You know you've lost the battle for hearts and minds when...

...you get accused of releasing man-eating badgers among the local populus.

My apologies to anybody who has already seen this three month old article, but I've just come across it (during some casual investigation into the genus Meles).

British foreign policy: a tour d'horizon

Every international security pundit would like to summarise the broad sweep of strategic concerns facing the United Kingdom in a single hour. This is just such a lecture.

Sadly (or, for those of you reading it, happily), this is not mine. My comments are limited to parentheses. At least, not originally. Rather, it is a summary of the hour-long inaugural lecture of Professor Michael Clarke, the new director of the Royal United Services Institute.

Prof. Clarke began with the rather trite comment that this was a very uncertain time in international affairs. At such a time think tanks such as RUSI had a lot to offer, for they had the luxury to stoop and think while politicians were too busy reacting to events.

He began (apologetically) with a biblical quote: “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong … [for] … time and chance happeneth to them all”. The them for (and title of) his essay was Strategy and Fortune, for luck as much as good planning played a role in foreign (one might argue all) policy. Good strategies can ride over bad luck, whereas bad strategies were destroyed by it.

Having said this, he turned to a long analysis of the Blair years. Until 1997, UK foreign policy had been shaped by Realist orthodoxy: sovereignty; territorial inviolability; balance-of-power. Blair characterised this as a “doctrine of benign inactivity” (though it was clear that he did not see this as quite so benign, as bystanders watching the tragedies of the Balkans and Rwanda might appreciate).

By comparison, Blair’s own foreign policy would be shaped by three strands:
1) Policy designed around values such as liberty, democracy, tolerance and justice, where “idealism becomes Realpolitik”
2) The integration of “hard power” (the power to compel) with “oft power” (the power to attract)
3) A recognition that the world was not benign to the UK and that we would therefore need to fight for our values: thus the liberal interventionism exemplified in his Chicago Speech.
This liberal interventionism would have to be based on two strategies: Leadership and Positioning. Leadership meant that the UK should be in the foreground – as it was with Kosovo, climate change and Iraq. Positioning meant that the UK’s success would depend on where it stood; in Blair’s view, the best place to be was among democratic allies, shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States.

Clarke then described Blair as a Shakespearian character whose great successes were followed by great tragedy. And he did indeed begin successfully: his first term saw an increased give and take within the EU, more focussed on the bigger picture; successful intervention in Kosovo where British and French leadership – the willingness to break a deadlock by using ground forces – won the war with Milosevic; a textbook humanitarian intervention in Sierra Leone; and Operation Desert Fox, which Clarke argued was in retrospect far more successful than was at first thought – it nearly led to Saddam’s ouster.

But the events of September 11th changed both the world and Blair’s fortune – not because of what Al Qaeda did, but because of America’s reaction to it. Blair’s April 2002 meeting with President Bush at Crawford, Texas left Blair convinced that the US would invade Iraq and that the UK must therefore back them. He therefore came up with a five point plan that highlighted both his focus on positioning and his self-belief (some might argue hubris). He would
1) Get Europe to back the US, which would encourage
2) The US to work though the UN, which would include
3) The US committing to a renewed push for peace in Palestine, which would lead to
4) A regional settlement for the whole Middle East, which would
5) Draw in the Neo-Cons in Washington as it would play into their democratisation agenda.

Eventually (perhaps sadly) he failed on all counts. Consequently the US went it “alone”, and the UK was bound to join them because of Blair’s conviction that this was the position that the UK must adopt if it was to have influence internationally. Four years later the objectives of the coalition have been radically revised, from creating a peaceful, democratic and free Iraq, they are now happy just to retreat with honour from an Iraq stable enough to hold together while Iraqis settle their own differences. The result for Blair was that he lost his power to lead or to take the initiative; indeed, an axis formed against him personally, led by Putin, Schroeder and Chirac. Blair tried to recover. Clarke noted the focus after 2003 on Africa, the environment and global poverty. Gleneagles was a personal triumph for Blair but perhaps also a parting gift from a G8 glad to be seeing the back of him.

The key messages from the Blair era were that
1) Globalisation is not inherently benign (especially if you are from the Third World) and is certainly not equitable
2) The UK is very well placed to benefit from Globalisation because it has an open society and a flexible economy]
3) The UK lives (and dies) by collective action
4) There is a crisis of collective action in the world today.

