by Mark Curtis
After September 11th, US foreign policy has become so overtly imperial that it is common even for mainstream commentators to recognise this. Britain’s primary ally is now an unleashed global hyperpower with no rival, bent on violence against states that seriously oppose it and working largely outside the international law to which it is rhetorically committed. Meanwhile, British leaders continue to steadfastly praise the US for remaining committed to the values it is openly demolishing, indeed continuing to offer unstinting support. Tony Blair notes that ‘I find working with President Bush extremely easy and we do see eye to eye on the big geopolitical issues of the day.’ Jack Straw adds that ‘the United States has always acted in a manner that is consistent with international law, it just has’.19
Britain under Blair is so clearly the leading apologist for US foreign policy, that the relationship seriously resembles that between the former Soviet Union and its satellite republics of Belorussia and Ukraine. These two entities were allowed to keep separate seats at the UN throughout the postwar period, and were allowed separate votes. But in practice it was clear to all that they were client states of Moscow. Britain, in its major foreign policies, is now largely a US client state while its military has become an effective US proxy force. Although some differences over foreign policy remain, this degree of British subjection to US imperial power is altogether new.
This heightened proxy role is one of several elements that New Labour is adding to the traditional US–British special relationship. In Afghanistan British forces played the role of a US proxy force by providing specialist troops to hunt down Taliban and Al Qaida operatives when Washington asked for British help. Britain stepped in when the major fear in Washington was of too many US troops being killed in these operations.
However, in any military intervention the US is likely to undertake, and in the cases of Kosovo and Iraq, British forces are not really needed for military purposes. Rather, Britain provides a token military commitment, its more useful function being to uphold the pretence of an ‘international coalition’, where only the US and its faithful ‘junior partner’ are seriously interested in military action.
A second role is that British ministers and officials are acting in effect as US diplomats – as international coalition builders in support of US strategy. At the UN, the US and Britain often work hand in glove. Over Iraq, London and Washington have worked extraordinarily closely, first to ensure that sanctions are maintained and now to try to outmanoeuvre the opposition (that is, most of the world) in securing UN acquiescence in military intervention against Baghdad. It is British ministers, notably Blair himself and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who fly around the world to drum up support for the Anglo-US line on Iraq and, previously, Afghanistan. Similarly, it was largely British ministers and diplomats who manoeuvred to secure ‘NATO’ support for bombing Yugoslavia, when it was largely an Anglo-American operation.
The Wall Street Journal described Blair on the eve of the war against Afghanistan as the ‘newest US ambassador’. It said that ‘Mr Blair has emerged as America’s chief foreign ambassador to members of the emerging coalition’ to combat terrorism. Blair ‘has become a self-appointed adviser on Mr Bush’s top team of doves and hawks’ and ‘can travel when Mr Bush is reluctant to leave home’.20
But the third British role is just as important. Britain under Blair has overtly become chief public propagandist for ‘Western’ strategy. As noted in chapter 1, during the Kosovo war, Britain’s propaganda contribution to the ‘NATO’ campaign was probably far more important than its military contribution. New Labour is the recognised international expert on propaganda directed to Western publics. This involves both media ‘spin’ and some unprecedented intellectual justifications for Anglo-US wars, as articulated in ministerial speeches. In Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Blair has articulated ‘allied’ strategy in trendier language more designed to win over the media and placate public opinion than the more blunt (and less media-savvy) US administration.
It is a myth that, as some have argued, Britain has generally restrained the US. The reality is generally the opposite, that British support for the US has empowered it to secure its objectives more easily, as evidenced in the three British roles noted above. Over Iraq, Britain, it appears, simply helped persuade the Bush administration to give the appearance of following a UN route, even after the US said it intended to launch an attack with or without UN support. Again, the British government was acting more like Bush’s public relations adviser.
All this is not to say that British elites support everything the US does. There are various public areas of disagreement between London and Washington, for example over Iran and some aspects of trade, as there have always been. And in private many British ministers and diplomats have major concerns about various US policies. Some of these, notably policy towards Israel, are sometimes seen as a liability to Western interests. But for the most part these are disagreements over tactics and presentation of policy. On most of the big strategic issues, there is common purpose on objectives.
I think it is a mistake to see Britain simply as a ‘poodle’ of the US, as though Britain slavishly follows Washington for the sake of preserving a special relationship. The situation is in reality more serious. Most client states feel bound by their masters; Britain is different in choosing to support US actions and in being willingly subservient. Many of the worst US policies are supported by British elites because the latter agree with the US quite independently, not simply out of loyalty to a special relationship. Those elites acted with complete disregard for moral standards when they ruled the globe so it is hardly surprising that their successors give the same latitude to the US.
