I had been waiting to see what Paddy Ashdown would have to say on Iraq because he’s probably the person in British politics who best understands the international complexities of all the world’s flashpoints.
On a day when Tony Blair is urging speedy action to deal with extremism, Paddy spoke to Sky News’ Murnaghan programme about what he thinks should happen. He was asked if Blair was right to be interventionist. His reply that intervening didn’t necessarily mean blowing things and people up:
I’m firmly interventionist because I believe unless we are prepared to intervene internationally to preserve the wider peace when it’s threatened, the world will be a much more turbulent place but I don’t believe it’s right in these circumstances in the way that Tony suggests. I mean there are other ways you can do it and we might come on to talking about that. Look, I’m sorry Dermot, I’m having a bit of a difficulty getting my mind round the idea that a problem that has been caused or made worse by killing many, many Arab Muslims in the Middle East is now going to be made better by killing more with Western weapons. I just don’t think that’s the solution.
He also warned about ignoring the wider context of what is going on – the conflict between Sunni and Shia Muslims:
..the problem is that we are at the beginning of a widening Sunni/Shia religious sectarian conflict that is going to be spreading across the entire Middle East, it will go to Iraq, it will go to Egypt, it will go to Libya, it will go to Mali and that’s exactly what’s happened. This is more about the preparations, funded by the way by our so-called friends in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, to capture and unify the Sunni community, the Sunni umma, for a Jihadist cause in preparation for a widening Shia war and unless we understand that and unless we understand also, Dermot, that we have pretty limited means to influence the progress of that, then I think we are going to get every calculation wrong.
We need to be aware of the position of the Russians in all of this, too:
…we need also to recognise that the Russians have a concern about this and a very legitimate one because what they are seeing in those Islamic republics of Dagestan, Chechnya threatening the cohesion of the Russian Federation is exactly the same radicalisation of the Sunni community and the real danger of this, unless we are very careful, is that we are drawn in on one side, on the side of the Sunnis, and Russia is drawn in on the other. Then you have a regional war with the great powers engaged. Now I don’t say we are there yet but that at all costs is what we must avoid.
But what can we do about it? He talked about ISIS making Al Qaeda look like a Vicarage tea party and suggested that he thinks they’ve over extended themselves and would be beaten back in the short term, but the best way of dealing with the longer term problem was by use of subtle diplomacy, which includes a reformist Iran:
Now I have a suspicion that diplomacy has a role to play here and that diplomacy is to ask ourselves in real terms whether our true allies here are the unreformed Saudi Arabian monarchy and the Qatari monarchy that is funding these extremist movements or whether reformist Iran isn’t somebody we should be playing, so I think we could diplomatically always try to make sure we played to the balance. The big thing we mustn’t do, and this is the danger of getting involved with bombs and guns again, is for us to be instrumentalised on the side of the Sunni and then for the Russians to be instrumentalised on the other side. I think there is much more diplomacy to play here than there is straightforward military intervention with guns and aircraft and air support and so on. I think that is clumsy and I think it will exacerbate the situation in all probably rather than improve it. So a little more subtle diplomacy here might be quite helpful.
Paddy certainly confirmed by suspicions that we are right to be very apprehensive about these developments. However, it is a source of great relief to me that Paddy has the ear of the Deputy Prime Minister and will be advising him to plot a sensible and cautious path through this complex situation.
You can read the whole interview with Paddy here.
Murnaghan was embarrassed with riches in the form of world affairs savvy former Liberal Democrat leaders as Sir Menzies Campbell was doing the paper review. Also speaking about Iraq and in particular the article by former Ambassador Sir Christpher Meyer in the Mail on Sunday, he said:
Indeed and there is a piquancy in that because of course Christopher Meyer was there, he had to follow the instructions of this political masters but it’s now emerged that from time to time he was excluded from some of the most important meetings and what he says, it’s in the headline, ‘No Mr Blair, your naïve war was a trigger for this savage violence”. You’ve just had an interview with Tony Blair in which he says the opposite but I think it’s very interesting that someone who had to implement the policy is so root and branch opposed to what Mr Blair is now offering.
Elaborating on Meyer’s position, Sir Menzies said:
Well he says that the root of all this is the fact that we went in there and disturbed the circumstances. It is quite true that there was nothing good to be said about Saddam Hussein and a lot of people still argue that in the fullness of time then the opposition might well have been powerful enough in order to deal with them. Remember too, we were following a policy in those days of containment and deterrents, making life very difficult for Saddam Hussein and his regime and there is no reason that I have ever seen put forward as to why we would shouldn’t have continued that other than – and I think Mr Blair actually admitted it to you today – that the purpose was regime change. Well that’s not what he was telling us back in 2003 and in particular what Clare Short was being told when she was a member of the Cabinet.
You can read Ming’s interview here.
* Caron Lindsay is Co-Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings