Arthur,
I don't know about "maniac", as Tam Dalyell refers to him, but
I think that Robert Cooper is pretty simple-minded in the way that he
overviews history and characterises countries.
I am beginning to think that Blair is a coward. Let me describe why. A
few days ago a Star Chamber trio of the Executive of the Labour Party
kicked George Galloway MP out of the Labour Party, obviously with Blair's
approval. He is now deciding whether to resign his seat and re-contest
his election to the House of Commons as an Independent MP. (General
opinion is that he will succeed because he is a popular MP in his
constituency -- they call him "Georgeous George".) Galloway's
sins were that he opposed Blair's decision to invade Iraq and called
Blair a "wolf". He is a specialist on Iraq, has established a
charity for childhood cancer there and is married to an Arab doctor. His
main failing, however, is that on one occasion he was filmed by the BBC
as praising Saddam Hussein in a rather flamboyant manner even though he
says he does not support Saddam's policies.
Now for Tam Dalyell. He is a left-winger, one of the most experienced
Labour MPs in the House of Commons and in fact is the Father of the House
-- that is, the longest-served. He is very intelligent and highly
respected by all sides. He writes a column on science and technology in
the New Scientist every week. He is also well-informed and
attacked Thatcher week after week, month after month, when he discovered
that Thatcher had given permission for a nuclear submarine to torpedo an
old Argentinian battleship containing hundreds of soldiers, the
Belgrano, steaming away as fast as it could from the Falklands War
and was well outside the war zone and pointing for home. Like
Galloway and about 140 other Labour MPs, Dalyell was also an opponent of
the Iraq invasion. In addition, Tam Dalyell called Blair a "war
criminal".
Blair has not dared to act against Dalyell.
Keith
At 08:07 26/10/2003 -0500, you posted:
<<<
'I BELIEVE EUROPE WILL HAVE ITS OWN SEPTEMBER 11'
Rachel Sylvester talks to Robert Cooper, Tony Blair's foreign policy
guru
If there is one man who can explain why Tony Blair went to war in Iraq,
sent troops to Afghanistan and wants to join the euro, it is a tall,
cultured man in Brussels called Robert Cooper. He is the foreign policy
guru who, on secondment to No 10 in the years before the September 11
attacks, influenced much of the Prime Minister's thinking on
international affairs.
It was also Mr Cooper who, five years ago, persuaded Mr Blair to push for
a European military capability. Then, presciently, in the months before
the World Trade Centre attack, he started badgering the Prime Minister to
think seriously about the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. When
the war on terrorism began, he was made Britain's special representative
on Afghanistan. Later, with military action against Iraq looming, he
argued for a new form of imperialism, based not on territory but on
western values such as human rights, democracy and Coca-Cola.
Now he has been posted to Brussels as right-hand man to Javier Solana,
Europe's foreign and security policy supremo. But he retains close links
with Downing Street, where his ideas are held in great respect. With his
flamboyant cufflinks and designer ties, Mr Cooper, 56, is an unusual
career diplomat. He is more likely to be seen careering through the
traffic on his bicycle than folding his long legs into a diplomatic
car.
In Whitehall and beyond, he is valued for his independence of mind.
Unusually for a civil servant, he has a licence to print as well as to
think next week he is publishing a book, The Breaking of Nations,
that sets out his ideas. Some are horrified by his influence on Mr Blair;
Tam Dalyell, the Left-wing Labour MP, once described him as a maniac. But
the Prime Minister greatly values his ability to "think out of the
box".
"I am an idealist," he says, as he stride towards a Brussels
cafe. "I still have my Sixties instincts. I do not understand why
people would want to fight each other -- or sometimes why they would
not."
Although Europe has so far escaped a terrorist attack on the scale of the
September 11 tragedy, he fears that one is almost inevitable.
"There are enough disaffected people in the world and there are
enough weapons," he says. "The image of what you can do as a
terrorist - pictures of planes crashing into the twin towers - will live
in people's memories."
Terrorist groups have not yet acquired a nuclear weapon, he says.
"They have tried and you have to guess that if they try for long
enough they are going to succeed."
He believes that the risks to world peace are greater now than they were
in the first half of the 20th century, when thousands of people were
killed in two world wars.
"Individuals will have a potential destructive capacity which they
have not had since the Middle Ages. The risk is that the liberation that
we have all experienced over the past 200 years - from the state, the
Church and so on -- is going to turn out to be a very nasty
joke."
This is a frightening vision, particularly coming from a mild-mannered
civil servant who was astute enough to see the danger that the power
vacuum in Afghanistan posed to the wider world. The point now, Mr Cooper
says, is to work out what can be done to stop the unthinkable from
happening.
"You stop it by spreading civilisation, by creating good government.
We have to try to put ourselves into the situation where there has been
another major terrorist incident - using biological weapons in a European
city, for example. Imagine what you might do, then do it in
advance."
Although he rejects the analysis that there is a "clash of
civilisations" between Christianity and Islam, he thinks the West
has still not sufficiently understood the new threat.
"In the Cold War, we were dealing with a civilisation which was very
similar to ours. The people we are dealing with now are much more
foreign. Maybe we need more anthropologists."
The Cooper theory is that there are three types of country pre-modern,
defined by chaos and lack of state control, such as pre-war Afghanistan;
the modern nation state within clear boundaries, such as Saddam Hussein's
Iraq; and post-modern, in which the nation state is collapsing into a
bigger order - the European Union for example.
The post-modern world, which prefers diplomacy to war, must realise that
pre-modern countries are dangerous not because they are strong but
because they are so weak that they can become ciphers for people such as
Osama bin Laden. It must also understand that the modern and pre-modern
worlds operate in different ways.
"You cannot treat people like Saddam Hussein the way you treat your
neighbours," Mr Cooper says. "If we have a problem with France
and Germany, we negotiate. But there are leaders you cannot negotiate
with."
He argues that the attack on Iraq was justified to prevent the spread of
weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups. He still thinks that
such weapons may be found. Even if they are not, he says, "I find it
difficult to regard the fall of Saddam as a bad thing".
As an aside, Mr Cooper has an interesting theory that it is particularly
difficult for oil-rich countries to become democracies. "If you have
a state that does not have to raise taxes because the money flows out of
the ground, it can survive without democracy."
It was the realisation that the chaos of the pre-modern world could so
easily destroy the order of the post-modern one that prompted Mr Cooper
to develop his ideas about a new imperialism.
"Decolonisation left the world with a lot of weak states," he
says. "For a while they lived on the capital that had been left
behind then survived because the Cold War gave the superpowers a reason
to prop them up.
"But now we have seen states collapse and in Afghanistan we saw how
dangerous that can be. If you want to avoid havens for terrorists, you
have to bring these countries back under control."
Although he appears to share some of the American neo-conservative views,
he rejects the idea that there is an "axis of evil" that must
be neutralised one country at a time. Iran and North Korea should be
dealt with in different ways, he says.
Mr Cooper believes that cost will limit the number of imperial
adventures. "In the old days, the imperialists used to exploit
people; now they pay for them. The temptations of imperialism are very
limited as a result."
Mr Cooper is concerned by America's global dominance. "I would be
more comfortable in a world where power was less concentrated," he
says. Mr Blair, caught between Europe and America, is in an awkward
position.
"He finds himself as the main advocate of Europe in the United
States and that is unhealthy for him and it is unhealthy for the US. I
think Blair is a European basically."
The transatlantic tensions over Iraq, Mr Cooper argues, can be explained
by the fact that, as a post-modern concept, the EU is based on
multi-national negotiations and the rule of law, while the US, a modern
state in his definition, sees the world in terms of power. That is why
the Americans have less time for the United Nations than does
Europe.
While the US would benefit from taking the rule of law, symbolised by the
UN, more seriously, the EU also "needs to think a bit more in terms
of power," he says. "We cannot just sit back and leave the rest
of the world to America."
That is why he supports the idea of a European defence force as a
support, rather than a rival, to Nato. The Americans are far from happy
about the idea. Mr Cooper, foreign policy guru first in Britain and now
in Europe, says with candour "Influencing foreigners is really
difficult."
Daily Telegraph -- 25 October 2003
Keith Hudson, Bath, England,
<www.evolutionary-economics.org>,
<www.handlo.com>,
<www.property-portraits.co.uk>