When British elites really disagree with the US they are often not afraid to say so in the strongest terms. When the US imposed tariffs on imported steel in early 2002, the British government was enraged. Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt said in the House of Commons that the US action was ‘wholly unjustified’ and ‘quite the wrong response’. It was also a ‘clear breach’ of the US’ ‘free trade’ obligations in the World Trade Organisation as well as being ‘in clear disregard of international opinion’. Hewitt also said that ‘we are not prepared to allow the United States to try to dump its problems on the rest of the world’.21
The difference in this case is of course that US actions on steel imports threaten Britain’s commercial interests. By contrast, pummelling foreign countries such as Afghanistan are worthy objectives, in line with British elites’ own interests, in fact as British as Sunday cricket.
Basic support for US foreign policy has traditionally been a pillar of British foreign policy shared across the British elite. The ideological system reflects this view in its reporting on the US.
Criticism of US foreign policy in the mainstream media has tended to be only in areas where US policy differs from Britain’s. On issues where the two elites agree, the core of the special relationship, there tends to be stunning obedience to elite ideology. The idea of the US as an ultimate defender of high principles is regularly put, rarely challenged and almost never – as is surely justified – ridiculed. US leaders’ claims to be acting morally are regularly reported at face value with little or no critical comment. Television news can be distinctly embarrassing in this respect, but so too is much of the print media.
Just as important is what is not reported. The argument is sometimes made that the British media are generally critical of the US. But compared to the reality of US foreign policy, what passes for criticism is generally superficial only. The range of US policies undermining human rights around the world, especially support for repressive regimes, is regularly unreported. US economic policies, as in the World Trade Organisation, which are capturing the global economy to benefit US corporations, also go systematically uncovered. Reporting on US military interventions usually focuses on the tactics used, rather than exposing more plausible objectives, and comment is invariably restricted to the practicalities of whether it wi
ll be in the interests of US elites. The simple reality that the US is a consistent violator of global ethical standards had been little mentioned in the mainstream, although such comments have risen under Bush, where, as noted, it is seriously hard to miss. No other state in the world – with the exception of Britain itself – is given such latitude by the British media to commit international crime.
In the right-wing press the US is generally seen as a wondrous defender of all that is good in the world. An editorial in the Financial Times the day after the US attacks against Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 noted that ‘committing violence deep inside a distant state is not an action to be undertaken lightly’ since a number of risks are involved. ‘The only question’, it continues, ‘is whether the threat posed by the terrorists to US and international security is large and imminent enough to justify running such risks.’ So international law is not an issue, only the pragmatic calculation (by the US itself, that is) about whether the threat outweighs the risks. It is unimaginable that the Financial Times would provide this framing in the case of Iran or Iraq (or even France and Germany) carrying out some attack abroad on what it deemed ‘terrorist targets’.22
There is also amazing apologia for US policies in the liberal press; the idea that it is systematically critical of US policy is a myth. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee once remarked on, for example, ‘America’s new found sense of responsibility for universal human rights’ at the end of the Clinton administration. An earlier report by Martin Walker covered a speech by President Clinton at the UN, who said that many leaders who had just spoken at the same podium would return home to ‘walk over the basic rights of people and nations. It is up to us to stop them.’ There was no hint of irony in reporting this, and no mention of the fact that the country that leads in walking over other nations’ rights – by a large margin, in modern times – was the one delivering the speech.23
Columnist Martin Woollacott has proved to be one of the primary apologists for US power. In one article, Woollacott notes that the recent phase in US interventionism is on balance ‘a good development’, in a world order ‘that needs America’s capacity to enforce as a last resort’. He convinced himself at the end of the Clinton administration that ‘Clinton’s worst sin in international affairs was probably procrastination, followed by over-cautiousness about what the American public would bear and by a failure to manage an admittedly difficult congress.’24 Worst sin? What, worse than bombing Sudan and Iraq, or supporting state terror in Colombia or Israel? This is Clinton’s ‘worst sin’ seen from within an elite agenda.
In his columns, Woollacott regularly plays the role of ‘independent expert’ – preparing the intellectual ground for elite policy or retrospectively justifying it. For example, when Kofi Annan negotiated a UN agreement with Saddam Hussein in February 1998 that forestalled a US/British military attack on Iraq, Woollacott warned: ‘are we beating the retreat from intervention?’ Interventions are seen by some as likely to make a bad world worse or as a hangover from Western imperialism, Woollacott noted. But ‘the truth is that intervention is, at its best, nothing more or less than action based on the conviction that it is worth trying to set the world to rights, and without that we are nothing’.25
The consensual elite view is that the US is essentially benign. This is captured in the term ‘global policeman’, with its allusion of keeping order and maintaining the law in a world of criminals. The Financial Times has described the US as a ‘reluctant global policeman’, implying that it is the criminals that force the US to adopt unwillingly an interventionist role in the world.26 To me, the FT is here expressing the modern version of the imperial concept of ‘the white man’s burden’. The term ‘global policeman’ doesn’t exactly capture the idea that the same country is the world’s leading international criminal.
