9/11 plus 7

The World Trade Center in New York City was destroyed by Al-Qaeda terrorists aboard two hijacked airliners seven years ago today. The same day a third hijacked airliner was crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a fourth, on its way to the U.S. Capitol, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers and flight crew attempted to regain control of the plane. In all nearly three thousand human beings and nineteen terrorists were killed in the attacks. The immediate consequences were the launch of the War on Terror and the invasion of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban government, which had been sheltering Al-Qaeda terrorists for some time. A longer term consequence was the invasion of Iraq, to depose the savage tyrant Saddam Hussein…

But you know all this, don’t you? So why should it be necessary to recite in detail the circumstances surrounding the defining historical event of our age? The sad fact is that memories fade with time - painful memories even more so. September 11th 2001 was the day the world changed - and it still hurts.

Mark Steyn used to say (and possibly still does) that there are September 10th people and September 11th people. The September 11th people got the point of the 9/11 attacks. The September 10th crowd never did. Fortunately George W. Bush was one of the September 11th people, and the story of the George W. Bush presidency is the story of 9/11 writ large. But now that presidency is nearing its end. Where do we go from here? If we have moved from a September 10th world to a September 11th world, how do we get to September 12th? Do we have to live under the metaphorical shadow of the Twin Towers forever?

That is the question which underpins this year’s presidential election campaign in the United States. The watchword is “change”. Things must not be as they have been. Seven years of a War on Terror have left the American political establishment divided, the people exhausted. The people are looking for some good news for a change, and Barack Obama has positioned himself as the man to provide it. But, telegenic as he may be, effective as he is as an orator, inspirational as he is as the first African-American presidential nominee for a major party in American history - what has he got to say? Has the danger illuminated by 9/11 passed? Have the goals of the War on Terror been achieved? Has democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan been secured? While progress has been achieved on all fronts, there remains much work to be done. Iraq in particular is turning into a success story at last, as the surge strategy introduced last year continues to bear fruit. Afghanistan continues to give cause for concern, with the Taliban resurgent. Periodical attacks by Al-Qaeda or their surrogates continue, and other terrorist plots are regularly uncovered. Iran continues its inexorable progress towards the status of a nuclear weapons state. Russia is becoming increasingly belligerent, and China increasingly powerful. What use are soothing words amd pious rhetoric against the threats faced by America and the free world?

Fortunately, there is another choice for change. Few serving politicians in any major democracy can match John McCain’s record of courage, service and sacrifice. The former prisoner of war who suffered torture during five years of captivity in Vietnam embodies the virtues about which others (including, particularly, his opponent in the election) can only wax lyrical. Consequently, in discussing the dangers we face, and the requirements of national and international security, few can match the moral authority of the Republican candidate. If America must go to war elsewhere, we can be confident that President McCain will not shirk the responsibility. It is principally McCain’s personal experience and independence of mind which guarantees that a McCain administration would be no mere continuation of the Bush years. Who can imagine that the excesses of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay would have been tolerated by a McCain White House? McCain’s maverick reputation as a man who will take on his own party if necessary (and his selection of a running mate with a similar reputation in her own state), together with a willingness to work with politicians of the opposing party both identify a man who puts patriotism and principle before party affiliation. Again the contrast with Obama and Biden, both Democratic machine politicians, is marked.

So whichever man wins the presidential election, change is on the cards for the American people. The choice, however, is stark. For all the failures of planning and execution during the last seven years, George W. Bush has taken his country in the right direction for the right reasons. And yet the world is still a dangerous place. Americans must choose whether to face their challenges with fortitude and honour, or take refuge in prevarication and soft options which may not be so soft after all. For while the world of September 11th was a difficult and tragic one, the world of September 12th may not be any easier.

On Conservative foreign policy

David Cameron’s strategy in the face of a government still undecided on whether to hang together or hang separately is straightforward. First - say as little as possible; second - watch the votes roll in. On the one hand, you can’t blame him. On the other hand, we need to know what a Conservative government under David Cameron actually might do.

The Cameron foreign policy is still particularly opaque, even though this is a subject on which he has not been silent:

“We should accept that we cannot impose democracy at the barrel of a gun,” he said in Islamabad. “We cannot drop democracy from 10,000 feet and we should not try. Put crudely, that was what was wrong with the “neo-con” approach and why I am a liberal Conservative, not a neo-Conservative.”

“Put crudely” is correct. However, the statement is crude enough to win over most of the Conservative Party and others on the political right, to say nothing of the many others in the country who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are some more sophisticated voices on the right, however. Here’s Helen Szamuely of the Bruges Group (an anti-EU pressure group), on Cameron’s comment quoted above.

This is, sadly, unmitigated rubbish. There are no particular rules as to how democracy is arrived at and the methods he dismisses were the very ones that were used to impose democracy on Germany, Austria, Italy and Japan. They seem to have worked quite well and would have worked with other countries such as Hungary if the Soviet Union had not intervened. As one contributor to the discussion points out, those methods did no harm to Serbia in the long run, either.

