Iron Britannia

by Anthony Barnett

  The manipulation was found to be acceptable in part because it fitted into a long practised mode of official understatement about casualties. The less people are allowed to know what they mean in human terms, the more they will accept. Take, for example, what was probably the most craven exchange in the House of Commons during the whole conflict. It took place just after the devastating attack on the Sir Galahad. John Nott had told the House of Commons that he would not release the casualty figures. Richard Crawshaw of the SDP, then put the following point to him in the guise of a question:

  Can we not take comfort from the fact that up to the present time the losses, thankfully, have been much less than could possibly have been conceived when the operation was put into effect?

  To this rather extraordinary claim, the Secretary of State for Defence replied,

  I agree with him that it is remarkable that we have not received more casualties and greater losses than we have. It has been a remarkably successful venture.31

  Note the use of the word ‘remarkable’. When unexpectedly high losses are incurred because the enemy attacks with greater success than anticipated, one notes that given the success of the enemy attack, or given his potential, it is remarkable that the losses are so low. Precisely the same callousness can be found in one of Churchill’s descriptions of a German night attack on London. He devotes most of it to the fires in Pall Mall and the destruction of the Carlton Club, and concludes,

  Altogether it was a lurid evening, and considering the damage to buildings it was remarkable that there were not more than five hundred people killed and about a couple of thousand injured.32

  How remarkable.

  There was insufficient protest from the press itself, which bowed all too slavishly to military direction. Here also there is a history. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, the great attack by Britain’s volunteer army saw nearly 20,000 killed and nearly 60,000 wounded, on its own side. It was one of the most murderous and stupifying military debacles of all times. The Times reported, ‘It is on balance a good day for England …’.33 The reporter who wrote this later justified himself by saying, ‘I have to spare the feelings of men and women, who have sons and husbands still fighting in France’. Doubtless he meant well. But we should note that in 1916 General Haig had said that he would break off the offensive if it did not succeed immediately, yet the obsequiousness that surrounded him allowed him to continue the futile attacks for another four months, until British losses alone mounted to over 400,000.34 How many mothers’s feelings would have been spared if an early outcry had stopped the slaughter? Yet we can still read the same old apologetics today. In the Guardian of 3 July 1982, for example, Gareth Parry:

  The presentation of the Falklands war has been carefully sanitized. Pictures and descriptions of the casualties have been discreet, and I believe rightly, for the sake of relatives. Even now to attempt to describe some of the more horrific sights and sounds of war would be unkind.

  Such is the way that we are prepared even now for the next war, with kindness.

  Notes

  * I would like to thank Jane Kenrick for a helpful discussion about the themes of this chapter.

  1 Economist, 22 June 1982, which reported that 22% of its poll sample was against the victorious war ‘given the cost in lives and money’.

  2 But the literary world did: one lead was given by James Fenton’s passionate intervention in the Spectator 1 May 1982, which described the UK’s Falklands adventures as ‘frivolous, murderous and wicked’. A letter which denounced the war was signed by some of Britain’s best novelists, from Angela Carter to Salmon Rushdie and was sent to The Times, which refused to publish it. For a more general picture see Authors Take Sides on the Falklands, London 1982, with its revealing pro-Armada statements from Spike Milligan to Arnold Wesker.

  3 Guardian, 14 August 1982.

  4 Tony Benn, Parliament and Power, London 1982, pp. 110-113.

  5 16 June 1982.

  6 16 June 1982.

  7 Rule Britannia, London 1981, pp. 184-8.

  8 August issue, 1982.

  9 26 July 1982 (her emphasis).

  10 In a letter The Times did publish, 28 Mary 1982.

  11 See Walter Easey’s Agenda article, Guardian, 26 April 1982.

  12 31 May 1982.

  13 An off-the-cuff remark by Fred Halliday.

  14 David White, quoted by Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, Cambridge 1981, p. 78.

  15 pp. 48-9.

  16 The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford 1979, pp. 231-5.

  17 As above, pp. 239-43. Fussell quotes R.H. Tawney, who said that during the Somme attack, one of his men ‘Buried his head to the ground and didn’t move. I think he was crying. I told him I would shoot him, and he came up like a lamb’. Mutinous French troops would make a loud baa-ing noise as they were being marched to the front line.

  18 As above, p. 51 ff.

  19 Hansard for House of Lords, 3 April 1982, p. 1583.

  20 Wiener, p. 158.

  21 The Country and the City, London 1975, p. 356. Fraser Harrison’s important essay Strange Land; the countryside myth and reality, London 1982, draws upon Williams’ work amongst others to make a novel plea for rural values that is also a critique of nostalgic pastoralism.

  22 10 pm BBC radio news, 17 June 1982.

  23 ‘Working class culture and politics in London, 1870-1900: notes on the remaking of a working class’, Journal of Social History, Summer 1974.

  24 Observer, 31 July 1982.

  25 Standard, 15 June 1982.

  26 3 July 1982.

  27 As above.

  28 As above.

  29 Financial Times, 20 July 1982.

  30 Letter to The Times, 17 June 1982.

  31 Guardian Parliamentary report for 10 June 1982.

  32 Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol II, London 1949, p. 307.

