 Well, thank you very much. And I would like to say at the outset that Garrett was going to give me dinner before I gave the speech, or afterwards I forgot which. And he is a huge loss to your country and he is a huge loss to those of us who loved him. And I had a hell of a lot of disagreements with him. It never made one jot or tittle difference to a deep and abiding friendship. And we are all the losers for him. ond mae'n meddwl lle'n gobeithio a'r blaenau i dweud â'r oed yn ymddangosol am ymddangosol, ac ond ond yn ymddangosol. Yn ymddangosol, mae'n gweithio yn ymddangosol, mae'n mynd ymddangosol ac mae'n gwneud ymddangosol ar lŵn mynd i Llebiadau. A dyna'n ar hyn o'n gweithio y Llebiadau yn ymddangosol a'r hyn sydd yn ffordd, ac mae'n gweithio i'r ymddangosol, mae'n gweithio i'r ymddangosol. Yn y brydw i'r hyn sydd unifyddion o Constan â 21 yma yma dda, yw'r tymhwil yn cyfwyr dri, y llyfrionedd a ddechrau. Ond mae'r cyfwyr, y cyfwyr sydd gyda ddweud sydd yn cyfwyr y llyfrionedd a ddweud. Oedd yn gallu bod y ddweud yma o ddweud cyfwyr wedi cyfwyr a ddweud ddweud ar gyfer y mae hynny o rhywbeth. Rhywbeth fyddain yn y clywed, ac yn y bwysig o'u cychwyn ar gyfer hynny nid o'r llyfrionedd, is not just an add-on but it's something that has been striven for in the United Nations from the start. It is worth reminding ourself that while the war was still waging, the big format at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in 1944 to plan for a post war world. It's also quite important for the British to remember that it was the U.S. which insisted on a reference to a universal declaration of human rights against British objections and Soviet objections. On 25 April 1945 at San Francisco, the founding conference of the UN started and soon the U.S. Secretary of State Edward Stettinus made clear that the U.S. expected a Human Rights Commission to be established to promptly undertake to prepare an international bill of rights and the eventual full UN Commission on Human Rights met in January 1947 at Lake Success in New York State with Eleanor Roosevelt in the chair. Now it is because of that deep and underlying thing on human rights it's ensconced in the UN family. The extension of democracy is a welcome development for most of us, Member States of the UN, but we must not forget and that it's recent, you know. I mean when I was in the late 70s, China abstained on practically all discussions in the UN. China is becoming ever more involved in the UN and more active. But here they are with the largest population of any Member State. They don't accept democracy as an essential aspect of human rights, let alone a contributor to progress in the widest economic and cultural sense. And there are a considerable number of other countries in the UN that don't take this. So I don't think we can put democracy at the core of the center of the 21st century UN development. It can be there as part of our aspiration. And it is, I think, very interesting how, certainly almost all my active life in foreign affairs, the prevailing view within the British Foreign Office was that democracy would never come to the Arab States. And indeed the Arabists used to lecture us that there was something special, unique and almost peculiar in a virtuous way about Arab people not wanting democracy. Well that looks pretty different now and I think it was always nonsense. So it's a good moment to look again at this balance between human rights and democracy. I don't think you always have to choose. Of course all politicians always believe it's much better not to have to choose. But I think it is perfectly reasonable given human nature and the difference of circumstances and the Arab Spring is a very good demonstration of this that you pursue human rights and you pursue democracy. And as the situation evolves one or the other seems to strike a great accord with the country and you push that one and sometimes neither strikes a record or you can move on both fronts. At the moment for example I think that it's pretty inevitable that you're going to have to give human rights a much higher priority than we have given hitherto in Iran and I welcome that. Now I know I'm speaking Dublin. Bahrain is a live issue here. I followed it very carefully. I think the delegation which Erine O'Brien took to Bahrain and with politicians, a mixed delegation doctors, politicians, human rights workers was a very, very fine example of you if you like using the friendship that had been developed through the medical training in Dublin and the links into Bahrain. Erine is a friend of mine so I'm not objective. But I know that the report of their findings which occurred in the Lancet early in September is a model of that sort of report. And I think it's extremely important that that pressure on Bahrain comes from a country like Ireland with this unique link located into the whole heart of medicine. And I think it is outrageous some of the things that have been done and it's worth pursuing and persisting in pressure in this particular area. Now, UN Charter I think has withstood the passage of the years surprisingly