Web Of Deceit: Britain's Real Foreign Policy

by Mark Curtis

  In January 1959 the British Air Ministry stated that RAF bombing was aiming to prevent the rebels holding out in the mountains by attacking their defensive positions and ‘their means of existence, including the cultivation, animals and water supply of the local population assisting them’. David Lees, later to become Air Chief Marshal, spoke in his account of the campaign of the relentless bombardment ‘against simple agricultural tribes’ continuing week after week, admitting it was ‘a terrifying experience’.21

  The SAS operation to take the Jebel mountain is customarily presented as one of which Britons should be proud, showing the superhuman skills of their famous SAS. In reality, British ‘success’ was mainly due to inflicting terrifying violence. In fact, most of the villagers on the Jebel mountain were pleading to surrender before the SAS arrived. These methods ensured Britain defeated the rebels by 1959.

  By 1960 a UN committee had been formed to investigate the situation in Oman. One report concluded that ‘a serious international problem’ had arisen from ‘imperialistic policies and foreign intervention’ in Oman:

  Had it not been for the possibility of oil being discovered in the interior, the action taken by the United Kingdom might well have been less drastic and much damage, destruction, human suffering and loss of human life might have been avoided.

  In December 1965 the General Assembly passed a resolution recognising Oman’s right to self-determination, stating that this was being prevented by Britain’s colonial presence, and calling upon Britain to withdraw.22 Britain naturally brushed aside such UN calls.

  By 1964, Britain was countering another revolt against the Sultan’s extreme repression – known as the Dhofar Rebellion, by the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf. The rebels’ proclamation of June 1965 – calling for the liberation of Dhofar province – was, according to Townsend, ‘the product of an economic and social frustration inflamed by a mindless political repression’. Even by 1970 the Omani regime forbade smoking in public, playing football, wearing glasses, shoes or trousers, having electricity or importing medicine, eating in public or talking to anyone for more than fifteen minutes. The Sultan’s response to the rebel proclamation ‘was not an alternative programme with proposals for reform or economic assistance … but simply the use of even greater force’.23

  Britain removed the Sultan in a 1970 coup. Prime minister Harold Wilson sanctioned it and it was carried out shortly after the Heath government took power in the June general election. A detachment from the Omani army surrounded the Sultan’s palace and British-flown aircraft from the Omani air force dropped teargas bombs, providing cover for a military advance. British officials had organised everything but expressed ‘amazement’ at suggestions in the Guardian that they might have had anything to do with the coup. Britain installed the old Sultan in the Dorchester hotel in London where he died two years later.24

  The new Sultan was immediately surrounded by British advisers and officers, including a four-man SAS unit entrusted with his personal protection. Under the cover of a ‘British army training team’, an SAS unit organised irregular forces to fight the rebels, and British forces numbered 1,000 by 1974. They included a psychological operations units that undertook leaflet drops and radio broadcasts to guerilla-held areas.

  Customary methods were used in countering the rebels. One British army officer stated that they ‘burnt down rebel villages and shot their goats and cows. Any enemy corpses that we recovered were propped up in a corner of the [main city’s market] as a salutary lesson to any would-be freedom fighters’; tactics reminiscent of those used in Malaya.25

  A military contingent was also later sent by the Shah of Iran, taking time off from terrorising his own population to help out with other necessary Western duties. Jordan – whose pro-Western regime had been bolstered by a 1958 British military intervention – also sent military advisers to Oman, while the US provided counter-insurgency aid routed through its key client in the region, Saudi Arabia. By 1975 the last group of rebels had surrendered or crossed the border into Yemen. The Western-directed order in this part of the Middle East was preserved.

  The same, elsewhere

  At a conference of regional MI6 Directors in the mid-1960s, Tim Milne, the Director for the Middle East, spoke of the continuing British use of ‘disruptive actions’ such as bribes, covert funding, buggings and telephone taps and the use of ‘pencil bombs’ in dirty tricks operations.26

  These methods are part of the story of British support for elites and violence against opponents threatening an independent route, repeated throughout the postwar period in the Middle East.

