Today, Jim Murphy makes a much trumpeted speech on the importance of intervention in foreign states. Labour will continue to support military interventions, we are told, as “an essential response to the world in which we live”. Now we, like most Labour members and most of the British public, believe that recent interventions in Iraq and elsewhere have been pretty disastrous, and we are not happy about a Labour shadow minister making an allegedly important speech on a platform tainted by neo-con Islamaphobes so we’ll wait to hear what Mr Murphy has to say before commenting further. However, there is one way in which the undermining of authoritarian regimes in the middle east is more than justified — the exposure of their corruption in British courts. Continue reading
Tagged with Liberal Interventionism
Liberal interventionism: an excuse for yet another war
For 10 years the peace movement has been on continuous high alert. We have had ‘liberal intervention’ in Afghanistan, Iraq and most recently in Libya. Even before September 11th 2001, we had NATO intervention in Yugoslavia and regular US/UK bombing raids over the misnamed ‘no fly zone’ of Iraq.
During this time, public opinion in the UK has shifted against military action. It remains mostly loyal to servicemen and women in the armed forces but this period has seen significant decline in support for politicians’ decisions. Each war appears to have been less popular than the previous one. Continue reading
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Libya: three reasons to curb the euphoria
Despite the initial euphoria about the downfall of a brutal and erratic autocracy in Libya, three uncomfortable matters emerge from the wreckage – and not just the obvious question of whether the National Transitional Council can bring about the reconciliation for a secure, viable and democratic future for the country.
One issue, which should not be lost sight of in the rebels’ victory, is the deliberate manipulation of UN Resolution 1973 to achieve ends manifestly beyond and not covered by its text. Continue reading