At this point Clarke turned to the future, and noted that the challenges for the future depended on how one viewed it. Traditional international security problems would focus on the Middle East, a resurgent Russia, Britain’s place in Europe. Trans-national problems included crime, terror, WMDs, energy-, cyber- and food-security. Structural problems include global inequality, climate change, health and failing states. What is not clear is in what way these impact on Britain. What is clear is that the international consensus is weak, unclear and ineffective, and that even the powerful were struggling to impose their will.

In dealing with the apparent problems highlighted above, however, there was a tendency to ignore the problems of international structures – how one achieves an international consensus. There was almost a tragic fatalism that accepted the failure of international institutions since the Cold War, with new sources of legitimacy replacing “clear pillars” with a “subtle constellation of power”; difficulties of control and influence as a result of network, globalised and disaggregated economies; changing “rules of the game” as international law leant more towards human security.

In fact, international law was weaker rather than stronger, and the West only had itself to blame. The West had played fast and loose with international law – acts of humanitarian intervention had undermined legal norms. This was a dangerous game to play, for in what would be the “Asian Century” the West would lose power and influence, and “rules matter most to the least powerful.”

Yet Clarke remained optimistic. He believe that the US would gain from considering and addressing these issues; the UK would gain by working collectively, which it was traditionally good at; the UK remained part of a broad international consensus (if one looked beyond the immediate challenge of Iraq); and the UK had good armed forces. But Britain must be cautious about using them; their very quality led to a tendency to reach for force too soon. He also lamented (as did Lord Ashdown in his recent book) that while the military was more joined up than ever, it was woefully disconnected from humanitarian and civil agencies.

Blair was, in Clarke’s view, correct to position itself beside the US, but the UK must also recognise that the US is entering an introspective stage, and that when it emerges the old certainty that its Janus-faced strategy would always put the Atlantic fist would be gone; in the coming century, America would be a Pacific power first-and-foremost. The UK’s role in the C21st would be to be a hub rather than a pillar of international security, acting to articulate and lead the consensus (as the Stern Review did on climate change).

As for Europe, it would remain peaceful and prosperous, but in the Asian Century, it would increasingly struggle for latitude in which to manoeuvre.

A full transcript is available from RUSI.

More wisdom from Paddy Ashdown

Last I outlined the peacekeeping wisdom of Paddy Ashdown, as set out in his new book, Swords and Ploughshares. However, he has been dispensing other wise words recently, as well.

On 11 July he was interviewed on 18 Doughty Street. As well as discussing his book, he sets out a frankly ominous prognosis for the future situation in Iraq and (worse still) Afghanistan. If we lose, he suggests, we face the beginnings of a regional civil war across the Middle East (in the sense that Mao Tse-tung saw the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars), the collapse of Nato and the end of our willingness to intervene to prevent conflicts around the world.

He also had some very interesting things to say about the liberal Democrats, however, and especially about Sir Menzies Campbell. He gave quite a good description of the House of Commons, Prime Minister’s Question Time and the difficulties of being the leader of the third party (7.30mins). As he later explains, “I would much rather have taken the risk of going into Sarajevo through the siege than standing up at Prime Minister’s questions the House of Commons. It seems far less dangerous and far less frightening.”

Of particular note is his comment on Ming’s performance in comparison to his own. “People forget this when they comment on Ming Campbell’s Prime Minister’s question, which I think have become actually quite good, I was a disaster. I was a disaster for the first year as leader of the then-Liberal Party. I was ritually handbagged in front of the television cameras of the nation… by Mrs. Thatcher, and people went around saying ‘Will this guy ever hack it?’ You just have to learn how to deal with that.” (8.30mins)

And what space is there for the Lib Dems in the new British politics. Ashdown cautions patience. The shine will come off both Cameron and Brown, he predicts. Ming should concentrate on sagacity, integrity, experience – these are the qualities that will work in our favour in the coming year or two.

He has many interesting insights into Tony Blair, whom he likes and admires and with whom he came close to working in quasi-coalition. In a particularly germane moment, he sums up Blair’s career in a manner that bloggers would have died to have managed only a few weeks ago. Ashdown tells us that Blair said to him that three things would define his term in office: 1) that Labour and the Lib Dems would realign British politics; 2) Blair would re-associate Britain with its historic role at the centre of Europe; and 3) Blair would do something about the widening gap between rich and poor. On all three he has failed.