  In Aden (later South Yemen) from 1964 to 1967, Britain sought to counter a national liberation movement in favour of continued rule by friendly despots; this time, however, British troops eventually withdrew in failure. A UN call in 1963 for Britain to withdraw from Aden and permit self-determination was rejected. The SAS set up plain-clothes hit squads to make arrests and engage in shoot-outs with political opponents. Attacking the civilian population, RAF bombing destroyed rebel villages and crops, causing tens of thousands of people to flee.

  An official British investigation in 1971 observed that the British army had engaged in the torture of detainees, using methods including ‘wall-standing, hooding, noise, bread and water diet and deprivation of sleep’. These techniques, the investigation found:

  have played an important part in counter-insurgency operations in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus and more recently in the British Cameroons (1960–61), Brunei (1963), British Guiana (1964), Aden (1964–67), Borneo/Malaysia (1965–66), the Persian Gulf (1970–71) and in Northern Ireland (1971).

  Another official investigation concluded that pierced eardrums had been observed on detainees coming from an interrogation centre in Aden. The Red Cross and Amnesty International were refused permission to interview detainees in one notorious prison.27

  Britain also pursued a covert war in North Yemen in the 1960s in which 200,000 people were killed. Colluding with Israel’s Mossad and the Saudi regime, British Labour and Conservative governments secretly supplied arms and funding to royalist rebels fighting pro-Egyptian republican forces that had overthrown the pro-British Imam in a 1962 coup.

  In fact, Britain conducted a dirty war, with MI6 working with tribesmen recruited locally to ‘direct the planting of bombs’ at Egyptian military outposts while garrison towns were ‘shot up’ and political figures murdered. The RAF also conducted some secret bombings against Egyptian targets. The British government decided there could be no official SAS involvement, but authorised it to organise a mercenary operation that eventually involved dozens of ex-SAS servicemen. MI6 provided intelligence and logistical support to the rebels and GCHQ pinpointed the locations of republican troops. While Whitehall denied official involvement, the secret funds provided to the operation had been earmarked to the overseas aid programme. The rebels, however, failed to dislodge the government and in 1970 a treaty was signed ending the war.28

  Coups have been another way of installing favoured elites and/or removing unfavoured ones. Alongside the British coup in Oman in 1970 went coups against rulers in the Gulf emirates of Sharjah in 1965 and Abu Dhabi in 1966. In the mid-1950s, Britain also planned the assassination of Nasser and the overthrow of the government in Syria. This followed a successful British-backed coup in Syria in 1949.

  The invasion of Egypt in 1956 was nothing unusual; actually quite normal practice for British policy in the 1950s. Three years before, Britain had sent troops to overthrow the government of British Guiana and organised a coup to overthrow Musaddiq in Iran. In 1948 it had deployed troops in Malaya and in 1952 in Kenya to promote colonial and commercial interests and to conduct vicious wars.

  The invasion of Egypt is rarely described as such. Commentators usually prefer the ‘Suez fiasco’ or ‘Suez crisis’, or variants. Much analysis has also dwelt on the illness of prime minister Anthony Eden as an explanation for Britain’s behaviour – as if
it were doing anything other than the standard practice. At the Cabinet meeting on 28 August 1956, military intervention was decided upon unanimously, the reservation being that Eden had to recognise that ‘the possibilities of a peaceful settlement must be fully explored’.29

  Egyptian president Nasser was an independent, popular nationalist who posed the threat of independent development, both for the people of Egypt – who had been long exploited by de facto colonial rule – and as a model in the wider Middle East. Britain publicly tried to portray Nasser as a stooge of Moscow, indulging in the usual pretext for intervention. But the Foreign Office understood in private that Nasser was ‘avowedly anti-Communist’ and was ‘unfortunately … strongly neutralist’. It noted:

  He will not only seek to get help without strings from both the West and the Soviet bloc, but to the extent that he succeeds he will encourage other Arab countries to do the same … At the worst … our traditional friends may start to wonder whether enmity or at least neutrality is not more profitable than friendship.

