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By David Rieff
, Project Syndicate
When Tony Blair, having
procrastinated about his departure almost to the point of unreason,
finally gives up the British premiership this month, it will be to
the general relief not only of the British public as a whole, but
also of the overwhelming majority of his own party. After three
terms in office, it could hardly be otherwise. Despite the cliché,
power does corrupt, and the late Blair era, like that of Margaret
Thatcher before it, has been a squalid spectacle.
The paradox is that, for a man
who wielded so much power for so long, it is unclear what domestic
legacy, if any, Blair will leave. Blairism was a mood, a style, but,
in substantive terms, it represented no radical break with the
Thatcherite legacy that New Labour repackaged so cleverly, and, in
fairness, administered more humanely than the Iron Lady ever did.
Foreign policy is another story.
Whatever one thinks of him, in international affairs Blair was a
leader of consequence. Indeed, he can be plausibly described as
being chiefly responsible for formulating and successfully
propagating the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention.” That
idea captured the imagination of much of the elite of the developed
world over the course of the 1990’s, and provided the moral
rationale for the principal Western military interventions of the
post-Cold War period, from Bosnia to Iraq.
Given how catastrophic the
invasion of Iraq has turned out to be, it is hard even to remember
when interventions on moral grounds—whether to thwart a dictator,
as in the case of the Balkan wars, or to put an end to anarchic
cruelty, as in the case of British intervention in Sierra
Leone—seemed like a great advance in international affairs. No
longer would the powerful sit by idly while butchers like Slobodan
Milosevic or Foday Sankoh slaughtered their own people.
Today, humanitarian intervention
has become a dirty word for many of the same people who once
believed in it. Only American neo-conservatives, understandably
grateful for his championing of the Iraq war and his ability to
argue for it coherently and eloquently (unlike President Bush, who
was and is unable to do either), are sorry to see Blair go. But what
may be lost is how many people did believe.
Blair still does. In a recent
interview, he replied to the question of the core of his foreign
policy with two words: “liberal interventionism.” The world may
have moved on, chastened by the realization that interveners, even
when intervening in the name of human rights, can be as barbaric as
tin pot dictators. But Blair, it seems, is not to be moved. What was
famously said of Thatcher—“the lady’s not for turning”—can
be said of him as well.
In fairness to Blair, this is not
mere stubbornness, as it seems to the case with Bush and his current
and erstwhile minions, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and, of
course, Vice President Dick Cheney. For Blair, there is a moral
unity between the interventions in Kosovo and Iraq, both of which he
presents as examples of a post-Westphalian idea that powerful states
are called upon to defend suffering communities globally, including
by military means.
To the charge that this idea is
actually old-fashioned liberal imperialism updated for the post-Cold
War world, Blair has consistently replied that what he called for in
Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Iraq are wars of “values, not
interests.” In his more petulant moments, he has asked why so many
of those who saw no harm in NATO undermining Milosevic adamantly
opposed the ouster of Saddam Hussein.
Actually, the answer is quite
simple. Blair’s vision of wars of values rather than interests has
increasingly come to seem like a moral flag of convenience—in a
way similar to the use of human rights by the rich world’s
governments to justify their continued domination of institutions
like the World Bank and the IMF. The fact that NATO now considers
its area of operations to legitimately extend all the way to the
Hindu Kush has given pause even to many who once believed as
fervently in humanitarian intervention as Blair still does.
David Rieff is the author, most
recently of, At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed
Intervention. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2007.
www.project-syndicate.org
(Continued tomorrow)
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