Finally, the best moment has to be Paddy’s giggle when Iain tells him that when Iain heard Gordon Brown had offered Ashdown a cabinet job, he naturally assumed that it must have been foreign secretary (33mins). Paddy obviously didn’t think this was quite such a natural conclusion.

The Trap: Whatever happened to our dreams of freedom? (Part 3)

Last night saw the third and final episode of Adam Curtis’s television series, The Trap: Whatever happened to our dreams of freedom?.

As I outlined in my reviews of the first and second episodes, this series has argued that the past thirty years has been dominated by a narrow and depressing view of freedom based on an assumption that cold rationality and a distrust of political leadership. Mr. Curtis has sought to undermine this concept. However, in doing so he has demonstrated his own failure to understand both the nature of freedom and the gulf between what has been delivered by political leaders and what individuals cry out for.

In this third post I will outline the programme for those who did not see it. I will address his conclusions in a final post, and there I will argue that he is wrong not only in his analysis but also in his fundamental call for a new type of freedom. In my writing, below, I will limit my comments (in the last and third from last paragraphs) to Curtis’s description of the experiences in Russia and in Iraq. Here Curtis was deliberately disingenuous, attempting to conjure a biased picture and so make it appear that the concept of liberty he opposes is to blame for the problems those countries experienced.

In the final episode, entitled We will force you to be free, Curtis abandoned his focus on psychology and Public Choice Theory, turning instead to the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism in the twentieth century. The leading exponent of liberty was the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. In his essay Two Concepts of Liberty he presented two different images of freedom, which he called “Negative” and “Positive” liberty. Both were born of the French Revolution, but where the former sought freedom from constraint, the latter sought to make the world a better place. Put crudely, these have been described as “freedom to” and “freedom from”: the freedom to act as one sees fit (as long as it does not curtail the freedom of others, as Mill and others stressed), or the freedom from want that came from a progressive society.

Berlin believed that negative liberty was a great prize, freeing us from coercion by others and tyranny by governments. Positive liberty, on the other hand, was a dangerous form of absolutism, for if there was only one ideal future, only one truth, then anything was justified to achieve that goal. “I object to paternalism,” Berlin explained, “to being told what to do.” His great fear was the tyranny of the Communist regimes that were at the time dominating Eastern Europe, but as his example he took the positive liberty preached by the Jacobins of the French Revolution: that the people were too stupid to appreciate freedom, so the state must “force them to be free”, using terror to force the changes necessary to make a better society. Negative liberty would protect us from this progressive tyranny. But Berlin also cautioned that the belief in negative liberty must never itself become an absolute destiny, for if it did it would morph into a form of positive liberty, with anything justified to achieve that end.

Having set out the philosophical battlefield, Curtis began to populate it. Positive liberty was very popular in the middle of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that freedom was shackled by society, and individuals had to break those shackles to be free. His views influenced Algerian revolutionaries who argued that the West controlled not by force of arms but of ideas, and that catharsis could be achieved by the cleansing fire of violence. Sartre also influenced Steve Biko, Che Guevara and Pol Pot. The views of these men fed back to Sartre, who advocated revolution to free society. This reached its apotheosis in the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia, where revolutionaries sought to sweep aside the shackles that bound society by liquidating the entire middle class, even inviting the Cambodian Diaspora back to help rebuild society, only to butcher them on the runways as they stepped off the planes.

The US reaction to the spread of revolutionary fervour was to promote reactionary forces; the “Realpolitik” of Henry Kissinger. But the support of dictators such as Pinochet and Marcos disgusted others in America – later known as the Neoconservatives – who felt that America should be promoting its values abroad rather than supping with the devil. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, his Secretary of State told congress that there “are things worth fighting for”, and the administration introduced Project Democracy, a plan to promote democracy abroad using four key tools:

• Public support for democratic politics (including dropping the old, discredited allies)
• Promoting democracy abroad – but only in its electoral form, and not what Curtis referred to as the “other aspects of democracy: the redistribution of land and wealth”
• Undermining communist governments abroad (e.g. in Nicaragua)
• The creation of an Office of Public Diplomacy to spread propaganda to the American public.

