David Miliband's piccolo diplomacy, says Guardian, UK
Simon JENKINS
Blair at least walked the walk. But this Foreign Secretary can offer
only feelgood gestures of episcopal concern
I hope President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka takes time out today to
comment on the resignation of Mr Speaker. What the Sri Lankan Government
has 'wanted to see', he might say in the jargon of the new
interventionism, is clean and transparent democracy in Britain. Speaking
for all Sri Lankans, he would regard the affair of MPs' expenses as
unacceptable and not living up to their commitments. A group of Sri
Lankan MPs would be visiting Britain to monitor developments.
Ridiculous? Yet those are exactly the words and tone of voice used by
Britain's Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, in his dealings with what
seems like half the globe.
The Foreign Office wakes each morning and scans the world's conflicts
to ponder where it might score a quick headline with a call for peace,
reform, a ceasefire or United Nations action.
Ceasefire
I cannot see the point of Britain telling the world that "what we
want to see is Russia on a different course". It merely infuriates every
Russian.
Why does Miliband say of Syria's dictator that "I've been talking for
over 18 months to him about his responsibilities in the region", as if
he were Lugard addressing a recalcitrant Nigerian chief? Why boast that
he is "working on maintaining a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza" when
he is doing nothing of the sort?
Arms dealers
A delegation of Singapore's MPs might feel equally justified in
visiting London to express the unacceptability of Britain's financial
regulation.
The Colombian Prime Minister, recently criticised by Miliband for the
impunity of his militia, might wonder at the impunity of Britain's
corrupt arms dealers.
Pakistan, lectured weekly by London about its army's performance,
might demand an inquiry into discipline at Deep Cut barracks.
Beijing might discover a Miliband-style moral obligation to defend
minority rights in Northern Ireland, given the resurgence of separatist
violence.
The Swedes might denounce Britain's care of the elderly on the
grounds that they cannot stand idly by while welfare state values are
traduced by British callousness.
British media
Were any of these things to happen, British politicians and the
British media would be outraged. How dare other nations pass judgment on
our affairs? What business is it of theirs? Yet this is what Britain
does to them.
Foreign policy is in 19th Century mode, with a moral gunboat over
every horizon.
Iran, Colombia, Kenya, Russia, Sri Lanka have all been damned by
Miliband with the same fatwa as unacceptable. Regular ceasefire calls
are bread and butter to the Foreign Office's underemployed policymakers.
These feel-good gestures of episcopal concern are intended to
generate a warm sense of well-being in speaker and audience, a jerkily
liberal response to something must be done. The effect is zero. This is
not megaphone diplomacy but piccolo.
Ceasefires usually benefit one side or the other in a running
conflict.
They are seldom impartial to those embroiled in the theatre of war,
any more than are other weapons of soft intervention such as
condemnation, boycott and commercial and financial sanction. In Sri
Lanka, a rudimentary study of the past three months of fighting would
have told Miliband that a ceasefire would be pro-Tamil, not just
pro-humanitarian.
He compounded his demand by damning the indiscriminate shelling of
Tamil civilians. How he could do this while supporting the bombing of
Pashtun civilians along the Afghan border is a mystery.
Yet the consequence of appearing to support the Tamils was to
infuriate those same insurgents when Miliband refused to lift a finger
to give force to his ceasefire call. It was just words, hypocritical
window-dressing.
It appeared to support a partitionist movement, but refused to do so
in practice.
The outcome has been entirely negative.
Miliband is regarded in Colombo as an incompetent neo-imperial
meddler whose embassy was attacked on Monday and whose effigy was burned
and tossed into the compound.
Meanwhile the Tamils, double-crossed by London's posturing, reacted
with one of the most furious demonstrations seen in Parliament Square.
Foreign nationals
The conflict was not ended by this rhetorical intervention. No lives
were saved, no British interest served.
Each side has merely been convinced that London was favouring its
sworn enemy. Policy towards Sri Lanka merits a doctoral thesis in
diplomatic ineptitude.
Britain had no dog in this fight, and no capacity to influence events
either way.
Its platitudes, bromides and hectoring were merely patronising, like
an NHS advert telling the world to wash its hands and blow its nose.
As of today, Britons travelling to Sri Lanka must be less safe than
any other foreign nationals, whichever side of the divide they happen to
encounter.
Such intervention soon falls victim to relativism. The one country
that is treated by Miliband with kid gloves is the People's Republic of
China.
He recently told the Fabians that "it is important that we don't
treat China as an errant child" - implying just such treatment for every
other moral miscreant. Why? Because China is rich.
Such intervention has been as pointless in Sri Lanka as its
predecessors in Israel/Palestine, Russia, Georgia, Iran, Burma, Sudan
and Zimbabwe. Tony Blair's 1999 exegesis on so-called liberal
interventionism, whatever its justification in the Balkans, has
degenerated into a global woe-crying under Gordon Brown and Miliband.
Where the fine talk led to military action, at least it walked the
walk. Labour's early decision to move from the Tories' policy of
humanitarian relief in Yugoslavia to threatened, then actual, aggression
against the Serbs represented a coherent policy.
Hostilities
By rewarding each separatist movement in turn it achieved Nato's
covert objective of Balkan fragmentation.
The same outcome will probably follow intervention in Iraq,
Afghanistan and even Pakistan. Such policies may be disagreeable but at
least they are understandable. Miliband's piccolo diplomacy is a
mystery.
He seems to crave a role above his station, howling at the moon as if
saying so made it so. He has summoned the ghost of Palmerston from a
Whitehall attic, but confined him to the press office, to write endless
speeches full of words such as unacceptable and disappointed.
At this very moment someone in the Foreign Office must be drafting a
memorandum for his boss, welcoming the agreement of both sides in Sri
Lanka to Miliband's demand that they cease hostilities and behave like
sensible chaps. How good of them to do so. Cucumber sandwiches, anyone?
guardian.co.uk
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