  The problem was that Nasser ‘was aiming at leadership of the Arab world’, the Foreign Secretary stated a few months before the invasion.30

  Britain feared that Nasser’s heretical design in nationalising the Suez Canal company was ‘using the revenues for her own internal purposes’. This is not what development as understood by Britain – then or now – should be about. Rather, Britain regarded the Suez Canal as ‘an international asset’ vital to ‘the free world’; that is, it was ours to control.31

  British planning to remove Nasser began well before the latter’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal company in July 1956. Various assassinations were planned, as noted in chapter 3. Eden was prepared to pay any price to remove Nasser (or the ‘Muslim Mussolini’, as he once called him). He told Foreign Office Minister Anthony Nutting: ‘I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt’ as a result.32

  US opposition to the British invasion was decisive in causing its failure. British officials consistently tried to enlist US support; the MI6 director, George Young, in particular became frustrated at the US knocking down ‘every proposal for bashing the Gyppos’, as he put it.33

  But US concerns were actually more ambivalent. Eisenhower later said that if Britain had ‘done it quickly, we would have accepted it’. With military action under way, one State Department official told the CIA officer liaising with the British to:

  tell your friends to comply with the goddam ceasefire or go ahead with the goddam invasion. Either way, we’ll back them up if they do it fast. What we can’t stand is their goddam hesitation, waltzing while Hungary is burning.

  This referred to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which the Russians had launched at the same time. The US also appears to have been concerned with the timing of the invasion since it disrupted well-laid US and British plans for a coup in Syria at the same time.34

  13

  THE SINGLE-IDEOLOGY TOTALITARIAN STATE

  Bugger the public’s right to know. The game is the security of the state – not the public’s right to know.

  Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press spokesman

  MANY COMMENTATORS REFER to a ‘consensus’ on foreign policy between the major political parties, with few differences between Labour and the Conservatives. This is certainly true, indeed of the whole postwar period. But it has deepened under Blair to the point where there are barely any significant differences on any international issue. But the term ‘consensus’ doesn’t capture the reality.

  My view is that in its foreign policy Britain has become a Single-Ideology Totalitarian State. I am not exaggerating by using the word ‘totalitarian’. But let me explain what I mean by ‘single ideology’ first.

  The state we’re really in

  By ‘single-ideology state’, I mean that British foreign policy is shaped and managed by a domestic elite that shares the same basic viewpoint on all major aspects of foreign policy. This elite spans the influential figures in all the mainstream parties, the civil service and technocrats who implement the policy, and also senior academic and media figures who help shape public opinion. This elite promotes the basic pillars of Britain’s role in the world, such as: strong general support (involving consistent apologia) for US foreign policy and maintaining a special relationship; maintaining a powerful interventionist military capability and using it; promotion of ‘free trade’ and worldwide economic ‘liberalisation’; retention of nuclear weapons; promoting military industry and Britain’s role as an arms exporter; and strong support for the traditional order in the Middle East, Gulf regimes and other key bilateral allies.

  The only major foreign-related issues on which there is current disagreement within the elite are: first, the euro, together with the extent of Britain’s integration into the EU; and second, war against Iraq. But the debate within the elite on launching a full-scale war against Iraq was more a disagreement over tactics on how to secure British goals in the Middle East, rather than over a fundamentally different British role in the region. On the ‘pillars’ of foreign policy, there are also debates and differences within the elite on tactics to promote them, but not on the fact that Britain should. These debates within the elite largely set the parameters of discussion in the mainstream political culture and the media, which I discuss further in chapters 18 and 19.

