- Let’s be honest. There’s a clear link with Islam (£) by David Aaronovitch, The Times
- Intellectual property is an innovation killer by Joshua Lachkovic , KernalMag
- Dumb Idea Hall of Fame by Aaron David Miller, Foreign Policy
- Nadine Dorries threatens Cameron's Party Leadership by Nadine Dorries, Daily Mail
- Boris set for party leadership? by Traci Watson, USAToday
- Anti-Israel students deface Star of David at student conference by Jonny Paul, Jerusalem Post
- Jihadist Videos on University Facebook by Rupert Sutton, Huffington Post UK
- Skintland: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose by Alex Massie, Spectator UK
- Green tax on conservatories by James Slack and Tamara Cohen, Daily Mail
- Saudi princess: What I'd change about my country by Staff writers, BBC
Tony Blair and torture in Libya
Blair, Libya, torture and rendition: What did Labour leaders know and when did they know it? asks former UK ambassador Charles Crawford
The news that further police investigations loom into the way MI6 cooperated with the then Gaddafi regime in Libya (in particular by effecting the ‘rendition’ of two Libyans back to Tripoli - and likely mistreatment) has prompted me to look again at my Commentator piece from September 5 last year (emphasis added):
There are only two basic choices available to democracies when it comes to dealing with odious regimes: Isolation, or Engagement. Both can have perverse consequences, because it is impossible to deal with perverse regimes without some perverse outcomes Isolation (plus or minus sanctions) invariably drags on unhappily, mainly because the regimes are never in fact that isolated: see the wild success of those policies for eg Cuba, Myanmar, Zimbabwe and Belarus. In some cases the regime may isolate itself, all the better to oppress its own citizens: see decades of North Korea.
Engagement creates different problems. Above all, if you engage with dirty people, how to avoid some of their dirt ending up on you? The promise of Engagement is that it offers the hope of slowly but surely changing things for the better; the danger is that while you are doing that, the key leaders of the regime in fact get far richer and learn how to be oppressive in new, cleverer ways. So in the Libya case. The stupid/wicked/naive Brits trained the Libyan security forces! Of course we did: if you want to set in motion a process of reform and enlightenment in such regressive institutions, what else to do?
Think about what this means in practice. If the Libyan secret police are known torturers, you will be training them while their torturing ways continue. Even if the total amount of Libyan torture declines sharply as a direct result of Libyans cleaning up their act during the wider normalisationprocess, your trainers in one way or the other will be helping a torturing regime be more efficient.Yet without outside democratic engagement (and the high-level civilisational rewards which rightly flow to the regime for behaving in a less extreme way) the chances of reducing Libyan torture at all (and thereby opening some small new space for opposition trends) are hugely reduced...
Let's take for granted that a “Western” democratic system with a strong legal system is just “better” than a cruel torturing dictatorship. What should a democracy do about a dictatorship?
One option is to do nothing. Faraway foreigners oppress each other: what's new?
That option is in fact quite often used, even if there is a busy pretence of “doing something”. Saudi Arabia imposes odious unfair apartheid-like restrictions on its citizens and exports colossal volumes of poisonous Islamism, yet we studiously treat it as a “factor of stability”. Communist China used to be far worse, murdering millions. As did the USSR.
The hard fact that these systems are powerful, ruthless and/or rich compels a certain caution. But does the fact that we “tolerate” (say) the Saudi system demolish any claim by us to moral superiority? Double standards, they shriek.
No. Any good policy has to be realistic as well as consistent. If you can't stop all killers, it's right to stop those you can stop. There is solid intellectual and moral territory between “double standards” and “no standards”.
If we decide to do something to change a dictatorship, what in fact is likely to work, where “work” means bringing about change for the more pluralistic, preferably without massive violence? Not that massive violence is necessarily bad – the heroic efforts of the Syrian people against the Assad regime deserve much more active support.
The default position of Western democracies these days is that change should be “peaceful”. The embarrassing implication of this position never mentioned on the BBC is that enslaved people are better off if their slave-drivers reform slavery gradually and maybe even stay in control, rather than get abruptly toppled even at the cost of many human lives. Slave-drivers need dialogue! A lot of dubious moral philosophy lurks behind that proposition.
South Africa is always presented as a triumph for peaceful change, but of course wasn't.