  33 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty, London 1982, p. 84.

  34 A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, Oxford 1965, pp. 60-1.

  6 A War in the Third World

  IN THE beginning many spectators around the world were convinced that it was all opera bouffe: gauchos in ponchos and Brits in bowler hats snarling at one another and rattling a few sabres, before being led off to the conference table by their common American master. Instead, there was a short war which has rattled a good many preconceptions about contemporary world politics. It has certainly shaken the conventional wisdom that European ‘imperialism’ is a dead letter as well as the notion that the superpowers effectively ‘control’ all the military actions of their subordinates. Just as important, the Falklands conflict has also lifted a window on the political causes of war in the Third World through which we must briefly look.

  There are two respects in which Galtieri’s invasion bears remarkable parallels with other acts of aggression in the past few years. The Junta’s seizure of the Falklands stemmed from growing public opposition to its tyranny at home. It was a blatant attempt—three days before a threatened general strike of Argentina’s still powerful unions—to quiet opposition and secure a cheap popular triumph. Indeed the initial, easy successes were immediately presented as a nationalist legitimation of the military’s control of government (although most of the population apparently saw this manoeuvre for what it was). Thus the first and most imperative reason for the Junta’s impetuous action was its need to defuse internal tensions and boost its own collapsing support.

  But there was a second, and more calculated, reason as well. The defeat of the token British garrison at Port Stanley was intended to symbolize Argentina’s new prowess as a regional power. The decision to take the islands by force was meant to add credibility to Argentinian claims on the Antarctic as well as to intimidate its traditional rival, Chile. The Junta, victim of its own bombastic ideology, tried to counter domestic economic collapse with the escalation of Argentina’s military pretensions. To this extent the invasion of
the Falklands was a reflex of the same hubris which had led the Junta to despatch ‘advisers’ to Central America to fight there as proxy Yanquis. Internal control and military expansionism—the Junta’s real raison d’être for invading the Falklands—had nothing to do with the sentiment of Argentina’s population about sovereignty over the Malvinas. On the contrary, the invasion was an attempt to exploit the reasonableness of the country’s claim so as to mobilize the issue for other, utterly ignoble aims.

  The best riposte to the Junta came from the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’. Since 14 May 1978, every Thursday, their heads in white scarves, the mothers of those who have disappeared—presumed kidnapped and murdered by the regime—stand in Buenos Aires’s ‘Place of May’. They have done so every week since then, whatever the weather and the harassment; organized by the solidarity of common bereavement. They are the living indictment of the Junta and its associated killers, men like Menendez, the commander of the Argentine garrison in the Falklands, and the other thugs who came to power through making war against their own people. After the invasion, the mothers wrote on the placards placed around their necks as they stood in vigilance, ‘The Malvinas belong to Argentina and so do the disappeared ones’.

  This eloquent and moving symbol of resistance to the Junta is a reminder of the unpopular aspect to the capture of the Falklands. In a fully anti-colonial struggle such as the many we have witnessed since 1945, the armies which meet each other in combat are quite different in kind. A people’s army and a colonial army may recruit from the same population. But one is already the arm of a state power, the other seeks to become the creator of a new state power. The essence of such a liberation struggle is the expression of this inequality. Its success depends upon the nationalist forces being able to make a sufficient strength out of their own conventional weakness and a sufficient liability of their opponent’s conventional power, to overwhelm him in a political victory born of passage of arms. The conflict in the Falklands had none of this difference. It was a war between two conventional states, both of which attempted, through the battle of wills and weapons, to consolidate their unpopular regimes at home.

  In so far as there is a familiar pattern to the colonial aspect of the Falklands confrontation, it dates back to the early nineteenth century. Then many wars took place between European states and already existing recognized states in what is now termed the ‘Third World’—including an unsuccessful British siege of Buenos Aires in 1808. After the completion of colonial expansion, its consolidation and world wars, came the period of decolonization and the emergence of successful (because technologically and politically modern) resistance from within the imperial holdings, of France, Britain and Portugal especially. Today, the Argentinian attack on the Falklands, like the Indian takeover of Goa in 1961 or the Indonesian takeover of East Timor in 1976, is a sign that the boot it on the other foot. It is the turn of the once dominated to expand. And despite their protestations of self-justification, there clearly is an element of colonialization to such moves.

  Argentinian expansion is not imperialist, however; its ambition is limited to contiguous territory rather than any global reach. Recently, somewhat similar attempts by Third World states to expand their territorial dimension through war have occurred. In particular, since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, there have been the Khmer Rouge attacks on Vietnam itself (from April 1977), the Somali attack on Ethiopia’s Ogaden (July 1977), the Ugandan attack on Tanzania (November 1978) and the Iraqi invasion of Iran (September 1980). All four bear some parallels with each other and provide a comparative basis for defining the contemporary nature of the Argentine Junta’s behaviour in seizing the Falklands. Of course, they are far from identical; it would be facile to seek some formula to which they could all be reduced. In each case the value of the contrast is that it helps to highlight the unique, indigenous and specific aspects of each conflict by allowing the common backdrop to be seen more clearly. But the background itself is also interesting.