The result were two scandals: one contemporary and one held over for the future. The contemporary scandal was the Iran-Contra Affair. The scandal for the future was the precedent that was set for spinning intelligence to justify wars for which there was no clear and present danger. The problem, noted Curtis (though he later seemed to conveniently forget it) was that the Neocons had reified Berlin’s fear: they were advocating forms of negative liberty in a positivist way: they would force us to be free.

Nobody noticed, however, because in 1989 Communism collapsed and history ended. Liberal democracy had triumphed. Curtis chose to dwell on the results in Russia, where President Yeltsin followed Jeffrey Sachs advice and adopted a big bang approach to liberalising the economy, destroying elite institutions and freeing the people. To Curtis this was a disaster: prices shot up as soon as price controls were removed; people were issued with vouchers with which to buy stakes in privatising utilities, but they sold them for cash to the future Oligarchs who then snapped up the utilities for a windfall profit; objections in the Duma led Yeltsin to send in troops; finally there was a run on the banks and Russia defaulted on its debt. The results, argued Curtis, was that Russians turned their backs on the anarchy that had ensued and sought sanctuary in order. They willingly gave their freedoms away to President Putin, a reactionary autocrat who promised stability at the expense of liberty.

There is always a point in Curtis’s films where his bias is exposed. In this episode it was the Russian experience. His presentation of the Russian financial crisis crudely exploited time compression, disguising the five years that elapsed between the liberalisation and the financial difficulties. Nor did he mention the low price of commodities (on which Russia was dependent) in the late 1990s, or how much money would later flow into Russia as commodity prices rose. He ignored the knock-on effects from the Asian financial crisis, to which Russia was a sequel. And he said nothing of the Chechen War, surely a more effective tool in Putin’s armoury than the economy. Lastly, Curtis ignored the very different experience in much of Eastern Europe, where liberalisation has led to massive rises in living standards and where greater freedom has been welcomed. This analysis exposes Mr. Curtis as a partial and biased analyst. It does him no credit.

In the final part, Curtis suggested that Tony Blair was quite taken with the principles of negative liberty, but lamented the loss of idealism that positive liberty conveyed. He wrote to Isaiah Berlin and asked whether it might be possible to synthesise the two, though the dying Berlin never replied. Blair went on to argue that it was the destiny of the West to spread liberty. Curtis argues that this was negative liberty as evangelism, but others might argue that it was not negative liberty at all. Blair was also aware that Public Choice Theory had undermined faith in politicians, so the only way to carry the people was – argued Curtis – to lie to them. Evidence for the Iraq war was spun, and Iraq was given a Russian-style dose of liberalising shock-therapy: everything was privatised and the Baath administrators were sacked.

The Iraq experience also encouraged distortion and bias from Curtis. He argued that the de-Baathification resulted from a liberal distrust of public officials. Not a word was said of the intellectual antecedent of this idea, the de-Nazification of Germany, or the fact that the vast majority of the Iraqi people were demanding the removal of their Baath tormentors. Even more unbelievably, Curtis claimed that it was the economic consequences of liberalisation and the lack of positive liberty at the heart of Iraqi democracy that triggered the insurgency, not a combination of Sunni ex-Baath rejectionists and Al Qaeda-inspired fanatics, as every other commentator and expert has agreed. It was fabrication on a grand scale.

He was right in one area, though. The emergence of Islamic terrorism in Western cities has been used – by both Blair and President Bush, among others – to justify massive extensions of state power in an attempt to pre-empt crime and terrorism. This has gone beyond terror, however, to seek pre-emptive powers to control possible criminal and even anti-social behaviour. The result is a return to the arbitrary power of the state and the end of the very civil liberties that the West is claiming to protect. It is a bitter irony.

I have separately reviewed part 2 and part 3. Curtis's conclusion and my analysis of it are discussed in a final post.

A lot of nonsense talked about Saddam

One of the world’s most evil tyrants was executed this morning, in accordance with Iraqi law. We may not like it, but we should accept it with more grace than some liberals appear willing to show.

I must take issue with Tim Kent’s conspiracy theory, in particular (another MySpace user, so I can’t reply on his blog). He argues that “[Saddam’s] old friends are protected. Yes, his old mates like Rumsfeld, Bush, Thatcher, Kohl. All of the people who supplied him with weapons, chemicals, materials to carry out his murders and wars. No need for that to come out now!”

