Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  The war against Iraq is occurring when the trio of key oil-producing states are all beyond current Western control: Iran is an official enemy while the rule of the Saud family in Saudi Arabia, a key Western ally, is facing unprecedented challenges and may even be on the brink of collapse. The controllers of ‘international order’ must, in this situation, ensure that the other part of the trio – Iraq, with the world’s second largest oil reserves – is brought firmly into the Western orbit.

  Oil is, of course, the fundamental Anglo-American interest in the Middle East, and was described by British planners in 1947 as ‘a vital prize for any power interested in world influence or domination’. ‘We must at all costs maintain control of this oil’, British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd noted in 1956.13

  US planners outlined in secret files at the beginning of the post-war world a ‘mutual recognition’ with Britain that the two countries’ oil policy sought ‘control, at least for the moment, of the great bulk of the free petroleum resources of the world’. The US, planners stated in 1947, should ‘seek the removal or modification of existent barriers to the expansion of American foreign oil operations’ and ‘promote … the entry of additional American firms into all phases of foreign oil operations.’14

  Over half a century later the goal is the same. General Anthony Zinni, commander in chief of the US Central Command in the Middle East, testified in Congress in 1999 that the Gulf region, with its huge oil reserves, was a ‘vital interest’ of ‘long standing’ for the US and that the US ‘must have free access to the region’s resources’.15 In the current crisis, the protection of the oilfields is ‘issue number one’, according to a US State Department meeting on the future of Iraq reported in early 2003.16

  Oil is designated to be controlled by Western allies in the Middle East to ensure that industry profits accrue to Western companies and are invested in Western economies. A traditional threat in the past has been that nationalist regimes would use oil wealth primarily to benefit local populations and to build up independent sources of power to challenge US domination over the region. Traditionally, such regimes have been overthrown or prevented from arising by British and US power. The declassified documents show that British and US policy has always been to support the authority of favoured repressive ruling regimes in the Gulf and has helped them counter internal challenges, as outlined in chapter 11.

  The US gained greater influence over the Iraqi oil industry after the 1991 war. A quarter of Iraq’s oil revenues under the UN’s ‘oil for food’ programme currently go to Kuwait, hence indirectly to Western corporations, while sanctions serve as a way of keeping Iraqi oil off the market. A major problem with Iraq arose from its nationalisation of oil in 1972; before this, British and US oil companies had long held a three-quarters stake in Iraqi oil production. Overthrowing the regime now offers the prospect of privatising oil operations and of Western oil companies regaining their previous position. The prize is indeed great – some estimates put the value of Iraq’s likely foreign oil contract awards at over $1 trillion. The prize may be even greater, however, since US control of the world’s second largest oil reserves in Iraq could break Saudi Arabia’s hold on the oil-pricing cartel, Opec, and set prices in the future.

  The historical rivalry among countries and companies for control of this large pie is ongoing. According to one industry source, ‘there is not an oil company in the world that doesn’t have its eye on Iraq’. BP’s Lord Browne has said that ‘we would like to make sure, if Iraq changes its regime, that there should be a level playing field for the selection of oil companies to go in there.’ And the Chief Executive of Chevron, Kenneth Derr, has said that ‘Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas – reserves I’d love Chevron to have access to’, in a speech where he pronounced strong support for the sanctions that have kept Chevron’s rivals at bay.17

  US strategy is clearly to fend off Russian and French domination over Iraqi oil. Contracts with Baghdad signed by oil companies from these two countries are likely to be torn up once a pro-US government is installed, as the pro-US opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress has pledged to do if it achieves power. But Washington was willing to hold out the carrot of future French and Russian oil deals with Iraq to try to secure their backing for war. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said that ‘the French and the Russians should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq towards a decent government, we’ll do our best to ensure the new government and American companies work closely with them’.18 Again, both countries refused to play ball.

  The new heights of state propaganda

  ‘This is not about oil, it’s about peace’, Jack Straw told a reporter for the Iranian newspaper, the Persian Morning Daily.19 It is obvious that the conflict is significantly about oil. However, state propaganda during the current Iraq crisis has gone much deeper: since late 2002 in particular the British public has been subject to a campaign of perhaps unprecedented heights in the post-war world.

  At one level, it has been seriously funny watching the clique around Tony Blair try to work through various pretexts for attacking Iraq. It appears that the population is regarded as a giant focus group to test each new argument, a hurdle to be overcome by anything that enables elites to achieve their objectives. The Iraq crisis, to me, provides further evidence that the public is regarded as the major threat to policy-makers. The fact that the strategy emanates from a tiny clique around Blair – with major opposition from within the elite – confirms that the British political system’s ‘elective dictatorship’ is alive and well. I return to the theme of Britain’s secretive, elitist and undemocratic policy-making in chapter 13.