Even past mass murder in Vietnam has subsequently been regularly excused. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing recently in the New Statesman, for example, refers to the US’ ‘idealistic war-waging to make the world safe for democracy’ and the fundamental US commitment to ‘the defence of freedom’. ‘The US had no material motive in Southeast Asia’, Wheatcroft explains. ‘Kennedy liberals … would have been unable to sleep at night if they had not intervened on behalf of civilisation and justice.’ These levels of support for the Official History of our ally do not always apply, but neither are they rare.27
There is a phrase for anyone lunatic enough to believe that the US is less than wholly supportive of ethical standards globally – ‘anti-American’. This term of abuse is regularly used by mainstream commentators of anyone who criticises US foreign policy.
Let us be clear about this. There are numerous aspects of American domestic society to admire, notably its enshrinement of individual freedoms and rights, which probably surpass any other country. But the deep poverty and inequality in US society is abhorrent, as are the key aspects of its foreign policy, which are systematically abusive of other people’s human rights. One leitmotif of US history is consistent interventions to overthrow or undermine progressive governments that offer good development prospects for their people, such as in Guatemala, Iran, Chile and Nicaragua. The US’ most fundamental role in the world is organising the global economy and key regions to benefit US business, a strategy that has further impoverished dozens of nations and which holds large regions of the world hostage to US commercial interests. The current phase of US global intervention under the rubric of the ‘war against terrorism’ is further imposing the US elite’s will on much of the planet, in support of often repressive local elites. Amnesty International could say in 1996:
Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or ‘disappeared’, at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame.28
This reality of US foreign policy has been analysed by a large range of analysts such as Noam Chomsky, Gabriel Kolko, Edward Herman, Walter La Feber, Michael Klare, Michael Parenti, William Blum and others. Their analysis should be uncontroversial. That it is usually seen as ‘radical’ shows just how ideologically supportive of the state institutions the British mainstream political culture is.
The veil of deceit that obscures much of the reality of US foreign policy, cast by the mainstream media and others, prevents a more accurate understanding of our primary ally’s real role in the world. In turn, this allows British elites to pursue policies supportive of the US, binding an important relationship which has been so destructive to people’s lives over the past decades, and continuing today.
5
ISRAEL: SIDING WITH THE AGGRESSOR
It is a fact that we have killed 14 Palestinians in Jenin, Kabatyeh and Tammum, with the world remaining absolutely silent.
Israeli defence minister Ben Elizer, 14 September 20011
FOREIGN SECRETARY JACK Straw was told in an interview on BBC Radio 4 that more Palestinians than Israelis had been killed in recent violence. Straw replied:
Well they have, although one doesn’t want to get into this kind of arithmetic. There is no direct moral equivalence between people who are the direct victims of terrorism, who are entirely innocent, and those who are taking part in conflict.2
This comment revealed the British government’s understanding of the conflict – in essence, the Palestinians are the primary aggressors and Israel the victim. The reality is mainly the opposite, and, in accordance with traditional practice, Britain has chosen to side with the primary aggressor.
In the Jenin massacre in April 2002, the Israeli army killed around the same number of people (fifty-two) as Yugoslav forces did in the Racak massacre in Kosovo three years earlier. The latter, as noted in chapter 6, elicited the unqualified outrage of British leaders, who used it as sure-fire proof of the evil of the Milosevic regime. A few days after the release of a UN report on Racak, NATO began its bombing campaign. After Jenin, however, Britain barely raised an eyebrow.
Isra
el ‘committed war crimes in the military operation in the Jenin refugee camp’, with many civilians ‘killed wilfully or unlawfully’, according to Human Rights Watch. The Israeli army used Palestinians as ‘human shields’ and indiscriminate and excessive force. A fifty-seven-year-old wheelchair-bound man was shot and run over by tanks, and a thirty-seven-year-old man was crushed in the rubble of his home when Israeli soldiers refused to allow him time to leave before a bulldozer destroyed it. US-supplied helicopters fired anti-tank missiles into the camp, failing to distinguish between military and civilian targets, hitting many houses where there were no Palestinian fighters. 140 buildings were levelled and more than 200 severely damaged. Israel also blocked emergency medical access to Jenin camp, and soldiers repeatedly fired on Red Cross ambulances, in one case shooting a nurse who had come to the assistance of a wounded man.3
Israeli actions in Jenin were so gross that Britain could not entirely ignore them. Britain’s Defence Attaché in Israel conducted an official report – not made public – concluding that the Israelis used ‘excessive and disproportionate force’. Britain did publicly criticise Israeli actions, along with the rest of the international community. Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw claimed that it was due to a British initiative that the UN endorsed a fact-finding mission to Jenin (that was blocked by Israel).4 But it appears that Britain’s motivation for this was to support Israel in light of the contending views about the number of deaths, some initial claims of which reached into the hundreds. After the massacre, Jack Straw told the Today programme on Radio 4 that he phoned his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, and that:
