Rare News Desk
The election in Great Britain has veered into intriguing territory.
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Dismissed by many political analysts last year as doomed to fall, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative government has ridden an economic recovery back to first place in many polls. Meanwhile the Scottish Nationalists are threatening to wipe out Labour north of Hadrian’s Wall, meaning any future left-wing government might have to incorporate a party that wants to break up the United Kingdom. And the populist UKIP, which wants Britain to leave the European Union, still gets a healthy share of votes.
The specter of third parties and coalition government means the two main parties, the Conservatives and Labour, are fighting bitterly for every vote. Labour leader Ed Miliband, eager to capitalize on a refugee crisis that’s rocked Europe as North Africans flee their continent’s bloody conflicts, decided yesterday to attack Cameron on foreign policy. It was Cameron, alongside French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who spearheaded the coalition invasion of Libya back in 2011, which left that country in tatters.
Here’s an excerpt from Miliband’s comments:
In Libya, Labour supported military action to avoid the slaughter Qaddafi threatened in Benghazi. But since the action, the failure of post conflict planning has become obvious. David Cameron was wrong to assume that Libya’s political culture and institutions could be left to evolve and transform on their own.
What we have seen in Libya is that when tensions over power and resource began to emerge, they simply reinforced deep seated ideological and ethnic fault lines in the country, meaning the hopes of the revolutionary uprisings quickly began to unravel. The tragedy is that this could have been anticipated. It should have been avoided. And Britain could have played its part in ensuring the international community stood by the people of Libya in practice rather than standing behind the unfounded hopes of potential progress only in principle.
This contributes to the pernicious notion that Great Britain and its partners could have somehow sewn a 680,000 square mile nation back together, something which should have been rendered inconceivable by the failures in Iraq. The real lesson from Libya isn’t found on some mythical treasure map of post-war planning, but in the steely restraint needed to sometimes leave a dictator alone.
Regardless, this isn’t a good avenue for Miliband to be hurtling down. Conservatives are squealing about the Labour leader’s alleged politicization of a tragedy, but the real problem is that, as Daniel Larison points out, Miliband supported Cameron’s efforts to depose Moammar Gaddafi. His sudden ex post facto armchairing of the Libya crisis rings hollow this close to an election.
Miliband isn’t a hopeless liberal internationalist. He opposed Cameron’s attempt to link arms with the U.S. and launch airstrikes against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. It was Miliband, along with disillusioned Tory backbenchers, who defeated the motion to bomb Syria in a humiliating blow to Cameron:
But it’s the Libya intervention that Miliband is trying to score points off of, and on that he has no credibility.
I don’t want to see Miliband, “Red Ed” as he’s often called, win a majority in Parliament. Though slightly better than Cameron on foreign policy, his domestic ideas are the usual neo-Keynesian tripe and a Labour government would almost certainly require a coalition with the Scottish nationalists who are even more progressive.
But America’s Republicans can learn something from his plight. Right now many leading GOP presidential candidates are strutting about, verbally roughhousing Hillary Clinton on foreign policy. But what basis do they have for their tough talk? Hillary ardently supported America’s role in the Libya intervention, as did they. Hillary said Assad “must go,” as did they. Hillary said Vladimir Putin was just like Hitler, as did they.
There are some traces of daylight between Hillary and her GOP challengers: she issued a tepid statement of support for President Obama’s Iran deal, opposed by the Republican candidates, and referred to Assad as a “reformer” back in 2011. But the latter is hardly a statement of policy and the former she’s likely to switch if the polls compel her. Ultimately, there are very few meaningful differences between most of the GOP candidates and Hillary Clinton on foreign policy. Any debate between Clinton and a hawkish Republican would feature plenty of bluster and invocations of American strength, but very little substantive policy disagreement.
Take it from Ed Miliband: you can’t run against wars you supported. If Republicans truly want to critique Hillary’s approach to the world, they should nominate someone who thinks differently, especially on Libya in which she played a key role. As for the Brits, if they’re looking for an authentically anti-war party, it seems UKIP is the only way to go.
