The last of Britain’s troops left Iraq last Sunday with just a cursory mention in the press. What a contrast to eight years earlier, when they poured across the border with Kuwait in a hail of missiles, bombs and bullets, the international media following their every move.
It’s true that a national debate on Iraq has raged ever since it was clear that London and Washington were determined to take the country by force. But I still don’t think that Labour has learned the right lessons in its whole approach to foreign policy. Continue reading
At a time when fixing the big international decisions are revealed yet again to have a highly personalised twist to them (witness the blackballing of Brown for the IMF job because of his personal antipathy towards Cameron-Osborne before the election, though fear of future IMF hostility towards the Tory cuts programme if Brown got the job almost certainly played a part), another angle on this familiar tale has emerged. I have been told, from as they say reliable sources, that the notorious party on Oleg Deripaska’s yacht moored off Corfu was even more interesting than previously thought. Significantly it included another member who has since come into prominence for wholly different reasons. 
Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria, rumblings in Morocco and Algeria (and eventually Saudi?) even spreading south into sub-Saharan Africa such as Uganda, but the centre of this upturning of the old despotic order is Palestine. The tectonic shift in the latter has been little noticed, but is more momentous than any of the others. Palestine for half a century has been in thrall to US-Israeli domination, but without riots in the streets or even a new intafada that is now changing dramatically. Even hardened cynics were shocked at how far the Palestinian negotiators accommodated the ever-increasing and ever more humiuliating Israeli demands. But a new page is now opening, the most hopeful for decades. 
The three NATO leaders have now made clear their objective in Libya — and it is regime change and not the more limited objectives set by the UN. Regime change is not a legitimate objective for NATO’s leaders to determine. It is an entirely legitimate aspiration for the Libyan people. It could become a legitimate objective of an international force if it were explicitly approved by the UN, perhaps based on a conclusion of the investigations of the International Criminal Court into crimes committed against civilians in Libya, but such approval is unlikely to be forthcoming anytime soon.
UNISON has now joined UNITE in calling for an end to NATO bombing of Libya.