarchy, is now the army – or at least we have to hope so.

 

Second we need to be more pro-active in seeking a political solution to the future shape of a unitary Iraq. Everyone knows that this lies in a strongly federal Iraq – but no-one can agree what that should look like. Current international policy is to stand to aside, leave this to domestic populations and play no part in this debate. This is a luxury we cannot afford any longer.

 

Day by bloody day Iraq is being reshaped, not by rational dialogue, but through murder, violence and ethnic cleansing. We may not now be able to stop Iraq breaking up – but we should not wish it to happen, or stand idly by while it does.

 

And the best – arguably the only way to prevent this is for the international community now to take a pro-active role in creating Iraq’s new federal structure before it is too late.

 

This is not a job for the Coalition – they cannot do it. It is a job for the wider international community, including, crucially Iraq’s neighbours, who are the third element in any plan to avoid a deeper catastrophe.

 

Perhaps it is not yet quite too late – I doubt if most of Iraq’s neighbours – with the possible exception of Iran – really want to see chaos and a vacuum of power on their borders.

 

But the only plan for a federal, unitary Iraq which could succeed would be one buttressed by an international community agreement, to which the neighbours themselves are committed – like the Dayton agreement, which enshrined the shape of Bosnia in an international agreement after the war there ended in 1995.

 

Is this possible? It will certainly be difficult – but it offers the best solution – perhaps now the only one which can avoid the catastrophe of collapse in Iraq.

 

It is no longer within the power of the United States to broker such a regional solution. But there could be role for the EU here.

 

There is already a group called the Neighbours Forum, which consists of Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. It meets regularly at Foreign and Interior Minster level and has recently invited the EU and UN as observers. The EU could and should now, urgently use this forum as a framework to work towards a wider regional settlement which includes the central question of Palestine and incorporates an agreement, guaranteed by the international community and underpinned by the neighbours, on the future shape of Iraq.

 

There is no other context within which any hope of a reasonable end to the Iraq tragedy can be achieved.

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Iraq – Sunday Telegraph 15 Oct 2006

Iraq – Sunday Telegraph 15 Oct 2006

Paddy Ashdown

 

 

It is well known that military men speak bluntly – and General Sir Richard Dannatt has a reputation for being no exception to the rule. Nevertheless his recent comments look more like a case of placing large army boot into senior army mouth, than blunt soldier speak; more accidental discharge, than a well placed salvo directed at a deliberate target.

 

His claim that this is not news because he has said no more than others have said already, misses the point. For others to speculate that the direness of the Coalition’s position in Iraq belies the Government’s re-assurances to the contrary, is one thing. For the head of the Army to confirm it is quite another. Among other things it raises constitutional questions which General Sir Richard and the Prime Minister will need to sort out between them.

 

Meanwhile the truth has now been blurted into the open and needs to be addressed.

 

What do we do next in Iraq?

 

There is a view that the whole Iraq operation has been a disaster from start to finish. This is not wholly true.

 

In fact Donald Rumsfeld was right when he insisted that the invasion of Iraq did not have to follow the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, but could be accomplished with a light level force using modern all arms manoeuvre warfare. The conflict phase of the Iraq war was a near copybook example of how such a war can be won.

 

But the reconstruction phase which followed has been a near copybook example of how the peace can be lost afterwards. It all began because the light level forces deployed to win the war proved totally inadequate to secure the peace which followed. This led to the commission of the cardinal sin in peace making – losing control of the security space after the war ends. The wholesale disbandment of the Iraqi Army and security structures, together with the institutions of the state made matters worse by leaving the coalition with too few soldiers to secure the rule of law and no-one to help them administer the state. The dismal story of the last few years in Iraq has been no more than a recitation of the litany of actions which have been necessary to try and recover the situation from those initial errors.

 

In state building and reconstruction, the central battle field is the battle field of public opinion. If you cannot win there, you cannot win. Foreigners cannot reconstruct a state by force against the hostility of its people. But as Sir Richard has blurted out, that is what it has come to in Iraq. I understand that a recent opinion poll conducted by the Ministry of Defence shows that, in comparison to wide spread public support for our troops in Basra at the start, well over 90% of the population now no longer see the troops there as a help and want them to leave. In these circumstances the presence of soldiers is bound to become, as Sir Richard said, part of the problem, not part of the solution.

 

It is not the soldiers who are to be blamed for this – though they are the ones who suffer because of it. Soldiers cannot build peace – only politicians can. In these circumstances, as we should know from Northern Ireland, the soldier’s job is to hold the ring while a political solution is found.

 

But no sustainable political solution has been forthcoming in Iraq, leaving the soldiers, as General Dannett has pointed out, in an extremely exposed and dangerous position.

