Robin Cooks premature death at the age of 59 has robbed the world of a distinctive politician whose life allows us to see rather clearly what is wrong with the foreign policy of Tony Blair.
The key issues are Iraq and America. At present politics, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, is caught between the millstones of two positions. Are you against the war, American imperialism and all forms of intervention and the use of force? Or are you with America and against dictators, terrorists and evil-doers?
In this space there is no room for those of us who supported intervention in Afghanistan and Kosovo but opposed that in Iraq, that is to say those of us who exercised good judgment.
When Christopher Hitchens was in London last year a dinner was thrown to celebrate the great man of letters. He had come to participate in a debate about whether or not it was ever right to intervene. He had won the debate handsomely, of course. At the end of the dinner I said to him, in the brief moment I had the chance to talk directly to him, that he was contributing to closing down the argument by refusing to engage with those who came out against the invasion of Iraq on balance, despite the fact that they hated Saddam Hussein. For example, Stephen Lukes who made an eloquent critique of Hitchens on these lines in openDemocracy.
Also in openDemocracy, Christopher Harvies Remembering Robin Cook
The post-cold-war debate that really matters is the one between those who backed intervention in Kosovo and Afghanistan but opposed Iraq and those who supported all three interventions.
It is not the clash between the neocons and Blair followers, who scorn their opponents as appeasers of dictators and terrorism, and anti-Americans who regard any truck with United States power as collaboration with imperialism.
Both sides of this clash seek to dismiss anyone else as in-between, as ditherers of doubt, part of a squishy, indecisive marshland of compromise. In fact it is here that one finds those who support war against vile and dangerous dictators, but only as a means of last resort; who see force as demanding necessary (not cowardly) precaution; who seek to ensure that democratic principles will be strengthened and honest argument rewarded by intervention.
Alone, but right
Robin Cooks death brings home how few political figures personified such application of intelligent judgement. Germanys chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his foreign minister Joschka Fischer do so: both paid a high price domestically for insisting that Germany support intervention in Kosovo and Afghanistan and then paid a high price internationally for refusing to back America over Iraq. Robin Cook was their equivalent within the English-speaking political universe. This meant that amongst holders of high office he was on his own.
When he was foreign secretary of the United Kingdom, Robin Cook actively supported the invasion of Kosovo, working closely with the US secretary of state Madeleine Albright to prevent the genocidal expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians (who are, let us note well, Muslims). He supported the use of American forces as well as European to drive out what had become Milosevics army of occupation. He was hardly an anti-American leftist.
In addition, he supported the direct use of force to impose sanctions and to weaken Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Indeed, before Labour took office in 1997, he hugely enhanced own reputation by his withering assault on the Conservative government for selling arms to Iraq. I was privileged to witness it from the gallery in the House of Commons. It is probably fair to say that he knew about and opposed the arming of Saddam Hussein, and supported his removal, well before George W Bush or Tony Blair.
But when it came to the invasion in 2003 he made a judgment on the same terms and principles which had led him to these views. By then leader of the House of Commons, he had private briefings from the British intelligence services and came to the conclusion that there were no effective weapons of mass destruction threatening the west in the hands of Saddam Hussein. This was not simply a matter of deep forensic insight on his part. It was clear enough to anyone with the will to see. Much later Tony Blair said he was sorry that the information he had received from the intelligence services had been wrong. It hadnt been that wrong! Robin Cook understood that the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was a masquerade.
For an analysis of Tony Blairs speech in Chicago on 22 April 1999 in the middle of the Kosovo war see Chris Abbott & John Sloboda, The Blair doctrine and after: five years of humanitarian intervention (April 2004)
More important still he understood that the reality behind British support for the removal of Saddam Hussein was a unilateral decision taken by Tony Blair to support the American president whatever the American president decided.
Cook understood that this was a reckless and foolish policy indeed it shouldnt really be honoured with the term policy at all.
To put it another way, if the United States had had a genuine policy on Iraq, had built up the basic regional alliances necessary for a successful invasion, had shown the remorse necessary to win the Iraqi population to its side, had worked with its allies and the United Nations to prepare for Saddams overthrow and made this legal, why then there would have been a policy a reason to support war, however risky, irrespective of any weaponry, to remove a criminal dictator Cook loathed.
David Clark, who was Cooks long-time aide, writes that he advised Cook not to resign from Blairs government over Iraq as the coalition forces might dig out some rusting chemical device left over from the early 1990s. Cook agreed they might but stated: "This war is wrong and I will oppose it in any case".
To say the war is wrong is to understand that the war could have been right. To add that you will also oppose it, is to concede that there had been wrong things he did not oppose. He was, in the best sense, a true politician.
Moralising, and wrong
I only knew him slightly but over a twenty-year period. Most politicians who are ambitious for office, as he was, tend to be extremely friendly when you meet them. They slap you on the back, or equivalent, exude good cheer, insist it would be great to meet again soon. But if you try to engage them in a discussion or open an argument, their eyes glaze over, or they pat you on the knee, imply that you dont understand reality, generally refuse to engage.
Cook was the opposite of this. Rather awkward and self-important he was bad at the small talk. But he was always willing to lock horns over an argument.
It is therefore very telling to compare him with Tony Blair who presents himself as being exactly this kind of politician with a difference.
No one has presented himself in modern times more thoroughly as a moralising figure than Blair. In 1997 he asked the British population to trust him as a man of values with an outstanding moral character. Soon afterwards, as Blairs foreign secretary, Robin Cook announced that there should be an ethical dimension to British foreign policy. Now we learn that Blair and his entourage scorned this pronouncement, spun against him and insisted on a policy of selling Hawk jets to Indonesia which manifestly undermined this proclamation.
But, then, soon after that, Blair was giving his speech in Chicago announcing his doctrine that universal human rights would now be backed up by force in order to impose a new and better democratic moral order on the world.
One consequence of this was that Robin Cook also became a victim of a general denunciation of New Labour for its hypocrisy, helping to give politics a bad name because he sought to be ethical when he couldnt be. But in his case he really did seek to apply principles to policy.
This is no eulogy, or general overview of his life and character, of which there are now plenty in the British papers. What needs to be said is not just that he made the right and principled call when he resigned from Britains Labour government over Iraq but also that he made the right and principled decision when he worked with the Americans to attack Serbia and save Kosovo.
Both go together, the actions of a man who used war when it was right and left office when it was wrong. It was a politics the public could respect. His death weakens British politics generally and also the capacity of those across the political spectrum to escape from the increasingly hysterical moralism that has public life in its grip.
