Skipper

Two recent articles, one by Martin Kettle and the other by Andrew Rawnsley, address the subject of Blair's foreign policy. The speech delivered by Blair on Thursday morning was the third in series on this topic- the first in London earlier in the year and the second to the Australian parliament- which sought to rehabilitate the notion of the value based interventionist approach, first mooted in Chicago in 1999. Rawnsley argues that Blair was right to challenge the 'malign inactivity' of the 'realist' approach which denied the right of one state to interfere in the politics of another(though 'realist' theorists would argue with this analysis).

Blair's heightened sense of what is morally right led him to intervene in Sierra Leone to prevent more atrocities and he succeeded; led him to intervene in Kosovo to prevent more atrocities, and he succeeded; led him, after 9-11 to intervene in Afghanistan, where the jury is still very much out; and led him, in his curious solidarity with George Bush, to intervene in Iraq, where most of the juries sitting seem to have already reported not just a failure but one of cataclysmic proportions.

Kettle points out that much of what passes between the two politicians now will count for little: 'Two men with their backs to the wall and time running out.' Which is a pity from one point of view. Both have managed to deal their policy of benign intervention to alleviate or prevent suffering a near fatal blow by their Iraq adventure. We read and see so much of the strong trampling on the weak and feel impotent despair that they cannot be countered, through some external agency, with the force denied their victims.

Blair called in his speech for a reformed United Nations with the capacity to do just this. Ironically, it has been his own disastrous one -intervention- too- many which has probably forced American presidents for maybe the next decade into isolationist caution. The bloodstained streets of Baghdad are now paved with Blair's good intentions and the tragedy is that as a result, thousands more will suffer in the future, while we are forced to stand impotently by.