War sceptic Miliband offers chance of clean slate on Iraq
Brown has made many interesting appointments, but surely the most interesting is that of David Miliband, the man who many thought might challenge Brown and win, as the youngest foreign secretary in three decades. Especially as Miliband is known to have been privately sceptical about the Iraq war.Responding to his appointment yesterday, Mr Miliband called for "a diplomacy which is patient as well as purposeful, which listens as well as leads".
Unlike Jack Straw, who played a leading role in justifying the conflict, Miliband comes to this conflict with no past record on the subject, there are no previous comments about early victories etc., that Miliband has lying like an albatross around his neck. He really does represent a clean start and in Europe and abroad he will be seen as carrying none of the baggage that Straw and Margaret Beckett carried.
The first problem he faces is in heading off Tory claims that Britain must have a referendum regarding the new European Treaty but it is generally thought that he will sufficient grasp of his brief to see this off with some ease.Mr Miliband's elevation is extraordinary, making him the youngest foreign secretary since the ill-fated David Owen. Unlike Lord Owen, he has never worked in the Foreign Office before. He has socialism in his blood: his father was the Marxist professor Ralph Miliband, author of The State in a Capitalist Society.
He will present a stark contrast to his predecessor Mrs Beckett. He is energetic, modern, intellectual, non-tribal and instinctively pro-European. "It's a really interesting appointment," said Mark Leonard, the executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. "It's the first time since Robin Cook you have someone coming into the post with ideas about what foreign policy should look like. He's a natural internationalist."
Mr Miliband was one of a group of European foreign policy intellectuals who formulated the Laeken declaration in 2001 calling for institutional reform in the EU.
Miliband is a man that many of us, myself included, believe might one day be Prime Minister. Indeed, I was of the opinion that, if he challenged Brown in a leadership contest, that he might very well have won.
So he is an inspired choice for foreign secretary at a time when we not only have the Iraq war, but we have an American administration that seem to be considering action against Iran. Having already been instinctively against the Iraq war - and events since have proven that those of us who opposed that war were largely right - he is unlikely to approve, far less sign up to, any American action against Tehran.
Indeed, that largely applies to the new Prime Minister as well. David Blunkett revealed in his diaries that Brown only signed up to the Iraq war at the eleventh hour and only then because he feared that Blair would sack him if he didn't.
So George Bush faces a completely different British government, one that does not share his views over the Iraq conflict, and the appointment of Miliband tells us that Brown is not prepared to stick with the status quo.
Whereas Bush became used to expecting Blair's instant agreement on things like refusing to call for a ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon war, or possible action against the Iranians, that will not prove to be the case with Brown.
After the departure of Berlusconi and Aznar, Blair leaving Number Ten really does mean that Bush is isolated on the world stage, surrounded by a group of people who - with the exception of Merkel - really do not agree with his foreign policy.
There really are interesting times ahead. And Miliband's appointment tells us that Britain is about to embark on a much more independent course. When one couples this with the appointment of Sir Mark Malloch Brown to the post of minister for Africa, Asia and the United Nations, one really does sense that Brown is clearly signalling a change in the Special Relationship for as long as Bush is in power. Malloch Brown recently said that Bush and Blair's "loss of credibility" was imperilling the lives of humanitarian workers in conflict zones who were being "seen as serving western interests rather than universal values".
By appointing him to this post, Brown appears to be condoning what he said.
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