Libya

Debate between Lord Soley and Lord Gilbert

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I want first to congratulate the Government and the Prime Minister because they acted rightly and effectively. It is important to put that on the record and have it known. I also take the view that, as always with these situations, military intervention is uncertain; you do not know what is going to follow. Both the Minister and other people have said that we must not put boots on the ground and that we must exit quickly and so on. The problem is that, once you start a military action, knowing how and when it will end is incredibly difficult. It also raises the issue of what we do in the post-conflict situation. The failure in respect of Iraq was not the issues around the United Nations but the absence of a workable post-conflict plan. Colin Powell had such a plan, but when he was replaced by Donald Rumsfeld it went out of the window and we paid a very high price for it.

The temptation in these situations is to compare one intervention with the previous intervention. Making comparisons with Iraq is not particularly helpful. What matters is looking at this intervention as part of a historical process. I have made the point on many previous occasions that it is not just the West that intervenes. I have discussed these arguments with my noble friend Lord Parekh in the past, but I remind the House that India thought that it was absolutely right to intervene and remove the East Pakistan Government and replace it with Bangladesh. What was happening in East Pakistan then was very similar to what is happening in Libya now. In other words, intervention is carried out by others. I have referred in the past to debates in this House in the 19th century on the ending of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which cost us 12,000 military lives and released some 200,000 slaves. Those debates reflected many of the arguments now, particularly about international law. Intervention has a long history.

What fascinates me about this situation is that, with the collapse of the Cold War, the acceleration towards a wish for democracy, freedom and the rule of law has become clear. People in the Maghreb and the Middle East are not going on to the streets crying out for al-Qaeda or another dictator; they are going on to the streets crying out for democracy, the rule of law and human rights—they know what they want. The problem for them is delivering it, and our problem is helping them. Libya has had for 42 years a particularly brutal dictatorship. I sometimes think that we fail to get over the message that there is a very important difference between extreme and efficient dictators such as Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler and others and those Governments, of Saudi Arabia, for example, who may be authoritarian but are capable of being moved. If we see the current events in the context of a historical process of people crying out for democracy and recognising that you cannot have a modern, stable state without democracy and human rights, we begin to understand them a bit better.

It is important to remember that, following the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Gaddafi feared the same would happen to him. That is why he came to the British Government and said that he had a weapons of mass destruction programme, that he was—as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, said—supporting terrorism and that he was going to stop. The previous Government got a lot of criticism for trying then to engage with him, but they were exactly right. If a dictatorship looks as though it is changing and breaking down, you need to help it happen, but when it fails, as it so dramatically did when Gaddafi turned his guns on his own citizens, you have to intervene.

The noble Lord, Lord Teverson, referred to the European Union. My frustration with the EU is along the lines of that of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson: it is an economic giant but a political and military pygmy. I do not have time to develop the argument, so I shall use, as always, a rather casual analogy. It is like a family being brutalised and beaten up, with the kids being killed, and the next door neighbours—Europe in this case—sitting down, calling a case conference and discussing whether they should stop the benefits of the guy who is doing it. You have to have a police force and you have to be able to intervene. If we had been able to remove Saddam Hussein in 1993 after the first Gulf War, there would not have been a second Gulf War. Nor would there have been 10 years of sanctions, which all brutal and efficient dictatorships manage to redirect on to their opposition within their own country. That is why sanction regimes can often be inefficient.

We should look at this as a process where our role is to encourage and promote, without being embarrassed about it, democracy, the rule of law and human rights. These are not just western concepts. Many societies throughout history and around the world have shown these attributes; they might not have used the same words or the same structures, but that is what they have done. There is bound to be a natural desire for freedom in people, and we need to stand up and speak for it.

Law has been mentioned often in this debate; it is a very strong issue. Lawyers have failed to grasp the problem, and continue to fail to grasp, that if we do not deal with brutal dictators and give ourselves a power to remove them, however difficult it might be to draw up that law, we enable them to continue—in whatever country, whatever culture and whatever society. It is not easy. I do not pretend for one moment that you can have a law up your sleeve which you can pull out and put into effect, because, at the end of the day, the political reality is that the world is not ready for it. The political aspect tells you that you cannot do it. But let us just imagine if, in late 1944 or early 1945, we had said, “Well, we’ve expelled the Nazis from all the countries they’ve invaded, but we’re going to let Hitler stay in power and we might apply a few sanctions”. We would have been laughed out of court. It would have been politically impossible and morally disgusting. Lawyers fail to face up to that, which is why I get so cross with them when they argue the moral case about removing brutal dictators. Yes, it is difficult, and, no, we do not have a way of doing it at the moment—I acknowledge that—but you cannot just duck the problem.

The key issue for us now is the post-conflict situation. We cannot say, as some have done, that we will simply withdraw. We may get pulled further in. If this battle continues, we may have to have boots on the ground. We have to face that reality. We will not walk away if, suddenly, Gaddafi gets even stronger and refugees start pouring out of the area and coming over to Europe.

I desperately hope that the rebels win, but, as has been indicated, we do not really know very much about them, so, by God, we need to put in an effort to help build the institutions of a state which begins to provide some stability, because 42 years of brutal dictatorship breaks down community relations at all levels. All forms of brutal dictatorships do that and we forget it at our peril. People are not often aware—indeed, I was shocked when I heard it—that, at the end of the Second World War, infighting among the French resistance cost more lives of French resistance fighters than were lost to the Nazis during the whole occupation.

[Lord Gilbert]

Before my noble friend sits down, would he not agree that everything that he has just been saying about lawyers was said by Edmund Burke?

[Lord Soley]

I shall have to go away and read Edmund Burke; I am not 100 per cent sure about that. I am not entirely against lawyers, although I have a long list of names of lawyers whom I would pay not to defend me.

Under evolving international law, we need to think a lot harder about the reality of politics. We need some way of facing up to the fact that leaving extreme dictators in power is not really a morally acceptable position.