  In 2002, ministers were mainly seizing on the argument about making Iraq comply with the UN; however, the problem here was that too many people saw little or no similar pressure being applied to Israel and other allies. Then, Saddam’s human rights record was tried; however, the problem was that this appalling record is comparable to that of many regimes supported by Britain and that London had anyway backed Saddam throughout the period of the worst atrocities in the 1980s. So by early 2003, the two favourite pretexts for a full onslaught against Iraq became the regime’s development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the alleging of a ‘link’ between it and Al Qaida. Only once these two had been tried (and failed) did Blair hit on his bottom line, asserting the ‘morality’ of a war against Iraq.

  The government’s dossier on Iraq’s development of WMD published towards the end of 2002 contained all kinds of allegations. But as the Guardian reported: ‘British government officials have privately admitted that they do not have any “killer evidence” about weapons of mass destruction. If they had, they would have already passed it to the inspectors.’ On the day before Blair announced that the dossier would soon be published, a Whitehall source was quoted as saying that the dossier was based on information found up to 1998, when the inspectors withdrew from Iraq, and that there was ‘very little new to put into it’.20

  The public refused to budge, so propaganda needed to reach new heights. Towards the end of 2002, official pronouncements began to allege a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. As outlined in chapter 3, Al Qaida is the new official threat of our age to at long last replace that of the Russian hordes and act as a pretext for all manner of Western policies, notably military intervention. A truly comic episode then began. First, planners were unable to present any evidence of this link whatsoever. In October 2002, before the government appeared to formally seize on the new pretext, the Guardian quoted a well-placed intelligence source who, asked whether Saddam had any links with Al Qaida, said: ‘quite the opposite’. The paper noted that ‘the clear message from British intelligence’ is that far from allying itself with Al Qaida, the Iraqi regime was distancing itself from it. This was the interpretation of the murder in Baghdad of the Palestinian terrorist, Abu Nidal, in August 2002.21 Indeed, the Iraqi regime has been consistently opposed to Islamic fundamentalist groups (unlike Lon
don and Washington, incidentally, who can count many as allies, such as the ruling family of Saudi Arabia, the world’s most fundamentalist state).

  Planners then hit on a new formula: ‘Terrorism and rogue regimes are part of the same picture’, Jack Straw started saying around the turn of the year. The reason was that ‘the most likely sources of technology and know-how for such terrorist organisations are rogue regimes’. Then, in speech after speech the same message was delivered. The assertion is plainly false since the record shows that the spread of WMD technology is likely to come as much from NATO countries as anywhere else (Germany, for example, probably provided the biggest aid to developing Iraq’s WMD). But this mere truth is of course not the issue; simply asserting the link is. The media have largely taken their cue, generally reporting government assertions as serious, even if with some criticism and, most importantly, failing to ridicule them as obvious propaganda.

  Since the alleged ‘link’ was hit upon, all sorts of imminent terrorist threats to Britain have arisen in the media, apparently the result of the ‘security services’ leaking unattributable stories. Examples are the supposed London underground nerve gas attack, reported threats to cross-channel ferries and the story of a tiny quantity of ricin found in the flat of a group of Algerians, together with numerous high-profile arrests. Much of the media have dutifully covered these stories, with some papers adding racist diatribes against asylum seekers now conveniently lumped into the camp of official terrorist threats. As noted by Mike Berry of the Glasgow University Media Group, Britain’s foremost body critically analysing media reporting, these operations usually result in few arrests, but by then they ‘have already served their purpose in helping to generate a climate of pervasive fear across the country’.22 The message the public is meant to get is that removing Saddam will also remove a terrorist threat to us.

  The wider context of ongoing state propaganda is critical to understand and little known. Judging from the abyss between its rhetoric and the reality of policy, the Blair government may have broken all postwar British records in state propaganda on its foreign policy, and is recognised as a global leader in this area. When Peter Mandelson, the architect of Blair’s election victory, became a minister, he said that ‘of course we want to use the media, but the media will be our tools, our servants; we are no longer content to let them be our persecutors.’23 Everyone knows about ‘spin’, but this term is itself spin, while the media has only reported some aspects of it: the extent of state propaganda goes much deeper.

  The Ministry of Defence has a new name for state propaganda. It used to call it ‘psychological operations’ but New Labour renamed it ‘information support’ (a change Orwell would have understood). ‘But’, the House of Commons Defence Committee has said, ‘the concept has changed little from the traditional objective of influencing the perceptions of selected target audiences’. The aim of these operations in Britain is ‘to mobilise and sustain support for a particular policy and interpretation of events.’

  In the war against Yugoslavia in 1999, the MoD identified four target audiences, according to the Defence Committee: the British public, Milosevic and his supporters, NATO allies and Kosovo Albanians. Thus the government identified the British public and Milosevic as targets; both enemies, albeit in different ways.

  The Defence Committee commented that with the British public ‘the prime task was to mobilise and to keep on-side public and political support for the campaign’. It said that ‘the whole campaign was designed with one and half eyes on media perceptions’ and concluded approvingly that:

  Ministers could not be accused of neglecting the media aspects of the battle. From the top-down, the UK government committed its considerable media operations resources to the campaign and to the task of mobilising international and British public opinion.

