"JUST as we should learn from the mistakes of this government, so too we should learn from our past - including the 2003 Iraq war," Ed Miliband said yesterday. It is a shame that the rest of his foreign policy speech indicated Labour's continued failure to do so. 

Reminding listeners that Labour supported the Con-Dem coalition's bloody bombardment of Libya in 2011 was perhaps meant to show Miliband's ability to take "tough decisions."

That tired phrase is generally trotted out by politicians when they want to indulge in macho attacks on the most vulnerable people in our society, and the same applies to foreign policy.

Military support for a gaggle of gun-toting bandits and religious fanatics replaced Colonel Gadaffi's authoritarian but secular regime with a crucible of warring factions.

The bombs killed thousands at the time, but many more have died since in the sectarian maelstrom that has engulfed a once peaceful country.

That's not, as Miliband claims, because Britain failed to "stand by" Libyans after Gadaffi was lynched. If "standing by" means military occupation, we helped the United States do that in Afghanistan and Iraq. The blood flowed all the faster.

It's because we launched an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country.

It's all very well talking about the evil ideology of Isis and the threat it poses. The murderous thugs running rampant in Syria and Iraq would not exist if Western imperialist powers hadn't subjected the Middle East to an orgy of violence for decades on end, invading, undermining and destabilising countries across the region.

In Syria, Britain's close allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia are busily arming and funding Islamist extremists who execute 10-year-olds and hurl homosexual people from the tops of buildings.

Miliband is no doubt as horrified as we are by this. But it will not stop unless the root cause - our own imperialist interventions - is identified and tackled.

His lack of clarity on the situation in Ukraine is equally dangerous. Seeing the resistance to Kiev's military assault on the Donbass as a proxy for Russian expansionism ignores the context in which Ukraine's civil war is taking place. That is, following the armed overthrow of the country's elected government.

Some on the left are uncomfortable supporting the separatists of Donetsk and Lugansk, on the grounds that it means siding with Vladimir Putin.

The Russian president is a reactionary right-wing nationalist. But the people of Donetsk and Lugansk are fighting neonazis.

Brigades like the Azov and Aidar battalions are led by white supremacists claiming to be part of a "crusade" against "semite-led subhumanity." They hold torch-lit marches in honour of nazi war criminals and parade portraits of Hitler. They make no secret of this.

In World War II the left found common cause with all sorts of reactionaries - Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle - in the fight to defeat the greatest menace the modern world has spawned, fascism. It's hardly surprising if authorities in eastern Ukraine will take all the help they can get in their current struggle to survive.

Britain needs to exert what influence it has to rein in Kiev, not join the tub-thumping anti-Russian hysteria being whipped up by the European Union to urge Nato to send "signals of deterrence" to Russia.

And speaking of the EU, Labour urgently needs to drop its vote-losing objections to a referendum on continued membership of a bloc which has enforced austerity across a whole continent.

As Miliband speaks a government specifically elected on a mandate to end austerity in Greece is being told by the EU that its people's opinions are illegitimate and the pain must continue.

This anti-democratic behemoth offers nothing progressive to working people in this country or any other. It's time for Labour to wake up.