  There have always been exceedingly few differences in foreign policy between Labour and the Conservatives in office. It is simply not true that Labour has pursued a distinct and progressive, ‘internationalist’ foreign policy, as many Labour supporters claim. As the chapters in this book show, it was the Attlee government that shamelessly drained poor colonies of scarce resources to aid Britain’s postwar economic recovery and that began covert planning to oust the Musaddiq government in Iran. It was the Wilson government that began the removal of the population of Diego Garcia to make way for a US military base and that supported the Indonesian generals’ campaign of slaughter in 1965. And it was the Callaghan government that supplied the Indonesian military with weapons to slaughter the people of East Timor in the late 1970s. The Blair administration is just the most recent in a series of horrible Labour governments.

  Despite this terrible Labour record, there were, though, some differences with the Conservatives. The latter have traditionally resorted more to military interventions and covert operations. Labour’s policy in opposition in the 1980s of unilateral nuclear disarmament was a break with the postwar ‘consensus’; it was the Attlee government that began the British nuclear programme and the Wilson government that acquired from the US Polaris long-range nuclear weapons in the 1960s.

  Under Blair, however, the differences have virtually completely disappeared. A secret Pentagon study leaked to the Guardian noted the US view that ‘beyond Europe, there are few apparent differences between the stated foreign policy goals of Labour and its Conservative predecessor’.1 The Blair government is pursuing only a few slightly less malign policies than the Conservatives would be likely to, most of which are marginal in the bigger picture. On the issues just mentioned, there is now no difference on nuclear weapons, while the Blair government is more militarily interventionist than any other postwar British government. Indeed – even though it is a contradiction to say it – so ‘similar’ has Labour become to the Conservatives that its policies are worse in some cases. I’ll give two examples of this.

  First, on Israel, Blair has in effect condoned Israeli violence in a way that has surpassed even the Thatcher government. Traditionally, the Foreign Office has been worried about adopting a too pro-Israel stance for fear of upsetting our Arab despots. Under Blair, Britain has more clearly adopted a pro-Israel line – refusing to seriously pressure Israel while offering effective apologies along with favoured trade relations – at a time when Israeli violence is worse than for the past two decades.

  Second, on its plans for reshaping the global economy and supporting big business globally, Labour must have surpassed the w
ildest expectations of business. As shown in chapter 9, the Blair government has become a leading international advocate for deepening global trade, investment and services ‘liberalisation’, especially in the WTO. Indeed, the Department for International Development is arguably the world’s strongest ‘development’ voice in favour of global liberalisation and its policies are largely indistinguishable from the Conservative opposition.

  But it is unfair to single out New Labour for blame in promoting the global economic liberalisation agenda. Support for this project is shared across the political class, in all mainstream political parties and in most of the media and academia, with dissent only at the margins. There is massive evidence showing that pure trade ‘liberalisation’ deepens poverty and inequality in poor developing countries. Yet even when the government’s (hard to miss) support for this agenda is noticed at all – which is rare – it remains politically incorrect to challenge the doctrine and often even to mention alternatives to liberalisation such as import protection, domestic subsidies and significant regulation of companies. This is a clear example of the British single-ideology state, which sets the interests of its elite so clearly against the interests of the majority of the people on the planet.

  If this explains a little of what I mean by ‘single ideology’, what about ‘totalitarian’? This refers to the ability of outsiders to influence the government’s foreign policy. In fact, despite the democratic facade that exists, the formal processes for doing this are basically non-existent.

  The main means by which elected MPs scrutinise government policy is the select committee system, consisting of all-party groups of MPs who conduct inquiries into selected government policies by questioning ministers and producing reports. But the committees related to foreign policy – foreign affairs, international development, trade and industry and defence – all suffer from the same defects: whole policies can go completely unscrutinised, while in those that are scrutinised critical lines of inquiry are regularly ignored, and questions usually fail to put ministers on the spot.