Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World
Mark Curtis
London: Vintage, 2003; p/b, £7.99
This latest analysis of British foreign policy by Mark Curtis could not be better timed. With more than a million Britons on the streets of London protesting against the Iraq war earlier this year there is a potentially large audience for a critical review of what led this country to that invasion. Even his title, Web of Deceit, catches the growing public perception of Tony Blair in leading the country into war on a false prospectus.
Coming after The Ambiguities of Power in 1995 and The Great Deception in 1998, this is Curtis’s third trawl through government documents from the perspective of those at the receiving end of British foreign policy. In the earlier two he dug beneath the Cold War double talk and obfuscation of ‘anti-communism’. Web of Deceit adds new material on that period ranging from Indonesia to British Guiana, from Diego Garcia to Oman, and then moves on to later political and military interventions for which the ‘war against terrorism’ is the new catchall defence.
He challenges head-on the Blair claim to be a force for good in the world:
‘The reality is that Britain under New Labour is a systematic violator of international law and ethical standards in its foreign policy – in effect, an outlaw state. It is a key ally of some of the world’s most repressive regimes that is consistently condoning, and sometimes actively aiding, human rights abuses.’
Why has this not been widely recognised by the British tax-payers who fund it and who, Curtis believes, are ill-served by it? Curtis largely blames the mainstream media for promoting a picture of British foreign policy completely at odds with the reality and says ‘the liberal intelligentsia is guilty of helping to weave a collective web of deceit’.
‘To read many mainstream commentators on Britain’s role in the world is to to enter a surreal, Kafkaesque world where the reality is often the direct opposite of what is intended and where the starting assumptions are frighteningly supportive of state power.’
He rejects Dean Acheson’s post-war view that Britain ‘has lost an empire and not yet found a role’. To Curtis,
‘Britain’s role remains an essentially imperial one: to act as junior partner to US global power; to help organise the global economy to benefit Western corporations; and to maximise Britain’s (that is, British elites’) independent political standing in the world and thus remain a “great power”.’
In examining the post-war US sidekick role he is particularly critical of Blair:
‘New Labour has surpassed even Thatcherite Conservatives in terms of the joint resort to violence with our favourite ally. There has been no other time in post-war – and earlier – history that Britain has so regularly conducted military interventions as junior partner to the US, as in the repeated bombing of Iraq and the wars in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan.’
As a vivid example, Curtis reminds us of Blair’s support for the 1998 US missile attack on the Al Shifa plant in Sudan where 90 per cent of that very poor country’s pharmaceuticals were made. In words to be almost exactly echoed five years later in support of the attack on Iraq, the British Prime Minister said:
‘Our ally, the United States, said at the time of the strike against Al Shifa that they had compelling evidence that the chemical plant was being used for the manufacture of chemical weapons materials.’
Blair was supported by his Attorney General who said:
‘The legality of the US action against the Al Shifa factory in Khartoum is a matter for the United States.’
Reasons for a change
Beyond the moral revulsion at such manifest breaches of international law which a large number of Britons now express, Curtis sees five reasons why a fundamental change of direction is required.
Britain’s threat to use nuclear weapons is an invitation to its potential enemies to acquire them. As the world’s second-largest arms exporter, Britain is heightening tensions and sowing the seeds of more international conflict. The ‘war on terrorism’ produces yet more dangerous responses from those targeted and many millions more who identify with them. Likewise supporting repressive elites also breeds problems further down the line. Finally, says Curtis:
‘Britain’s global economic policies are helping us to prevent development, increase inequality, and often deepen poverty. London’s basic priorities are, again, adding to a more unstable and dangerous world.’
Curtis says that the real threats to the British public
‘….are our own leaders more than the official threats designated by them. Our major ally is really our major threat – the US is the world’s leading outlaw state and through its new phase of military interventionism and strategy to reshape the global economy, it is creating even more boomerangs for us than our own elites’.
He sees the way forward as a policy of strategic non-co-operation with Washington, support for more liberal and democratic groups in the Middle East and elsewhere, conversion of the arms industry to primarily civilian use, a redirection of the armed forces to defensive duties and the democratisation of international institutions.
‘Overall, we must also set about disempowering Britain’s role in the world rather than clinging to absurd notions of “punching above our weight” and imperial concepts of maintaining Britain as a “great power”.’
Curtis does not underestimate the scale of this task but sees hope in new forms of international solidarity in opposition to global liberalisation. This movement ‘also needs to transform national governments and international institutions into genuine democracies.
‘Establishing democracy in Britain, alongside deepening the sense of global interdependence among people,’ he concludes, is the big challenge in transforming Britain’s foreign policy in order ‘to reconfigure Britain’s role in the world to at long last promote human values’.
An ethical dimension?
The Web of Deceit is another important contribution to the growing literature illuminating Britain’s post-war history. It is to be welcomed for that alone. But coming at the time it does, it also prompts the big question: can Britain’s foreign policy ever move in a more humane direction? Could the plea by New Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 1997 for a new ethical dimension be ever more than a pipe dream, a public relations gloss on a nasty reality?
On the face of it, the forces that Curtis records having shaped the direction of British foreign policy seem as strong as ever. The power of the energy, arms and financial interests over Tony Blair are clearly visible. His closeness to the United States, irrespective of Democratic or Republican occupancy of the White House, is manifest. Partly because of the backing for New Labour by the Israeli lobby, Blair also seems just as strongly locked into ‘anti-terrorism’ orthodoxy as his US counterparts. And in all those continuities the media still frame events to encourage public responses from active approval to resigned passivity. So are we for ever condemned to more of the same?
There are a few positive straws in the wind. While the media remain hugely influential in shaping our perceptions, they are nowhere near as all-pervasive in the UK as they are in the US. Yes, there is a dutiful reflection of the orthodoxies of foreign, intelligence, business and armed services policy fed to us by their pliant press corps, but there are also divergences from the approved script, a matter of much concern to the Blair government as evidenced most recently in the Hutton Inquiry.
While it is important not to exaggerate these changes, it is worth noting a few of them. As I write this, the Daily Mirror is recording the 183rd day in which weapons of mass destruction have yet to be found in Iraq. Its WMDometer, like its continued stance on the Iraq occupation, its routine rubbishing of George W. Bush and its features on international poverty, debt and the arms trade are reaching millions every day.
The Mirror’s motives may be mixed, but for a Labour-supporting tabloid to be doing this, as well as regularly questioning the veracity of Blair and his team, is no small thing. From a different political standpoint the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday have also challenged New Labour’s foreign policy stance over Iraq and also questioned the policy influence of Blair fundraiser Lord Levy and of Blair’s former propagandist Alastair Campbell.
The struggling Independent on Sunday put on sales this year as it campaigned against the war. Its sister daily, with its big following for Middle East specialist Robert Fisk, continues to pose challenges to Blair on foreign policy while remaining generally supportive of New Labour on the home front. Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, under the headline ‘Watch out for these sinister ideologues’ (October 27, 2003), fiercely attacked British neo-conservatives, echoing Curtis’s charge of duplicity being at the heart of British foreign policy. A Muslim, critical of many things done in its name, she has routinely challenged the silencing of criticism of Israel in the name of anti-Semitism.
Alibhai-Brown voices the slow but important politicisation of Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims, long seen as solid supporters of Labour. Blair’s recent wars seem to have begun to change that. When Labour lost control of Birmingham earlier this year after 19 years in charge, Mohammad Naseem, the chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, said a broad cross-section of voters opposed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Muslim organisations elsewhere in the UK said the ‘Baghdad backlash’ was behind other Labour defeats. (The ‘Baghdad bounce’ in the polls predicted by Home Secretary David Blunkett has yet to appear.)
But it was not just Muslim voters who produced Labour’s calamitous defeat in the Brent East by-election in September. In a campaign fought by Labour over such local issues as street crime and graffiti, distrust of Blair and the related opposition to the war were cited as key factors in the result. While this could not be said to be an election result turning on foreign policy decisions, they did play some part in it.
The very centralised nature of Blair’s government has contributed directly to this state of affairs. Many of the public controversies over the Iraq war reflected the disquiet many in the British state – elements within the Treasury, the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and the security services – felt but were unable to articulate within the tight regime Blair had around him in his war planning with Bush.
An elite divided
The hitherto largely homogeneous elite Curtis identifies as having historically forged and then promoted the direction of British foreign policy was divided. (Given the BBC’s historic closeness to the state, particularly over foreign policy, its row with No. 10 over Andrew Gilligan is likewise interesting.) Those differences then found public expression – from the briefings of the late Dr David Kelly to the intelligence services criticism of the Iraq dossier, from the opposition to the war of senior Tories previously supportive of almost every US initiative since the war to Robin Cook – and, in turn, found an echo in a wider public.
And that electorate is becoming harder to convince despite – now almost because of – the propaganda. This is not only because other information sources are now more widely and immediately available, but because the British electorate is now more well-travelled and diverse than it has ever been. Millions of British electors have spent extended periods abroad and many millions more have relatives and friends overseas: not only Muslims identify with those on the receiving end of British foreign policy. In addition, a substantial proportion of the politically active have ethical concerns for international issues and are knowledgeable about them. Most do not share the simplified No. 10 view of the world and distrust Blair’s good versus evil rhetoric.
Further, powerful as some of the lobby forces may be around Blair, they do not command the disciplined electoral support of the stay-at-home US religious Right, linking as they do with Israeli influences and those of the energy and arms industries in pressing for military interventions. So while Bush and Blair may share an international agenda, the British electorate remains the much harder of the two to persuade.
Can this electoral scepticism and these other divergences from conventional orthodoxy prompt the mainstream political parties to change their approach to foreign policy? It is difficult to see it emerging from what is left of the Labour Party. The internal structures permitting active membership participation have gone as the price Blair was willing to pay to guarantee assured outcomes to his backers: active members, after all, can rock the boat carrying the big donor cheques which keep New Labour afloat.
The Conservative party is no better placed and it is difficult to see how they would want to change the direction of foreign policy anyway. Whatever Hutton concludes, the Tories will be handicapped in seeking to capitalise on its findings by their prior commitment to war and their closeness to the US.
The Liberal Democrats made early noises against the war, but came quickly in line once hostilities began. As the traditional receptacle for unhappy Labour and Conservative supporters, the LibDems are now benefiting electorally, as their Brent East victory illustrates. But there is little evidence to show them moving towards the foreign policy agenda Curtis seeks. The Green Party is much closer to it and its members identify with many of the international solidarity campaigns Curtis refers to, but their electoral base remains small.
The future?
What does seem to be growing – especially among the young – is extra-party activity. The Stop the War campaign failed in its expressed intention, but it undoubtedly put the politicians under pressure and encouraged the media to be a little more open. The campaign against the arms trade has an energetic following, one reflected more broadly in many of the traditionally less radical non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on issues such as land mines. Curtis is right to say some NGOs have been co-opted into government programmes and are compromised in consequence. But many haven’t and succeed in raising awareness to challenge present foreign policy priorities from environmental concerns to the workings of the international financial markets.
Time will tell whether these small indications of change lead to the radical redirection of foreign policy Curtis urges. But as more and more Britons die in Iraq and as the cost of the occupation mounts, the questioning will intensify. The Web of Deceit is an invaluable resource for those seeking to broaden the range of those questions.