well. There was a time when it was always in my hip pocket. That was in the Balkans. And I got quite a fond of it actually. And I think it is more flexible than people have thought. It's still in a funny way reflects the realities of the power structures of 1945, not completely by any means, but its capacity to switch from Shanghaishire to Communist China to accept the breakup of the Russian Federation and not to take the opportunity to ditch Russia, which I think owed a lot to Bush senior's diplomacy and very wise and very careful. And one has to go back to Anton Eden's quiet, persistent readiness to have serious rouse with both Roosevelt and with Churchill and his championship of France's continued positioning in international affairs after the war and never given very much credit for it. I believe one of the great achievements of Anton Eden as foreign secretary. Yet the UN cannot be static into the 21st century. We all know it. Reform has to take place. I'm not going to go into all the arguments. We all know them, but it is ridiculous that India, Japan, Brazil, Germany and a African country perhaps are on rotation is not reflected permanently into the UN and now that people have got used to the fact that there will be five countries still with the veto but the others will be permanent members but without the veto. I think we've already reached a stage where it will be almost impossible for Britain to exercise a veto on its own without having at least one other member and that's basically more likely than not to be France. And it is very interesting how despite and I'm a great believer in Anglo-French cooperation and I saw it in the Balkans working extremely well too. In the UN context, French-British cooperation with the exception of the Iraq war but then I think a lot of the fault there in London, not in Paris has been really very good and continues to be. I know some of you in this room because I know some of your positions of old over Europe will believing that there should be a European representation in the UN. Well I hope you won't go on with this absurd nonsense. I mean here we are, we just lived through Libya with Germany unable to support and Poland unable to support us and France and Britain left carrying largely the can over Libya. Don't go on telling us that the moment is ripe for UN representation to be by Catherine Ashton and the Ashton and that. This is absurd and really Europe makes itself absurd when it goes for pretension. Be realistic, maybe it'll happen. Who knows, I don't know the future. What my grandchildren are going to live up to, I don't know but I'm by training as you said kindly a doctor of medicine and medicine is about evolution of human conditions and that applies to politics and we are not allowing our people to catch up with our European pretensions. Just let them catch up and then we'll have some of these other ideas. Now I learnt to look at the future but you can't look at the future without just a very quick look back and I think that last 50 years I think the most dangerous for the world but in a funny way probably the most stable and so we may look forward and see a more stable 50 years than we've... Sorry a more dangerous in some respects less stable 50 years there was an element of stability in the Cold War but extreme danger and people do forget this and a lot of pretentious nonsense is talked about. I mean our cities were targeted there was minutes when we now learn more about the Cuban Missile Crisis there was a missile with a nuclear warhead 15 miles outside the Guantanamo Bay that on one Friday night was capable of firing on an invasion from the United States without reference back to the Kremlin we don't get very much closer to World War than that so we have lived through very dangerous times but still we have a structured international world and I think we can learn a great deal from that world and now look forward I think the crucial moment was 1990 and the invasion of Kuwait and for a moment George Bush Sr bestrowed the world having assembled that multilateral coalition and it looked extremely promising and we talked a lot of us not only idealists about a new world order and having assembled a force which included Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia it did seem possible to believe in almost anything and there used to be a learned article suddenly produced about the reinstatement of the military staff committee the first casualty of the Cold War on the UN Charter something I'd love to see but anyhow that was a dream that lasted about 18 months nevertheless it is worth analysing I'm not going to do it at great depth but that 1991 period I'm not one of those who think it was a mistake not to go into Baghdad that was a decision taken after a good deal of thought and care both in London and in Washington and they made the correct judgement that if they did that it was outside the mandate which was conensgy with Kuwait it would have caused great feeling in the multilateral and almost certainly the other countries would have drawn they might have been successful who knows certainly they were in a