  Just before the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia was launched, NATO quadrupled the size of its media operation in Brussels on the advice of Alastair Campbell, Blair’s director of ‘communications’. The number of ethnic Albanians killed by Milosevic’s forces in Kosovo was exaggerated, with the Foreign Office claiming 10,000 at the time, later revising the figure to 2,000. The bombing of Yugoslavia proceeded with an array of propaganda about good versus evil, a moral test for the future and government acting from the deepest humanitarian values (largely taken seriously, and actively promoted, by a willing media, as noted in chapter 6).

  ‘The campaign directed against home audiences was fairly successful’, the Defence Committee noted approvingly. It outlined Britain’s role as NATO’s chief propagandist, saying that the ‘UK was rightly seen as the most proficient member of a generally underperforming Alliance’ in media operations. It also noted that ‘if anything, the UK’s contribution to the war of perceptions was of more significance than its strictly military contribution’. But ‘if anything, the UK’s efforts to shape perceptions were less efficient than they could have been’.24

  So, an all-party group of MPs supported a government strategy to deceive the public, even saying it didn’t go far enough – a nice illustration, perhaps, of the degree to which elected elites serve the public.

  The Economist has also encouraged our leaders to mislead the public. Just before bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, it pondered on the ‘requirements of the propaganda war’, noting that there were critics of military action in Afghanistan even in the US. One danger was that a massive refugee exodus following bombing could be blamed on the US. ‘America has to do what it can to defeat this argument’, the paper noted.25

  A new phrase for state propaganda currently popular with the liberal intelligentsia is ‘public diplomacy’, understood as directed towards foreign rather than domestic audiences. Mark Leonard, director of the Foreign Policy Centre, a think tank established by New Labour, is one exponent of this new, more stylish form of state propaganda. In an article for the US magazine Foreign Policy, Leonard explains that ‘public diplomacy’ is ‘more important than ever’ due to the ‘rise of global Non Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and protest movements.’ These, he explains, ‘have put ever greater constraints on national governments.’ So the ‘last decade is rife with examples of popular perceptions, rather than governments, setting the pace for international diplomacy’ – traditionally, the great threat to elites.

  He adds that ‘propaganda will not persuade populations in reluctant countries to support war, but perceptions of Western motivations as imperial or self-interested can damage the chances of success’. So diplomats ‘must transform themselves from reporters and lobbyists who react to issues into shapers of public debates around the world.’ ‘The challenge’ for governments, Leonard states, ‘is to move from supplying information to capturing the imagination.’ Leonard goes on to advise governments thus:

  If a message will engender distrust simply because it is coming from a foreign government, then the government should hide that fact as much as possible. Increasingly, if a state is to make its voice heard and to influence events outside its direct control, it must work through organisations and networks that are separate from, independent of, and even suspicious of governments themselves. Three of the most effective mediums for this type of public diplomacy are NGOs, diasporas and political parties.26

  In the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq, Britain and the US established a tightly controlled ‘news management’ system. No journalists were allowed to Saudi Arabia without official permission and, once there, were under the control of a Joint Information Bureau, run by British, US and Saudi officials. Their movement was organised, their film vetted and their copy read.

  Various disinformation was provided by the government. The strength of the Iraqi army was played up, as was the degree of damage caused by an oil slick off the Kuwaiti coast – an ecological threat blamed on Iraq but which was partly caused by Western bombing of oil storage tankers. An apparent plant story was that Saddam had sent his family to Mauritania; at other times Saddam and his associates were said to be ‘hiding
in hotels’. The BBC reported disinformation about Iraqi soldiers surrendering and helicopter pilots defecting to Saudi Arabia. British military sources put out disinformation saying that Iraq had moved chemical weapons to the front line – part of the alleged Iraqi chemical threat well covered in the media, and that never materialised. The story of Iraqis taking babies from incubators became the most influential fabrication from the US/Kuwaiti side, and directly changed Congressional opinion in the US.

  The media’s tendency to report government propaganda as fact helped ensure that such disinformation was publicised then, just as the new stories are now.27

  The Guardian described the 1998 bombing of Iraq by the US and Britain as involving ‘a government propaganda campaign unprecedented since the end of the cold war’. There were reports of an Iraqi plot to ‘flood Britain’ with anthrax while briefings and leaks from Whitehall about the Iraqi regime increased as the government sensed the lack of popular support for the bombing. The government set up an ‘Iraq Media Group’ to coordinate propaganda across Whitehall in order ‘to blacken Baghdad and prepare public opinion’ for the attacks. Themes included how Saddam’s regime, and not sanctions, were responsible for killing Iraqi children and how close the regime was to making biological weapons.28

  As for the current phase with Iraq and the ‘war against terrorism’, no one can now say they have not been warned. A recent MoD paper freely available on its website called ‘The future strategic context for defence’ notes that ‘we need to be aware of the ways in which public attitudes might shape and constrain military activity’. It continues: