The Guardian view on Libya: learning lessons from the latest failure
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Version 0 of 1. Ed Miliband grasped early on how Iraq had intellectually bankrupted New Labour. Away in Harvard’s ivory towers, when the drum beats for war were rolling, he never voted for the great misadventure and in 2010 he distinguished himself in a tight race with his brother by letting slip that he had always believed that it was a mistake. When he was crowned as the party leader five years ago, in this month’s manifesto, and at many points in between, Mr Miliband has spoken of the need to learn “the lessons of Iraq”. These were not empty words: in 2013, he led his party through the lobbies against a new bombing campaign in Syria, a move which eventually halted the interventionist plans, not only of London, but of Washington and Paris too. Mr Miliband has, then, shown himself to be a sceptic about projecting military power overseas. The desperate current condition of Syria is a reminder that horrors can follow from western inaction as well as western action, though who knows how strong Islamic State would be if the vicious, secular Assad regime had been bombed out of existence. Things might well be even worse, and it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to persuade the public – which remains in a war-weary post-Iraq mood – of that. Indeed, as Labour strains to court former Lib Dems and current waverers to the Greens, the Labour leader might have political reason for wanting to paint himself as a dove. But when Mr Miliband pushed foreign policy up the election agenda on Friday, he didn’t talk about the errors of Iraq or the follies of David Cameron’s Syrian plans. He chose instead to talk about the intervention he did support: the Libyan campaign against Colonel Gaddafi and his ominous threat to “cleanse Benghazi house by house”. In the aftermath of that campaign, the country remains a catastrophic battleground. While few of the 700 migrants who drowned off the Libyan coast last week originated from Libya itself, this lawless patch of desert is now the chief passageway to the perils of the Mediterranean. William Hague accused Mr Miliband of making “opportunistic” partisan points on a matter of national interest. That is absurd: the national interest has to be defined through democratic debate. If Britain bears some responsibility for Libya’s mess, then it surely bears some responsibility too for the drownings. The Conservatives would have done better to remind Mr Miliband that – thanks to Labour’s votes on Libya – the responsibility was his as well. They could also have challenged his suggestion that better post-conflict planning could have put Libya into an entirely different condition – and pressed him on why he didn’t say more when the big decisions were being taken. But this close to polling day, it is no surprise to find both sides generating more heat than light. Voters are left distilling from the frenzy hints about where leaders would take the country. With this foray into foreign affairs, Mr Miliband shows he is not always a dove, but takes a case-by-case approach to intervention. Further, that he has more faith than many in the possibilities for planning a way through the messy aftermath of war. |