 

Precipitate withdrawal – cutting and running – is not an option. The consequences for Iraq, the Middle East, the so called (and misnamed) “war on terror” and for Western and above all US power, are just too horrendous.

 

But we cannot leave our soldiers in a position where they are asked to do the impossible – compensate with military action (and attendant casualties) for the failure to find political solutions.

 

The blunt fact is that the Coalition no longer controls events in Iraq; events, in large measure, are controlling the Coalition. There may not yet be a technical civil war going on in the country, but slowly, inexorably and day by day Iraq is moving towards are more fractured and ethnically divided state than we would have found acceptable at the start. I am not sure that this can now be stopped.

 

But I am very sure that we will not even be able to influence and shape this process, let alone stop it, if we continue to be behind events rather than ahead of them. I have always been rather wary that a fully federal solution in Iraq would merely prove to be the prelude to the break up of the country. But that pass has now been sold. The Coalition has accepted that a federal solution is now the only option, but does not wish to get itself involved in shaping its structure or deciding where the boundaries of the federal units will fall. I am not sure we can now afford that luxury. For the future shape of Iraq is being decided day by violent day, not by politicians, but by killing and ethnic cleansing.

 

There must now be some question as to whether it is possible to preserve the unity of the Iraqi state. But we will stand the best chance of doing this by taking a more active role in shaping a federalised Iraq within a wider Middle Eastern settlement. One of the cardinal rules of peace making is that it is easier when you have at least the acquiescence of the neighbours and harder when you don’t. I doubt that Syria – or for that matter Iran – want a chaotic and disintegrated Iraq on their door step.

 

It will be neither easy nor comfortable to put together a regional settlement which includes – as it must, a solution to the question of Palestine. The US can no longer do this – but the EU can and should. For a wider regional solution, together with the creation of a sustainable federalised state in Iraq, probably now offers us the last, least worst chance of getting out of this in some dignity and relieving our hard pressed soldiers of the impossible job of trying to compensate with force for a comprehensive failure of politics.

 

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Interception of Communications 13 June 2013, The Guardian

Guardian Intrusion For 13 June 2013

 

David Omand, writing in yesterdays Guardian says we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that our intelligence services are working with the Americans and it’s a good thing that they are. He is right. But that does not mean that we should allow a friendly power (even our most friendly one) to intrude on our citizen’s privacy in ways they would not permit with their own.

 

He says that this is all OK because its only computers who see our data and humans will only see what they programme the computer to show them. But who does the programming?

 

He says we can be re-assured because our Government’s are all operating to the rule of law. But what if, as I believe, the law we have is an utterly defective one?

 

He proposes six brand new principles which should govern state intrusion into our privacy. I want to assert three well established old ones.

 

We have recently been told, even by those charged with overseeing the extent of state intrusion in our lives that “Citizens who are not breaking the law have no cause to be concerned about intrusion into their private lives.”

 

Wrong point.

 

The right one is: “If Governments never broke the law, citizens would have no cause to be concerned”.

 

But no Government can make such a promise either for itself, or for its successors. And no citizen should believe them if they did.

 

I remember in some previous life watching Post Office experts steaming open people’s letters. It has been done for a hundred years and more. The practice was (is, no doubt) legal, acceptable and accepted by most sensible citizens as a proper power to be exercised by the state in order to preserve our security and fight serious crime – PROVIDED this power is subject to three long established stringent safeguards – three “safeguard principles”, if you like.

 

First, that this power is used specifically and in an individually targeted manner. Fishing trips are not allowed. Nor is it permitted to hoover up the communications all citizens – or all citizens in a specific class – Muslims for instance, or EDL members for that matter – on the chance that those who protect us might just stumble across something which is of interest, or which might possibly be of interest at some time in the future.

 

Secondly the power to intrude into our privacy must be based on evidence – not just vague suspicion or statistical probability – that we are behaving, or about to behave, illegally.

 

And thirdly, granting this power must be subject to a warrant given by a third party, preferably a legal one, but possibly a Minister responsible to Parliament, who is outside the organisation which is seeking the right to intrude.

 

These are the safeguards which were in use when the state was steaming open letters. They were the same principles which were applied when state intrusion extended to telephones. Of course, now that those who would threaten our security have moved to new forms of communication such as emails and Skype, the state must have the power to follow them there, too. No sensible citizen would want to deny the state the ability to go where the serious law-breakers can go. But no alert one would permit that to happen unless that power remained subject to the same safeguards as before.

 

It is not the widening of the field of intrusion which is objectionable here, it is the weakening of the safeguards which should be in place to control it.

 

Some in this Government (and even more in the last one) propose that there is a fundamental difference between the “data” of communications (who communicated with whom) and the “content” (what they said). Not so. There is perhaps a difference of degree – but there is none of principle. The safeguards which apply to the first might be set at a lower level than those which apply to the second, but the basic principle remains the same in both cases. Who I sent a twitter message to a year ago, is no more the business of my Government than what I said – unless there are solid reasons to make it so.

