I have to admit that I have a soft spot for Denis MacShane, the Labour MP for Rotherham and former Foreign Office minister under Tony Blair. He is an unrelenting and articulate critic of Cameron’s Conservatives and a passionate, opinionated and interesting politician.
Like me, he has criticised the BBC over the BNP, attacked David Cameron’s alliance with Michal Kaminski, and helped expose the “cult of Cable”. But it would be absurd to pretend that he and I agree about foreign affairs. MacShane, for example, is an outspoken defender of Israel and a signatory to the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society.
The former minister has had a letter published in this week’s New Statesman, having a go at yours truly. Our published letters are not available online, so I have reproduced it below:
The usually super-savvy Mehdi Hasan is wrong on Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 (Dissident Voice, 25 January). If 20,000 men cross the frontiers of a sovereign state, while an air force bombs civilians and a fleet sails to bombard the enemy coast, most of us think that’s an invasion.
Hasan writes about the “the traditional Tory school of scepticism in international affairs”. That gave us appeasement of apartheid, support for Pinochet, a knighthood for Mugabe and a blind eye as 8,000 European Muslim were killed one by one at Srebrenica. I thought the NS was against tyranny and dictators and Tory appeasement of both?
“Usually super-savvy”? Denis, flattery will get you everywhere . . .
Let’s respond to his two main points in turn:
1) In my column, I mocked David Cameron for rushing to Tbilisi, in 2008, “to declare his support for embattled Georgia, which, he wrongly claimed, had been ‘illegally invaded’ by Russia”. MacShane disputes this, blaming the conflict on Russian forces crossing “the frontiers” of Georgia.
But the EU’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia supports my view. Here are the conclusions of their September 2009 report, via the BBC:
“The shelling of Tskhinvali [the South Ossetian capital] by the Georgian armed forces during the night of 7 to 8 August 2008 marked the beginning of the large-scale armed conflict in Georgia,” the report says.
It adds later: “There is the question of whether [this] use of force . . . was justifiable under international law. It was not.”
It also says Georgia’s claim that there had been a large-scale Russian military incursion into South Ossetia before the outbreak of war could not be “sufficiently substantiated”, though it said there was evidence of a lower-level military build-up.
And here’s the BBC’s Tim Whewell, who investigated the outbreak of hostilities for Newsnight in November 2008:
Its [Georgia’s] attack on 7 August on the breakaway region of South Ossetia triggered a Russian invasion, which in turn sparked the biggest crisis in east-west relations since the cold war.
The United States, Britain and other western governments offered Georgia strong diplomatic support, accusing Russia — South Ossetia’s ally — of aggression and massive overreaction.
But now mounting evidence is casting doubt on Georgia’s account of the origins and course of the war. It suggests that Georgia played a bigger role than it admits in provoking the conflict, and that it may have violated the rules of war in the first days of the fighting.
Oh, and here’s Colin Powell, a Republican and former US secretary of state, speaking on CNN shortly after the war began in 2008:
POWELL: And I think it was foolhardy on the part of President Saakashvili and the Georgian government to kick over this can, to light a match in a roomful of gas fumes.
SESNO: So you’re saying the Georgians provoked this?
POWELL: They did. I mean, there [were] a lot of reasons to have provocations in the area, but the match that started the conflagration was from the Georgian side.
Care to respond, Denis?
2) MacShane then turns to my preference for “traditional Tory . . . scepticism in international affairs” over the discredited, belligerent neoconservatism promoted by Michael Gove, George Osborne and others on the current Conservative front bench. He refers to Tory support for Augusto Pinochet — conveniently omitting to mention Jack Straw’s decision to send Pinochet home to Chile in 2000.
He also mentions a knighthood for Mugabe, again conveniently omitting to mention that it took Labour 11 years to strip him of that knighthood –and that, too, under pressure from the Tories.
MacShane is right to condemn the Hurd-Rifkind appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic in the mid-1990s, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of European Muslims. But he fails to mention Labour’s own miserable record on war and peace: the illegal invasion of Iraq, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.
I oppose “tyranny and dictators” as much as the next man — unless the next man is the Saudi-loving, Mubarak-supporting George W Bush. I just don’t advocate illegal wars of aggression, which kill thousands of civilians, as a means of getting rid of either.
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