Miliband's true colours
The foreign secretary's Bush-echoing stance on Georgia shows just what kind of leader he'd be All comments (159)
Andrew Murray The Guardian, Friday August 22 2008
If there is a Labour party leadership election this autumn, Dick Cheney and John McCain have their candidate. Step forward David Miliband, neoconservative. The foreign secretary's aggressive posturing on the side of Washington over the Ossetian crisis has made it abundantly clear where he stands on the great divide in world politics today. He is for the US empire.
This is bad news for those Labour party supporters who correctly believe that the party's troubles cannot be overcome without ending its witless support for US foreign policy and the calamities it is causing, of which the continuing Iraq war is the most lurid exhibit.
There was a flutter of hope during his momentary honeymoon period last summer that Gordon Brown would make the change the party and the public wanted - he muttered about pulling troops out of Iraq and looked a study in sulkiness when visiting George Bush.
All huff and puff, as it turned out. At least Miliband has made a point of puncturing any similar illusions in advance. His now famous manifesto in the Guardian parroted the standard Washington line on Iraq to the effect that the only problem was the failure of the invaders to prepare for the peace as well as the war, a proposition that even Donald Rumsfeld and Christopher Hitchens may by now agree with. But it is in relation to the Russia-Georgia crisis that he has most clearly broken cover.
Mikheil Saakashvili's role in igniting the conflict is ignored or downplayed. Russia should be punished. Nato must expand headlong. The view of the peoples of South Ossetia and Abkhazia that they do not wish to be Georgian must be ignored. Above all, the part played by US global expansionism in provoking the crisis must go unexamined.
Miliband has put Britain back in the centre of almost exactly the same "coalition of the willing" as rallied behind the Iraq infamy - Washington, London and "new Europe". The main difference is that this time Italy and Spain have joined France and Germany on the side of caution, leaving the British government even more isolated.
And even more hypocritical. For Miliband to insist - as he did in an article in the Times this week - that Russia must respect international law, displays a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. Pre-Iraq, support for the UN and international legality were cornerstones of Labour's stated approach to world politics. Tony Blair put paid to that and here we are half a million or so corpses later.
You can't play cop and robber at the same time on the world stage, just as you can't offer Labour a fresh start while clinging doggedly to the most disastrous policy of the last 11 years. Deputy chief whip Nick Brown appears to have got the message with a remarkable article on Comment is Free this week, trashing the Miliband line and Georgia's Nato aspirations.
Perhaps he has noticed that the foreign secretary is not only echoing George Bush's approach to the Georgian crisis but even David Cameron's, whose brief flirtation with less subservience to Washington seems to have gone by the board. Indeed, Miliband seems irked that Cameron got to Tbilisi first to deliver a Russophobic rant - the Tory leader's pledge to bar Russians from Selfridges marks the only point of difference. Miliband apparently stands firm on the right to shop, come what may.
Of course, the collateral damage done to the foreign secretary's prime ministerial pretensions is surely the least of the tragedies of the unnecessary war in the Caucasus. But it does leave an opening for any politician who can articulate the public desire for a foreign policy more independent of the US, before imperial Washington drags us into conflicts which may make even the immense suffering of Iraq seem like an appetiser.
· Andrew Murray is chair of the Stop the War Coalition
office@stopwar.org.uk