position to be successful but I draw another conclusion from that I think where it all went wrong was on the ceasefire and I think we need to look very carefully at ceasefires again you may remember that ceasefire was imposed without a lot of forethought it was a hugely emotional moment the Iraqi forces were on the road back from Kuwait and it was called a turkey shoot and the pictures on television were horrendous really with no power at all US and Allied forces were coming in shooting out these convoys of escaping Iraqi forces my mother rang me up and told me that David you've got to do something about this I said well she was 88, 89 at the time I said I have an open power about this anyhow five minutes later Colin Powell announced there was a ceasefire and my mother rang up and said thank you very much indeed I lived off that until she died in 1992 but it was a horrendous moment but if you think of it it all comes back that you can't look at the 2003 war without realising that we failed to implement the ceasefires that were agreed the ceasefires were not brought through because the ceasefires were not through we had to go in with operation comfort and stop the Kurds being taken out I still think one of the best of the post war interventions owed a lot to both John Major as Prime Minister and President Mitron Bush Senior was very reluctant to do anything to delay bringing the troops back before the election which he looked almost certain to win but there we are and I think it's worth giving some thought to this I think unconditional surrender which got a bad name after 1945 is nevertheless at the end of a just war sometimes a necessary requirement and dealing with a person like Saddam Hussein I think it was probably a necessary requirement or if not unconditional surrender a very clearly agreed ceasefire demands and provisions should have been built in right from day one into the Kuwait operation it wasn't, we paid a huge price for it but if anybody thought and I who wrote a passionate letter which was front page on the evening standard to John Major to use a no fly zone in 1991 if you told me that that would have still been operating in 2003 I had said you're joking and I think there is far far too much glib talk about how Saddam Hussein was contained in my view he was not contained quite part of anything else he did actually develop weapons of mass destruction and that was proven by the inspectors in that earlier period now I'm not here to justify my support for the Iraq war which was clearly wrong anyhow so I think you make a judgement about going to war and you have to decide will you do more harm than good and you try and assess also the good that you do far far too much damage was done to civilians in Iraq for anybody to be able to stand up and say this is a just war or that it was justified and it was as we now know absolutely appallingly conducted predominantly from the president's office in number 10 Downing Street and in Washington and we must learn lessons and never allow this to happen again as far as the UK is concerned we had the complete absence of cabinet government virtually from 1997 until the coalition took place in Britain in 2011 it improved a bit under Gordon Brown but not a lot and we now have the restoration of cabinet government and long may it continue but there were many many things which are beginning to come out and hopefully will come out even more with the Iraq inquiry but already in virtue of the evidence about how not to conduct a war and it is interesting that those lessons seem to be learnt perhaps more in America than elsewhere I'm not going to touch on the involvement in Bosnia we can discuss this in letters and things like that but having established no fly zones effectiveness in 1991 I was passionately believer that we had to use air power to tilt the balance of war against the Serbs and within the limits of being told before I was appointed although I had advocated it before I was appointed by both John Major and President Metron that they would not consider it unless the United States were involved and since it became perfectly clear that the United States were not going to be involved there were limits to how much I could argue that case but I do think Libya and while I deal with Libya soon now is another demonstration that you can tilt the balance of forces of those who are fighting on the ground by an intervention from the air from other states without putting your forces in on the ground as an occupying force that is the lesson the lesson certainly of Libya and in part the lesson of operation comfort and protection of the Kurds but we were on the ground in the region at the time so it's got to be a bit careful about that we weren't by any standards an occupying force but I think that there are very serious lessons for Bosnia over this in 1991 as part of the belief that the world was changing and this butroscal was given a good deal of freedom by the security council to be a very activist secretary of state secretary general not quite a Hamershire type quite considerable there are a huge number of interventions