  If we tabulate each set of protagonists by smaller and larger country, the following common elements can be identified:

  SMALLER LARGER

  Cambodia (Pol Pot) vs Vietnam (Le Duan’s Politbureau)

  Somalia (Siad Barre) vs Ethiopia (Mengistu, Haile Mariam)

  Uganda (Idi Amin) vs Tanzania (Julius Nyerere)

  Iraq (Saddam Hussein) vs Iran (Ayatollah Khomeini)

  In each case the smaller country initiated hostilities against the larger one. In each, the smaller country was led by a harsh dictatorship which based its rule on terror, and continues to do so in the cases of Somalia and Iraq. The nature of the regime in the smaller state was also relatively and qualitatively more imposed and dictatorial than that in the society it attacked. It is not that Vietnam, Ethiopia, Tanzania or Iran today are democracies, they are not. But their respective regimes are the product of an authentic revolutionary mobilization, and the leaders of all the four larger states listed here have a national record and a base of support within the population that accords them ‘legitimacy’. By contrast, those of the left hand side of the table, the smaller and more bellicose regimes, have been the product of rigid family dictatorships. Torture, massive terror, the disappearance of thousands, the cult of the personality and even the overt acknowledgement of such barbarism, rather than popular movements have marked these states.1 There can be little doubt that the internal instability generated by such rule determined their attempts at military adventure. This is not to say that the four larger states are unfamiliar with violent state repression or are ‘innocents’ in the tensions that arose between the neighbouring pairs. In each case the dispute had a history on both sides and the smaller state had reason to fear the pressure and influence of the larger. The response however was reckless rather than cautious.

  It is not difficult to see that the impetus of the Galtieri Junta, with tens of thousands of victims behind it, shared some of the characteristics of the other four aggressors. In each case, it should be added, a justifiable claim could be made out for the action taken. Probably the majority of the population in Cambodia, Somalia, Uganda and Iraq thought that the territory their army entered was theirs for reasons of history. This should warn us against any simple agreement with the passions of the Argentinians for the Malvinas. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the disputes, in all five cases a militaristic dictatorship took unilateral military action against a more powerful and somewhat more democratic, or at least a more rooted, regime.

  The analogy seems to end at this point because, while Britain might be a more democratic state at present than Argentina, is is not a Third World country nor a recent site of revolutionary mobilization. Far from the war between Buenos Aires and London being a conflict between newly independent societies, it was against the ancient colonial regime—Britain—which historically dominated, even if it did not absolutely rule, its one time protégé Argentina. The war over the Falklands was a North/South clash, not a South/South one like the four just enumerated.

  The Galtieri Junta, however, had not intended to tangle with the British militarily. It believed that no such response would be forthcoming. Argentina’s military was certainly under the impression that the United States would either lean towards it in the conflict or remain strictly neutral, in either case this would have made it impossible for Britain to mount a credible military reaction.2 One remarkable piece of evidence for the casual assumption of a peaceful takeover by the Junta is the amount of military equipment they had on order but still undelivered. Had they waited a year, they would have had twice as many French ‘Super Etendards’ with many more ‘Exocet’ missiles; a perhaps decisively larger number of German submarines would also have been at their disposal. Argentina’s Air Force had not even acquired the extra fuel tanks for its ‘Skyhawks’ which would have given them time for more than a single pass over the islands. At the same time, Britain had disclosed plans to run down its surface navy. By 1984 London might not have been able to send an Armada. In a
ddition the absence of serious preparations for a British landing, even after the Armada set out, shows that Argentina thought the idea of a war farcical rather than inevitable. Alas, it is one of the signs of truly irrational behaviour to presume the rational response of others.

  But while the Junta had not considered the feelings of the British Parliament when it ordered the conquest of the Malvinas, it was aware of possible repercussions in Latin American capitals. Argentina was too weak to risk a war with Brazil. It had a pretext to fight Chile over some tiny islands, but Catholic opinion and US diplomacy had prevented it from doing so, while such a war might be drawn out and expensive. Yet the Junta desired to show the rest of Latin America that Argentina had recovered from the traumas of domestic strife since the death of Peron. The reappropriation of the Falklands seems to have been chosen as a symbolic substitute. Argentinian prowess would be demonstrated by pecking the tail of the mangey lion. It was not the lion itself they wished to brave. Rather they wanted to crow over the menagerie that struts in the other presidential palaces and barracks of their unhappy sub-continent. The Junta’s aggression was of the South/South kind, in that its prime motivation was as a display aimed to impress its neighbours. It was displaced onto a bleak archipelago; one that happened to be the nominal possession of an erstwhile capital of Empire whose leadership was suffering from acute withdrawal pains.

  What are the reasons for the wars of the Third World that have just been enumerated? They are by no means the only armed conflicts in the world’s ‘South’ that have been or are taking place in our time. But they demonstrate a degree of independence from the postwar geopolitical order. At the same time they reproduce it in new ways. There are at least three reasons for such wars, the first of which—the arms trade—clearly imposes a new kind of dependency between ‘North’ and ‘South’, inherited from the old, more direct forms of hegemony.