More to the point, however, is the Boy-King’s platitudinous insistence that he is not a “neo-con”, an attitude that goes down very well with many of the more vociferous members of the party if the discussions on ToryBoy Forum are anything to go by.

There is an insistent cry that the Conservative Party, when in government (since it is not going to be in power, in view of who legislates for this country), should distance itself from the “neo-cons”. In fact, anyone who points out that, no matter who is in government on either side of the Pond, our closest and greatest ally is the United States, like Tim Montgomerie, editor of Conservative Home, is immediately described in slightly hysterical tones as being a “neo-con”.

The truth is that neither David Cameron nor those members of his party who shriek for the need to abandon the “neo-con” path have the slightest idea what that means or who the “neo-cons” are. It does not mean simply “more conservative” or “aggressively conservative”. The people who can be described as “neo-con”, such as Richard Perle or Irving Kristol, have usually followed a certain political path that started reasonably far on the left. Therefore, the term cannot seriously be applied to anyone else, even if they think the war in Iraq is a sensible and successful way of dealing with the problem of international jihad and terrorism.

Most certainly it cannot be applied to President Bush or his closest advisers or to John McCain or Sarah Palin, though they all support the war. Senator McCain was one of the first advocates of the now obviously successful surge in Iraq, which is not a shambles or a disaster, despite what numerous Conservatives in Britain maintain.

I shall pass over the implication, too often voiced that through the “neo-cons” the Jewish lobby successfully controls America’s foreign policy as there is no evidence for any of that. Support for Israel comes from different sources, which both my colleague and I have discussed at length on EUReferendum.

The trouble from the Conservative Party’s point of view is that this is the wrong way of going about the task of developing a foreign policy. Both the leadership and various vociferous members are looking at structures rather than content, the method normally used by the European Union in the furthering of its aims, particularly the development of the common foreign and security policy.

In their obsession with having to distance themselves from the poorly understood and, as it happens, not that important “neo-cons”, the Conservatives are losing sight of certain matters. Foreign policy does not emerge from dislike of certain groups and should not grow from the right-wing envy and dislike of the United States. If the Tories think that the US and the rest of the Anglosphere are not this country’s natural allies, they should come up with alternative ideas and simply talking vaguely of China and India (an Anglospheric country), as the Shadow Foreign Secretary did in a major speech in February 2007 is not enough.

Furthermore, problems of international relations and crises that occur from time to time, like the one that was precipitated by Russia when it decided to invade Georgia because the latter was not sufficiently enthusiastic about being in the former’s sphere of influence, requires an understanding of what is going on and an opinion of what is best for Britain and for the West. If the Conservative Party decides that foreign policy consists of looking at what they think those much-derided and completely unknown “neo-cons” do and then do the opposite, the country under Mr Cameron’s government will speedily find itself in the sort of messy, anomalous position it has achieved under Mr Brown.

The above demonstrates that hostility to the neoconservative label is far more evident than hostility to the ideas - although the ideas themselves are politically problematic. Tory foreign policy has never really followed a neoconservative path - it has, traditionally, more closely resembled the realpolitik of the Major years - generally non-interventionist and prepared to let the rest of the world go hang if necessary, provided that Britain itself is not under threat. It must be a concern that Cameron’s “liberal conservative” foreign policy is simply a cover for a return to a more isolationist stance - which would be bad news not just for the Conservative Party, but also for the country and the world.

Clarke declares Blairism dead

Charles Clarke has written what appears to be an extended obituary of Blairism:

We should recognise that Tony Blair was an outstanding Labour prime minister who has now departed the British political scene and has no future part to play. His legacy, on the basis of what we inherited in 1997, is historically important, but it does not define the way forward from 2008 onwards. It is worth summarising his approach to government.

In international affairs, Blair stood for a liberal interventionist strategy in our increasingly interdependent world. This attracted fierce criticism in relation to Iraq, but general support on the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. It led him to work with the power of the United States rather than join the anti-American claque, even when George W Bush demonstrated crippling incompetence or opposed British policy. And in the European Union, Blair’s good intentions turned to dust, so that Britain is now more remote from the centre of European power than ever.

Liberal interventionism must be underpinned by military force, but its moral authority was undermined by the glacial progress in preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the ill-considered determination to renew Trident. The rise of terrorist atrocities, including London in 2005, identified Tony Blair with tough efforts to strengthen security, sometimes at a perceived cost to liberty. In some circles, this damaged his reputation, despite the series of progressive constitutional reforms that modernised Britain. As for the economy, the achievement of the Blair-Brown leadership was to demonstrate, for the first time ever, that Labour could run the economy well and promote general prosperity. The contrast with their crisis - encircled Labour predecessors is stark.

This enormous success was accomplished by insulating economic decisions of long-term significance from short-term political pressures. In monetary policy, the institutional means was Bank of England independence. The fiscal method was creation of, and adherence to, the various “golden rules”.

Tony Blair saw this achievement as central, the foundation of his political success. Indeed, he wanted to reinforce this long-term economic rigour by locking the British exchange rate in to the euro, though disagreement with his chancellor made this impossible when joining would have been feasible.