at the time not just in Bosnia but they all went wrong when I think butros which given what happened to him and the Americans turned against him actually allowed the Americans far too great for control of the operation in Somalia I mean it was the ranger being towed behind this truck through the streets of Mogadishu that had a lasting effect on American public opinion meant that Clinton completely changed his commitment really internationally and it undoubtedly laid the seeds of Rwanda and it certainly laid the seeds for the failure for the US to engage in the Balkans until after the Severinica genocide so it's a hell of an expensive proposition and we need to look back at Somalia and actually my criticism of Butros and Ines is that he was too... he allowed the Americans to run the operation under UN flag but as soon as it went wrong it was the UN that had done the harm of course that is the role of the UN quite frequently to go when other nation states fear to go and then when things go wrong take the Bacchus the heads of state pour the shit on them but then that's life it's a very useful organization to have around and you must accept that and these international negotiations are disposable now let's deal with Kosovo which is a very interesting intervention first of all this undoubtedly stretched the UN charter the elastic of the UN charter I used to say to breaking point but my friend Robert Skedersky argued we actually broke it I think we were right to do it anyhow but we were in an unusual situation a very unstable situation with one of the permanent members Yltsin in effect said do it but don't come to the United Nations if you come to the United Nations I will be bound to veto it so just get on with it and I won't stop you I won't interfere that was broadly at the deal and Bill Clinton had great skills and one of his was that his stepfather was an alcoholic and when the history comes to be said of how he handled Yltsin it is an extraordinary good example helped I believe by strobe Talbot immensely anyhow with that reality I think the action we took was what we wanted now it has to be so the president of the United States was told by military and diplomatic people that a couple of two days two or three at the most and the service would fold well 85 days later the bombing was still going on and I wanted to develop this just a little bit because there is such a huge misunderstanding what happened in Kosovo a US Air Force review showed that only 14 Serb tanks were destroyed not 120 as initially reported 18 Serb armoured personnel carriers were destroyed not 220 and 20 mobile artillery eliminated not 450 the Serbs constructed fake artillery from logs and old truck axels and surfaced to our missiles made of paper and it is still in western capital after western capital and in universities studying foreign affairs up and down the world I keep getting shunted back at me this brilliant NATO military operation that brought the end of Milosevic now I was in favour of using force it was certainly a factor but this did not bring an end to the war the Serb military believed that they had held on in Kosovo and they were not defeated Milosevic lost power ultimately because he eventually was forced to order the Serbs out of Kosovo with extreme reluctance and that was why General Jackson very wisely did not follow the sackers' demands to go into Pristina airport because if he had done he would have broken the transition agreements and the Serbs would probably not have got out it would have been utterly chaotic arrangement but what is important to remember is that the famous meeting with Chernau Merdyn and Artishari at which Milosevic agreed to the terms was preceded by Chernau Merdyn to Belgrade now nobody knows what happened but remember these were the days when Soviet leaders didn't boast about Gazprom and they always said that Gazprom acted commercially which of course is nonsense and that Gazprom would not interfere with pipelines or do anything of this sort my own belief and nobody I've never yet spoken to anybody even stroked all but it doesn't come if he knows it doesn't come absolutely straight out with it and I believe that something was said by Chernau Merdyn to Milosevic it gave him no other option and I think Chernau Merdyn reminded him that he had been the chairman of Gazprom and he knew where the taps were on the pipelines and there would be no more gas if he didn't agree to this but extreme pressure was put on by Russia and that was if you like a payback for all that Clinton had done to help because Clinton did not want to put troops on the ground but Tony Blair to this day and you're going to go to read his autobiography and any other thing believes that it was all the threat to go in on force that made the difference all of these things are cumulative but this was predominantly I would say a diplomatic success ending this long and rather tortured battle now it's important to remember that because we must not exaggerate and we are certainly not post Libya exaggerate the use of air power and we were in many ways lucky in Libya now let me come to