Chris Abbott on Global Security

Tell me about Losing Control.

I used to work with the author, Paul Rogers, at Oxford Research Group and we ran the sustainable security programme together, and this book came out about ten years ago. The third edition has just been released this year. The reason why this is top of my list is that it introduces a key concept that was missing for this area and it’s a control paradigm, the notion of liddism. It’s basically a trend whereby Western states attempt to control threats to international security by military means, rather than understanding the nature of the threats and countering them at source. So, you can compare this to a pressure cooker where every attempt is made to keep the lid on, instead of turning down the heat.

Oh, I see. Liddism. The lid. Clever. So, what would be an example of trying to keep the lid on instead of turning down the heat?

Some of the policies pursued during the so-called ‘War on Terror’.

And how would you have turned the heat down?

Well, there you have to identify some of the specific sources of insecurity and attempt to address them. So, for example, in that instance you may try to look at some of the reasons why some Muslims are being alienated and marginalised, particularly politically and economically, and try to work with local governments, mosques etc, to try to resolve some of these issues. The key concept is about going to the source of the threat rather than trying to counter it and keep a lid on it. If you try to control it then you end up in a situation where the pressure continues to build and the lid might blow up in your face. Then there is the notion that irregular warfare from the marginalised communities may in the end prevent powerful states from maintaining their positions through military force. So that’s the key concept that Paul introduces, and it’s a wonderfully written book and captures the whole essence of this in a powerful way.

The second thing he draws attention to is the way that Western states very much focus on the wrong causes of insecurity: they are focused on traditional military causes, rogue states, terrorism etc, whereas the more pressing and fundamental causes are the widening socio-economic divide and environmental factors like climate change and competition over resources. Paul was ahead of his time in highlighting these issues. Nowadays these ideas are accepted. He is an academic but was aware that it is not enough to sit around thinking about these things. He understood the policy implications of his work and worked with think-tanks to try and push through recommendations based on his analysis.

It didn’t go very well then, given what happened in Iraq.

The thing with Iraq is that everyone was telling Tony Blair and policy-makers that this was a bad idea, but they pursued a different agenda. So what Paul was saying was unfortunately ignored. However, the flip side to that is that a million people marched on London to protest against the war and I think if the UK or America were thinking seriously about threatening military force against, say, Iran they would have to think twice. I’m not sure a government could survive politically if they were to do the same thing again. The sense of anger and injustice is too great.

Blair’s Wars, John Kampfner.

This is a great book. It came out just after the Iraq invasion. At the time John Kampfner was the editor of the New Statesman and his key question was: why did Tony Blair support George Bush and the use of force in Iraq?

And?

Well, to answer this question he goes right back to the beginning of Blair’s premiership and he makes the point that Tony Blair took Britain into five different conflicts. He goes right from the very beginning – he starts off with air strikes in Iraq, the Kosovo war, the dispatch of British troops to Sierra Leone in 2000, the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He tries to pick apart a very human, psychological thing that was going on behind the policy decisions and talks about what happened in the shift, particularly in Tony Blair’s mind. Early on there was an emphasis on humanitarian intervention, but by the end of his premiership he was involved in the illegal occupation of Iraq with George Bush. Kampfner talks around these issues and about the style of government that led to some of these disastrous foreign policy decisions.

What was going on psychologically?

He talks about the failure of government decision-making and focuses on the fact that the style of decision-making was very presidential and involved a very small group of political appointees and civil servants. Cabinet and parliament were given a marginal role and Blair firmly believed that he was doing the right thing. He really did believe that Saddam Hussein was an evil man and that he was right.

That’s not that bad a point, is it?

No, it’s not, but when you start sending armed forces into another country based on purely moral, gut-reaction feelings of good and evil, we start to fall into a very dangerous policy-making process. And where do you stop? Saddam Hussein is not the only dictator who has repressed his people and done awful things. Also, there has been a lot of work done on humanitarian intervention, where the military has to be used to create a space for the aid to go in, and that wasn’t the case in Iraq and it wasn’t the point. All the excuses they used – WMD, terrorism, humanitarian need – they were talked about after the decision had been made and I think the decision was a very personal moral decision.