hanoian

Answered by Craig Murray

No. I don't support the policy of liberal intervention. I think in practice it really doesn’t work very well. Obviously there is a spectrum of cases ranging from Iraq and Afghanistan at one end, to perhaps... Show more »No. I don't support the policy of liberal intervention. I think in practice it really doesn’t work very well. Obviously there is a spectrum of cases ranging from Iraq and Afghanistan at one end, to perhaps Kosovo and Sierra Leone and you find people who argue that liberal intervention is justified in some cases, and not in others. My view is to be very cautious about it always, partly because people very seldom welcome occupiers as liberators, which is the major lesson of Iraq. You have to be certain that loss of life caused during the liberal intervention is going to be outweighed by the improvement you are going to bring to the situation, and you get into the difficulties of weighing up the Utilitarian argument - is it really worth killing fifty thousand people to ameliorate the lives of a million? Also, of course, you have the whole concept of international law. The rather painstaking build up of international law, which had been led by countries like the United Kingdom, has been somewhat demolished by the behaviour of the United States and the UK in recent years. We've absolutely smashed through the UN charter through our invasion of Iraq without security council authority and we have effectively torn up documents like the UN convention against torture, the Geneva conventions, the Hague conventions, and numerous others. One of the great difficulties with interventionism is that very often it is predicated on an over simplistic analysis of the problem that you are trying to solve. For me this was the biggest single failing of Tony Blair's foreign policy. He saw the world significantly in black and white terms, and in quite complex conflicts he would ask - who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, in effect. Then we would perhaps intervene on behalf of the good guys. But the sad truth is that in conflict situations there seldom are any good guys. Show less »