by A. N. Wilson
If this was their attitude to hunting, it was no surprise that they all took pleasure in banning smoking in public places. Their definition of the word ‘public’ took in bars and public houses, even if these were free houses owned by a publican who wanted his customers to smoke. They included private clubs, and offices and places of work, even if owned by one individual who permitted his workforce to smoke. As in the case of hunting, what was surprising was not so much the fact that so many Members of Parliament wished to mind other people’s business. It was that the Conservatives and the Liberals, which some voters had supposed were parties which were meant to stand up for liberty of the individual, could not see that a matter of principle was at stake. Among public figures in Britain the painter David Hockney was alone in vociferous protest. Overnight, the pubs and clubs of England became less friendly places and within months many publicans faced bankruptcy. The bleak news was followed by news bulletins, dispatched without any questioning of their plausibility by BBC newscasters, about the ‘improvements in public health’ since the ban.
It was, then, a bossier, less tolerant Britain under Mr Blair. This should perhaps have made the British more capable of understanding the Muslims, who follow a scripture which is almost devoid of the narrative interest of the Hebrew Bible, and is largely injunctions and prescriptions. The Koran and New Labour’s formidable reams of new legislation, governing every aspect of British life, could indeed be seen by students of comparative religion to have much in common. Both were essentially puritanical creeds, and though New Labour was not teetotal as such, it was undoubtedly a movement fuelled by white wine spritzers rather than Thatcher’s malt whisky.
26
Tony’s Wars
In foreign policy Blair was an impenitent interventionist. Mr Gladstone’s agony on behalf of the Bulgarian hillsmen would–had Blair reached that far in mentor Woy’s book on the Victorian statesman which was cobbled together from the work of Gladstone scholar Colin Mathew–have found an echo in the young Prime Minister’s bosom. Almost as soon as he took office in 1997, Blair was given intelligence by the British Foreign Office which gave him grave cause for concern about the continuing menace of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Right-wing Republicans such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle were urging a complete change of direction in foreign policy, what they called a Project for the New American Century. They argued that America would have the power to change the world for the better only if it were to take a much bolder leadership role in the years to come. It should dare to be interventionist. These neo-conservatives urged a regime change in Iraq, with the Shia exile Ahmed Chalabi, from a wealthy banking family, as the likely American puppet-president of a new democratic Iraq. Clinton resisted this suggestion, but as Saddam Hussein consistently refused to allow UN weapons inspectors into his country, and as US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, on 7 August, suffered major terrorist attacks (224 killed), pressure was building on President Clinton to take a more aggressive attitude towards Iraq. After the embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, Clinton authorised the punishment-bombing of a supposed terrorist base in Afghanistan and what was claimed to be a chemical weapons-related facility in Sudan. They in fact hit a veterinary pharmaceuticals factory. ‘Everyone knew that what Clinton was doing was wrong, bombing that plant,’ said one member of Blair’s inner circle. ‘But we also knew that supporting him was right.’ While President Chirac of France and Kofi Annan of the United Nations made it clear that any further air strikes or military action by the USA were to be deplored, Britain alone remained supportive. Later that year, on 15 November, Clinton and Blair decided to use Tomahawk cruise missiles against Iraq. When asked by his secretary if he should cancel a game of tennis because of the impending air strikes, Blair replied, ‘Can’t let that squirt Saddam get in the way.’1 By the end of Ramadan 650 sorties had been made by Allied bombers. Two hundred and fifty targets had been selected. No weapons of mass destruction seemed to have been found by these bombing raids, but Blair was pleased at having played a part on the world stage while the other European leaders held back. On 9 January he flew to Kuwait to thank the RAF pilots who had carried out the bombings, and proudly had himself photographed in the cockpit of a Tornado jet.2