 

The problem is that this crucial dam was breached when the last Government allowed the intelligence organisations the power to hoover up all types of what were then the most modern forms of communications in direct and flagrant breach of all of these principles – instead of collecting information on individuals based on evidence of guilt, they permitted the collection of information on everyone, guilty or not. No evidence required; no need for warrants to be applied for. Now we are told – including by those who were Minsters when this egregious law was brought in – that all we need to do now to make ourselves safe, is to update the current law to cope with even newer, new technologies.

 

Wrong.

 

This is not just an opportunity to up to date what we already have. It is an opportunity to amend it so that, at last the laws governing the right for Governments to intrude into our private communications conform with the basic principles which have always applied in these matters in the past – and should still.

 

Now – most especially in the light of what we know has been happening in the US (and perhaps here too?) – we need to deal with what appears as a new challenge, but is in fact an old one, not by abandon long-established principles, but by re-asserting them.

 

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Government’s proposals on the retention of data – The Times 11 April

Government’s proposals on the retention of data – The Times 11 April

Here is your pub quiz question for the day.

 

You live in a country where the security services have unfettered right to know exactly who you spoke to on the phone and when and for how long, over the last year. Where would you be? China? Russia? Egypt? Some South American dictatorship? No, you would be in Britain.

 

In 2005, the last Government used its presidency of the EU to push through a directive requiring domestic telephone and internet providers to retain the full records of who contacted whom for a year and provide the Government with access to them on demand. This legislation was opposed by European Liberals and has had a very rough ride in other European countries. Sweden has yet to enact it and the courts in Germany, Romania and the Czech Republic have ruled it unconstitutional.

 

The coalition Government promised to halt this move towards greater surveillance. Yet now they seem to propose a massive extension to it.

 

Liberals accept, subject to safeguards decided by Parliament, that the Government has a right to monitor the private communications of its citizens where this is necessary for national security and in the pursuit of serious crime. And that these powers should keep pace with the development of communications.

 

But there must be safeguards, too.

 

Any extension of these powers should be strictly proportionate to the threat. That’s why we opposed the Labour Government when it tried to establish a central database in 2008.

 

Any exercise of these powers must be subject to a warrant and strictly targeted at individuals, where good grounds exist for believing that they are involved in serious law breaking or a threat to the security of the State. We have always resisted a “fishing trip” approach by the security services, where they seek the right to gather information on innocent citizens merely on the grounds that there may be among them, some who are committing serious crime.

 

The right to monitor private communications is thus justified only where it is specific, evidence based and applied to an individual.

 

It cannot be justified by treating us as a nation of suspects. It cannot be justified on the grounds that the information gathered might be useful to the State at some unspecified date in the future.

 

The Government’s new proposals to extend the retention of email, social media, web-sites and internet phone records breach these basic principles; they are disproportionate and they seek a generalised extension of State monitoring which apply to everyone, rather than to individuals.

 

The Government claims that it will have unfettered access only to “data” (i.e sender, recipient, time and duration) rather than content, so this does not constitute “a communications interception”. That is sophistry.

 

As free citizens we have a right to talk to whom we wish, when we wish and wherever we wish without the State knowing about it, unless there is good cause for it to do so. It is not just the content of our communication that is private. It is the fact that it occurred at all, when and for how long. An email is not just the text. It is also the sender, the time it is sent and the person it is sent to.

The “content” cannot be separated from the context.

 

It is for this reason that it is difficult to see how these proposals do not infringe to the Coalition agreement, which promised: “We will end the storage of email and internet records without good reason.”

 

The danger here is not diminished because there will be no centralised State database of the sort Labour proposed. That is largely an irrelevance. These proposals bring into existence a series of statutorily required databases held by others, in a form dictated by the State, to which the State will have unfettered access.

 

Nor are these dangers dealt with by hedging them around with safeguards. Or by making them subject to oversight by the Interception of Communications Commissioner. The principles being infringed here are much too big to be protected by safeguards and oversight.

 

Of course the security services have good reason to argue otherwise. It is their job to seek the best weapons they can to do the critical job we ask of them, especially in an Olympic year. We look to them to safeguard our national security. But we look to the Government to safeguard our liberties.

 

If these proposals were to allow our security services to put a case to ministers (or a judge) to extend the holding of intercept information on an individual or even many individuals, I would have no quibble with them. That would be specific, evidence based and subject to external approval. But this is not, it appears what is being suggested.

 

We should update our current interception laws to deal with the new ways criminals and terrorists communicate. But the need to have new laws should not mean parting company with old principles.

 

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