Libya I'm proud of the fact that for a few weeks I seem to be the only person arguing for a no-fly zone you may not have noticed me doing it because one of the reasons is the only place where I used to put myself forward to speak was Al Jazeera and I didn't bother about the BBC if the BBC wanted to do something I was fine but my hope was that we had to make people understand what a no-fly zone could do in the Arab world and it was not until they really did begin to understand and the French did a lot of education of what was the potential for it that we stood a chance of getting a resolution through the Security Council the first lesson then on constrained intervention is it has to be a future in the UN context unilateral action like in Iraq in 2003 and Iraq and Kosovo before I just don't think we'll be done whether it should or shouldn't we can leave that argument aside just don't think politicians will do it after those failures you have to well Iraq has definitely failed Kosovo is not a failure but there are lessons from Kosovo so we have to be very careful the Arab League's championing of this was crucially important and swung or put the Russians into a situation where they could really they had to choose and it was difficult to go against the Arab League I think there was also some very successful diplomacy by France and by Britain I think it's done a lot to restore confidence in the Foreign Office which was a hugely low ep that they took this resolution ran with it and did the necessary lobbying and we did get the right votes and it's extraordinary no country voted against abstain, abstentions but of course no veto now I look on that as again part of the constrained pattern of intervention it will be very rare if not never that interventions will take place in the opposition of the powers surrounding the area you're going to intervene I also think it will be pretty necessary to rule out occupying forces I don't say again it won't be possible to do it but it will be quite some time before you could ever get UN support for the sort of military operation that was conducted by President Bush in the spring of 1991 and that might mean standing by and doing nothing when only a occupying force could do what you wanted so again it's going to be constrained the sort of interventions were likely to be able to do over the next say decade and they're going to be constrained and I think that there are some other lessons to learn too from Libya that after Sebranica and after Rwanda let alone what Pol Pot did conveniently forgotten in Europe but by far the biggest post-war genocide it is right in my view in view of the genocide convention and in view of the horror that even to that day and the embarrassment and quite rightly embarrassment you should be rung round the necks of the French, British and American politicians I mean Sebranica was an avoidable accident and let it be put perfectly clear on record that that so-called action plan produced by the Americans and supported by the French and the British and the Spanish and the Russians was a disgraceful piece of UNry which was done in total defiance of all the professional advice of all the UN soldiers they said if you want five safe havens you've got to produce 33,000 troops and after a year they didn't produce 6,000 let alone quality troops so I think and to his credit David Cameron's come close pretty close to admitting that he just simply was not prepared to have a Sebranica on his watch and that was what was definitely going to happen in Benghazi you didn't have to do much more than just watch the news and listen to Gaddafi's sons to realise that this was going to be a rendence bloodbath and it then comes to the question is it right that that sort of thing should drive foreign policy? I think it's inevitable and I think it's right and I think there has to be a moral dimension ethical dimension which you like and I think that was one of the vital things and we were just in time and in fact if the French hadn't moved that afternoon early evening I think we could have found that Gaddafi forces could have got entrenched in the outskirts of Benghazi and it would have been hells difficult to get out so we were literally just in time in our intervention in Libya now what's most important human rights democracy there's nothing in the resolution I may say inevitably insisting that Libya post military activity has to be a democracy I hope profoundly it is but there's quite a lot about it needing to respect human rights we aren't out of the danger zone there are a lot of tensions in that country we haven't resolved some of the surrounding questions I mean we tried to intervene to prevent a genocide in Darfur in 2008 we did against the advice of the African Union use the international criminal court Bashir is the first operating head of state Milosevic was only tried after he lost the presidency in Serbia we did use the international criminal court in those resolutions over Libya quite a few people think unduly early certainly the African Union and some in the Arab League as well it looks as if we're going to get away