North Africa and the Middle East
Debate between Douglas Alexander and Matthew Offord(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Alexander
As so often, not only in recent days, but over many years in this House, the right hon. and learned Gentleman speaks with great authority and wisdom. I was coming on to a passage in my speech where I was keen to suggest to the House that it is illuminating at times to take, momentarily, that longer view and to appreciate the full extent of the failure that we have seen over recent weeks.
In different times and, admittedly, in different circumstances, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen said of the Kosovo conflict:
“We ran a military campaign and in parallel we ran an information campaign. Both were professional and focused but it was, to my mind, the information campaign which won it.”
He went on to say:
“Publics across the world got the message that we meant business and that we were absolutely committed to achieving our objectives summed up succinctly as ‘NATO in, Serbs out, refugees home’. The Kosovars watched and were reassured by our resolution and in Belgrade the generals and the Serbs generally began to understand that once NATO had taken on a mission, it was simply not going to fail. And as they got that message their resolution crumbled and even though their immediate military advantage remained, they gave up.”
Sadly, the clarity, coherence and effectiveness of that communication have not been matched in recent weeks by the international messaging to the Gaddafi regime.
Mr Alexander
I am keen to make just a little progress.
The Foreign Secretary said on 27 February that
“it is time for Colonel Gaddafi to go, that is the best hope for Libya.”
A few days later, on 3 March, President Obama stated that “he must leave”. But since those categorical statements the urgency of the diplomatic efforts have, alas, not matched the urgency of the situation.
The Foreign Secretary has already told the House that the Prime Minister and the US President speak “extremely regularly”, so may I ask the Foreign Secretary to take this opportunity genuinely to confirm to the House what is more than of passing interest: whether or not the Prime Minister has spoken to President Obama regularly in the wake of this crisis, over the past seven days? I ask that question because Downing street briefings suggest that there has been only one telephone call, and I would be happy to afford the Foreign Secretary the opportunity to intervene on me today to clarify the facts. Calling for action is not the same as acting to ensure that the action takes place. Public statements at a time of crisis need to be matched by the important work of private diplomacy. I suggest that if ever there was a time when such dialogue, leader to leader, was needed, it is a time like now. Indeed, not only has uncertainty about the international community’s position delayed action, but it will have been closely observed in Libya itself.
As United States Senator John Kerry commented yesterday, the time lost by the international community has
“compacted the choices, diminished the options. And it’s changed the state of play somewhat.
The calculation that many people in Libya might have made a week…10 days ago, if we’d started to announce and move certain things, might have been considerably different than the calculation that they might make today. And those calculations are critical in these kinds of events.”
Senator Kerry’s analysis is as accurate as it is devastating, for as we debate today the opportunity for meaningful action is simply slipping away.
Mr Offord
The right hon. Gentleman talks about a lack of action, but it is the Prime Minister who has provided that action, calling for a no-fly zone. When the right hon. Gentleman talks about the lack of a voice across the international community, I believe that he is referring to the Obama Administration. When the call of “Democracy!” was shouted, where was the leader of the free world?
Mr Alexander
My point is that public declarations of support for a policy need to be matched by private diplomacy. It appears that there is a fashion in the Government to take a different view and a different approach from the previous Government on many aspects of policy. There might be a view in the present Government that the action the previous Prime Minister took ahead of the G20 meeting—getting on a plane, travelling to Brazil and travelling around the world making the case for concerted international action in circumstances of economic crisis—was somewhat overplayed. I personally think that there is a genuine need for action to be taken at this stage but that public words need to be matched by private conduct. In that sense, there must be concerted efforts to try to bring the international community together. That challenge is not unique to the United Kingdom—it is a responsibility that falls on all those in positions of leadership—and I would be the first to concede that this is a challenging and difficult set of circumstances in which, to date, the international community has not been united. That is why, however, I think it demands effort, skill, application and judgment to ensure that we do what we can to cohere the international community rather than further to divide it at a point at which judgments are being made not only in Tripoli but in Benghazi about the commitment of the international community to supporting these changes.