264. Ethics, votes and wars

We saw in the last episode, that Britain’s involvement in the NATO intervention in Kosovo could be regarded as part of an ‘ethical foreign policy’, since its objective, many felt, was humanitarian, though others disagreed. Another military action, to support the government of Sierra Leone against rebellion, was more clearly humanitarian rather than self-serving, and so easier still to defend on ethical grounds.

All this, together with a strong economy and some reforms that were beginning to bear fruit, in the social, educational and health arenas, but Blair’s Labour government in a strong position. So it called a general election in June 2001, when it would set out to do something the party had never achieved before: win a Commons majority, serve out a term in office, and then win another.

And Blair pulled it off. Indeed, not only did Labour win, it took another landslide majority.

Celebrations didn’t last long though. Within three months of the election win, terrorists attacked the US in the atrocity we now call 9/11. An attack that serious led to a massive response, but not against the nation from which most of the terrorists and their leader, Osama bin Laden, came, which was Saudi Arabia, but against the nation that offered bin Laden refuge, Afghanistan.

That rather questioned the extent to which Labour was pursuing a foreign policy that could be called ethical. However, far worse was still to come. That, though, we’ll see in the next episode.

Illustration: the Twin Towers ablaze on 9/11, 11 September 2001. Public domain.

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License