This is nonsense. These four and others did tolerate Saddam Hussein during the 1980, in the erroneous belief that he was a lesser evil than Ayatollah Khomeini. But it is unlikely that there are any smoking guns still to be revealed. On the contrary; the reason why Mr. Kent is able to make his allegations is because the involvement of Rumsfeld, Bush, Thatcher, Kohl and others came out a long time ago.

Secondly, it rests on the presumption that he was hanged at the behest of the American and British governments: “Hanging Saddam leaves a further stain on the west…” In fact, the Coalition Provisional Authority did what little they could to prevent his death. Iraq’s first post-Saddam constitution, the Law of Administration for the State of Iraq for the Transitional Period did not provide for the death penalty, and Western governments tried to convince the Iraqi government not to introduce it.

The Iraqis were determined, however. The death penalty is common throughout Arabia, where Western opposition to capital punishment is treated with derision. With hundreds dying every week from sectarian violence, terror and crime, they were never likely to accede to our pleas. In addition, it was quite clear that they wanted to kill Saddam Hussein; one of the greatest concerns about this whole episode was that capital punishment was introduced very much with one man in mind.

In fact, while we a right to oppose the death penalty, I am not convinced that we are right to hector the Iraqis about it at this time. Notions of justice are not universal but are rooted in cultures. In our Christian culture, where “there [is] more joy in heaven over one sinner that does penance than over ninety-nine righteous persons…”, we look to rehabilitate criminals. Other cultures are less forgiving. I am not an expert on Islam or Arabic tradition, but it may be that retribution is more important to them than rehabilitation. Furthermore, with hundreds dying every week, they are probably not in a forgiving mood.

I hope that eventually Iraqis will come to enjoy true liberty: not just the freedom from Saddam that President Bush hailed, but the true liberty that comes from being an autonomous individual free from fear or coercion. It will be a long journey, and it may be that their road to freedom must begin with the execution of their last tyrant. In future I hope they can build a society where the State does not kill its citizens (even criminal ones) and rules apply equally to all. I do not think we will advance their respect for liberty by condemning the death of this evil man.

Iraq, the media and the war on terror

Matthew d’Ancona, editor of the Spectator, gave a speech yesterday at Policy Exchange at which he launched a pamphlet entitled Confessions of a Hawkish Hack – the media and the war on terror. He was also interviewed by the New Statesman’s Martin Bright. In what was a generally thoughtful and at times pessimistic discussion, perhaps the most interesting feature was that both the right-wing Mr. d’Ancona and the left-wing Mr. Bright admitted that that they might yet be proved wrong regarding their positions (respectively pro- and anti-) on the “War on Terror” and the Iraq War.

Those of you who now dismiss everything that supporters of the war have to say as though their every utterance is forever tainted should look away now, for this discussion is not for you. It is about you, however, for one of Mr. d’Ancona’s main themes was that one tragedy of the Iraq War is that it has undermined –perhaps destroyed – our society’s ability to engage in much-needed debate about the war between Islamic fundamentalism and Western values.

Mr. d’Ancona’s argued that Tony Blair’s decision to publish the Iraq Dossier both confused intelligence (the art of assessment, interpretation and educated guesswork) with spin (the art of presenting maybes as definites) and made the justification of the war rest on the existence of WMD, rather than Saddam Hussein’s violation of 12 years of Security Council resolutions. “Iraq” had now become shorthand for everything that is wrong with the New Labour project, and for its ultimate failure.

The result was that the much more important debate about how we confront Islamists bent on establishing a global Caliphate (an attitude that some American’s have taken to describing, quite accurately, as “Islamo-fascism”) is now framed in simplistic terms that paint everything as black and white and uses one single battle as a yardstick for the wider debate.

The question one is asked as a matter of course is “Where did you stand on Iraq?”, and how one answers is taken as indicative of where one stands on everything else, and whether one’s judgement is worthy of consideration. Mr. d’Ancona did not use the simile, but it would be like judging one’s position on the liberation of Europe by asking whether one supported the Battle of Arnhem.

Mr. d’Ancona’s fear is that we may be losing a war that many of us refuse to accept exists. While he recognises that “War on Terror” is a vague and unsatisfactory term, he questions what alternative President Bush could have used after 9/11: to name Islam even in context would have stoked the crusade fallacy Bin Laden would have us believe; to refer to it as merely a crime would not have satisfied the horror felt around the world. The enemy certainly views it as a war, and its plans span generations.