Economic “Blairism” was also defined by opposition to increasing taxes. This reflected the Reagan/Thatcher economic consensus, reinforced by Labour’s 1992 shadow Budget, that tax-raising political parties lost elections. This belief underpinned the disastrous and unfair basic-rate cut, financed by abolition of the 10p rate, of Gordon Brown’s 2007 Budget.

Social policy is the area in which the adjective “Blairite” is most widely and pejoratively used - often inaccurately linked to the word “privatise”. In fact, Blair believed that divisive private alternatives would spread within education and health unless the quality of public services and public life was significantly improved.

This meant prioritising the interests of public-service users and strengthening the state in some areas (for instance, antisocial behaviour). Empowering schools and hospitals, and extending user choice, would maximise public-service efficiency and help prevent the incursion of profit-driven alternatives.

This approach challenged some vested interests and it certainly created political tensions, not least with his deputy prime minister and chancellor. In the end, social change did not come quickly or consistently enough and, despite very major successes, reform in some areas was patchy.

This past week, Alistair Darling rightly said that the “coming 12 months will be the most difficult 12 months the Labour Party has had in a generation”. Blairism as a concept offers little by way of rescue. It is certainly not a guide to action. Equally, however, it is inaccurate and misleading to dismiss as some kind of Blairite rump those who fear that Labour’s current course will lead to utter destruction at the next general election.

There is no coherent Blairite ideology. Many of us who were proud to be members of Tony Blair’s government had differing approaches even then, and certainly propose differing prescriptions now.

This is, in general, a fair summary of Tony Blair’s approach to government and his achievements. Unsurprisingly, some of it is viewed through rose tinted spectacles: we are only now paying the price of New Labour’s “long-term economic rigour”, even if (as Clarke hints, none too subtly) much of the blame for this lies with Chancellor Brown. Furthermore, there are downsides which Clarke doesn’t even appear to recognise: the decidedly mixed benefits of the Human Rights Act; we now have Freedom of Information but Freedom of Speech is more circumscribed than it has been for generations; the damage to social cohesion wrought by increasingly ghettoised communities, some elements of which are now seeking to declare effective autonomy from the British state, notably through increasing demands for the recognition of Shari’a law, even from the Archbishop of Canterbury.

On the other hand, Blair clearly did have a coherent ideology. It was not perfect - indeed in terms of domestic policy the failures were in some cases marked - but it was driven by clear principles, even if many of these principles were not readily perceived at the time. Blairism was such a radical departure from traditional Labourism that it is hardly surprising that many of us were slow to perceive the features, positive and negative of the new ideological landscape.

The most radical change of all for a Labour Party whose defence policy throughout the 1980s was based principally around the replacement of Britain’s nuclear deterrent with a white flag, was the adoption of a liberal interventionist foreign policy based on ethical principles. Quite what those ethical principles turned out to be would have been a surprise to most Labour Party members in 1997 - not excluding Blair’s first foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, who resigned from Blair’s cabinet over the invasion of Iraq.

Can we therefore view this apparent recantation from an arch-Blairite as the end of the Blair doctrine? Clearly not - there are those in the Labour Party and elsewhere who are more than happy to espouse what are, effectively, classical liberal, neoconservative or “progressive” principles. Charles Clarke has a different end in view: the necessity of averting electoral disaster for Labour requires new leadership. By eschewing Blairism he is recognising that the Labour Party which toiled under a Blair regime which it simultaneously admired and despised will not travel down the same road again. Blairite principles may live on, but the Blairite ascendancy within the Labour Party is over - at least for now.

Increasing global poverty

The recently released report of the World Health Organisation, “Social Determinants of Health”, gets this scathing response from the Adam Smith Institute:

Declaring that ’social injustice is killing people on a grand scale’, the report proposes a vertiginous list of government interventions to help iron out inequality, from taxation to town planning. Many of their recommendations are particularly aimed at developing countries.create economic stagnation and structural unemployment.

Over the course of 247 pages, the authors make the case that only the wholesale socialisation of society and the economy can improve health. Economic growth, open markets and free trade cause ‘inequality’ and must be rejected.

Most of the recommendations – such as beefing up state welfare and employment regulation, and soaking the rich with tax – would almost certainly

And calling for an end to free trade is perverse in the extreme. Free trade has been demonstrated to be the biggest weapon ever against poverty. Since China recommenced international trade in the 1980s, 400 million people lifted themselves out of poverty in that country alone.

The WHO also willfully underestimates the importance of economic growth for health. Despite the report’s undergraduate-style railing against globalization, economic growth is causatively associated with improved health, because it allows people to afford decent living conditions, clean water and fuel.

Without economic growth, there will be no money to pay for these vital things.

It is, or ought to be, baffling that the experience of China, India and other countries in recent years should be ignored in the fight against global poverty. It has been evident for decades that the economics of traditional, twentieth century socialism has failed, as socialist disaster areas from North Korea to Zimbabwe clearly demonstrate. The WHO should stick to medicine.