with it and how Gaddafi will disappear but we're not sure the old old argument that has always bedevilled all these peace negotiations to what do we give the highest priority absolute justice or reconciliation but I've never made any secret in my view reconciliation comes before absolute justice when settling peace and war issues and I think we've got to be very careful how we use these references the international criminal court it is still building up its reputation it's important it succeeds but we must not put too much on to it and we must be very careful that the steps we take have the support of the countries surrounding it and that reference the international criminal court was a very dubious reference in my view it was premature in terms certainly of the African Union it strained the the Arab states and we should be careful about using this then on other things about Gaddafi well I have a history of course of this one of the reasons of course I wanted to get rid of Salim Assein was I was out of London I received an emergency message in 78 that a former Iraqi prime minister being gunned down on the streets of London I got back to the office and the Gaddafi muddling them up they were not any president of Iraq I didn't know much about him on my desk was a firstly pretty concrete evidence already that this chap Salim Assein was responsible for this gunning down and then a list of his attributes which were all short and the list of his criminal record was extremely long and from that moment on I don't openly admit I've had him in my sights and I've had Gaddafi in my sights for quite a long time 78 79 we were a haley we couldn't prove it we were a haley suspicious of his links into the IRA and he was support for terrorism around the world and I think the man is been a hugely destabilising influence now was it wrong for Bush and Blair and Clinton and Bush because it went in the Clinton period as well to try and persuade Gaddafi to give up nuclear weapons when we realise he's got a link with the Pakistani commercial peddler of nuclear weapons I think it was right to do that not easy to do I think Tony Blair made a great mistake of going there himself it's what a job you send your foreign secretary to go with this whole idea of this personal diplomacy ahead of government there are things that heads of government don't do and one of them is not kiss Gaddafi and I think that there are some serious errors of diplomacy were made during this period which are still repercussing but nevertheless I think it was right to make this attempt but Britain allowed its trading interest and its financial interests in Libya to run its foreign policy for the next four or five years with very serious and disadvantageous results but nevertheless once it was clear from us and Gaddafi's sons and others that we faced a challenge the British responded chiefs of staff somewhat unwillingly the politicians in my view and the coalition government admirably and Cameron with great clarity and Sarkozy I think can give if you have to award things certainly high up in making a decision to stake the reputation of his presidency which is a loeb on this very risky venture and I think Obama judged it absolutely right crucial to have those 200 cruise missiles coming in taking out the ground to air missiles absolutely saved all the lives we lost nobody could not have been done easily upon the air could have probably been done but not easily and I think he was right to start to make it clear that there are going to be interventions around the world which the United States are not going to automatically lead and that regional powers must be expected to take the largest hope I think it was a very good example of the strength and the value of NATO the fact that this was an operation which was fundamentally done by three countries another four European countries did play an important role but it was basically done by three two European and one American country but it used the infrastructure of the command and control procedures of NATO built up over many long painstaking years which helped us in Kosovo which helped us in Afghanistan which helped us hugely in Libya so even though it was an operation that did not command the support of all NATO members Turkey obviously an important absent Germany, Poland, two very important countries absent though it split the European Union as most foreign policy issues seem to be doing now for the last 20 years nevertheless Europe rallied afterwards as Europe rallied over the 2003 invasion over Iraq and we are and will be I think a major financial supporter in the rebuilding of Libya Italy I think played given its colonial role and its extreme vulnerability if something went wrong in Libya played us quite a strong hand actually and I think we should pay tribute to that and the making available there airfields was a good example of solidarity overall I think Libya is a very interesting development therefore for the future in terms of UN in terms of NATO regional activity and for the EU I suppose there are plusses and minuses but there are certainly lessons to be learnt