“This is the cold sweat war” in which the terrorist first spreads fear and then discord; we fight amongst ourselves, both between and within democracies. Meanwhile governments face the pressure to appear constantly new, constantly interesting, so that priorities become lost in “the quest for the daily mandate”. Governments have become subject to a form of ADHD, constantly flitting from one policy area to the next, frantically legislating and politicking, and journalists are party to it; they demand hyperactivity because it feeds their thirst for rolling-news.

The West is suffering from its own consumer culture (there d’Ancona would agree with both the domestic left and the Islamic far-right). If we don’t like a product we take it back and throw it away. This is liberating where MP3 players and mobile phones are concerned. With political parties it is harmful, and in foreign policy it is disastrous. Politics in general and foreign affairs in particular require strategic thinking; a sense of what we want at the finish and how we will get there. The key to strategy is that we stick to it even when faced with tactical setbacks; Tobruk didn’t make us abandon the North Africa Campaign.

Too many in the West now think that once the “Two madmen” that led us into Iraq have left office we will be able to put the sordid chapter of their folie à deux behind us and return to the norm of peace. This is wrong. “Modern conflicts are not trials of strength but of will”. This war, with a strain of Islam that teaches that the West is decadent and must be overthrown and which trains our own citizens to be its foot-soldiers, will grind on long after Blair and Bush are gone. The question is, do we have the patience we need to save our civilisation?

How Britain can be a true friend of the United States

Lurking under a headline worthy of The Times’s new tabloid format is a damning indictment of Tony Blair’s failure to manage Britain’s relationship with America. According to Dr. Kendall Mayers, a UK specialist at the State Department, Blair’s relationship with George Bush has been “a one sided relationship that was entered into with open eyes… there was nothing. There was no payback, no sense of reciprocity”.

Herein lies the root of much of the failure of Western policy in the Middle East. I have been and remain a staunch defender of the Atlantic Alliance and Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States. I am unashamed to call myself an friend of America. Yet the current Administration has treated the British Government with utter contempt. While I do not doubt the sincerity of Labour ministers when they say that they have always made strong representations to the American Government in private, it is clear that these have been brushed aside in a naïve display of hubris.

The catalogue of missed opportunities is long. Between 9/11 and the Iraq War, Britain pressed the US to take a holistic approach to the Middle East; no settlement could be achieved if the Israel/Palestine tragedy was not resolved. Yet the Bush administration has steered clear of this knottiest of problems, leaving it as a festering wound enraging Muslim opinion.

Only a few days ago Jeremy Greenstock, formerly Britain’s chief diplomat in Iraq, reiterated the claim that Britain urged the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority not to disband the Iraqi army. The Americans ignored this advice, sacked three hundred thousand of troops and started aggressively de-Baathifying the country. The newly jobless and disaffected quickly mounted an insurgency that only later took on an Islamist dimension.

The UK has repeatedly urged the US to close the Al Queda recruiting office at Guantanamo Bay. And the US ignored Britain’s suggestion that they engage with Iran in 2004; two years later we will go to Tehran cap-in-hand.

This is a tragedy. When asked on his death-bed what his greatest mistake was, President Eisenhower famously stated that he should have supported Britain over the Suez War. Despite the illegality of this conflict, the Anglo-French debacle gave a fillip to Arab nationalism that led directly to the Baathist takeover in Iraq and so to this second, equally ill-starred conflict. I do not tell this story to justify either that war on this one. Rather, I wonder whether President Bush will also one day come to rue ignoring British advice and treating his closest ally as a client state.

Having said all this, I do not share Dr. Mayers pessimism that the “special relationship” is doomed. However, a re-evaluation is due. Both Britain and America must learn that friends and allies serve one another best when being honest and tough with one another. There are many truths that friends do not wish to hear, but a real friend does not sit quietly by and bury his fears because he does not want to upset his friend with an uncomfortable truth. Rather, he tells it how he sees it, sticks to his guns (or ploughshares) and challenges his friend to prove his fears ungrounded. This is not what the Blair government has done, nor what the Bush administration has encouraged. But this is what the future must entail.

Britain must be a true friend to the United States. To be this, we must be a friend that says the truth.