In the next two wars which Blair conducted it seemed as if the case for interventionism was strong, if not overwhelming. President Clinton managed to broker a peace agreement in the Balkans on 21 November, 1995, after three and a half years of war and the deaths of 200,000. The British, guided by Douglas Hurd as Foreign Secretary, had been anti-interventionist, or ‘hyper-realist’ as the Americans called it. Bosnia had been left to suffer. Blair, once he came into office, was determined that the same should not happen in Kosovo. He dispatched his carrot-bearded Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to Belgrade to confront Slobodan Miloevic and demand Kosovan autonomy. Threats of ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces, as had happened in Bosnia, were once again uttered. By August, 200,000 Kosovan ethnic Albanians had been driven from their homes. When a policy of intervention had eventually been decided, it was once again Britain and America who undertook the bombing–this time of Belgrade. There were some drastic mistakes, but Blair said, ‘To those who say the aim of military strikes is not clear, I say it is crystal clear. It is to curb Slobodan Miloevic’s ability to wage war on an innocent civilian population.’3 At first it seemed as if the American bombing of Serbia was rallying the people behind Miloevic, but Blair, Robin Cook and Clare Short, the International Development Secretary in her ‘lovely Brummie accent’–as Alan Clark called it–defended the bombings as an act of liberation–albeit a clumsy one. By the end of the war, there were 850,000 refugees, caused directly by the bombing, and most of the military targets had been missed. But when Blair visited Pritina on 31 July, he was greeted by the liberated Kosovans as a saviour. As they chanted ‘Tony, Tony’, he could call out, ‘We fought in this conflict for a cause and that cause was justice.’
Blair’s third war was in Sierre Leone in which, with remarkably little loss of life, seven hundred entered Freetown, initially to evacuate foreign nationals after a coup d’état against the moderate Muslim government of Ahmad Tejan Kabbah. When eleven men of the Royal Irish Regiment, along with their local military liaison, were taken hostage, the SAS went in with Chinook helicopters. One British soldier was killed and twenty-five of the rebels. The rest of the hostages were rescued, and the Kabbah government restored. ‘We welcome your excellency the peacemaker, we love you and respect you, trust and support you’ read a sign hanging from a ramshackle school near Freetown airport when Blair revisited the country three years after its liberation.
Such messages were not hung out for Blair to read when he visited the Labour Party Conference or spoke to the trades unions. The office of Prime Minister is a lonely one, and, as successive occupants of the job had discovered, merely to lead a political party was to make most of your closest colleagues hate you. The more Thatcher had been loathed at home by her Cabinet, the more she saw herself as a liberator of eastern communist bloc countries, and a woman with a mission to the world. Blair had tasted early the heady excitements of being a world leader who could make a difference, in Kosovo and in Sierra Leone.
By the close of the second millennium, the Cold War had been won by the West. China had adopted capitalism and was well on the way to its phenomenal economic growth, making it a far greater world power than it had ever been in the days of its unbudgeable Marxism. The Soviet Union had broken up, and the subsequent wars in the Balkans had been brought to an end, very largely thanks to the interventionism of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bill Clinton in Kosovo. The new President of the United States, George W. Bush, had only been elected by a whisker, and there were those who questioned the very legality of his election. But elected he had been, and Blair was determined to follow Bill Clinton’s advice to work alongside the Americans as he had done so successfully before.
The communist threat to American power had been overcom
e. Nothing else in the world, surely, could pose a comparable threat. One American historian believed that the world had seen the end of history. Hereafter, all that remained was for the rest of the world to adopt Western capitalism. The world had become, in effect, American.
Anyone contemplating what George Bush Senior had called ‘the new world order’ would see that there were flaws in the argument.
History does not end. No one predicted the speed with which the Soviet bloc would unravel. It was equally possible that the US economy could, as it had done in 1929, implode. Those Europeans who watched with dismay as McDonald’s and Starbucks replaced their local cafés and restaurants would not necessarily have wept if, as could quite possibly happen, the United States themselves dissolved, as the nation states of the Soviet Union had dissolved.
If in Europe there were those who entertained feelings of generalised resentment against the spread of American food chains, American films, American music, American clothing, in the Middle East, and further east, there were more specific grievances felt against the United States and its influence. Many Muslims, in particular, saw in the United States nothing less than the Great Satan, a society which, for all its expressed belief in the teachings of Jesus, was grossly materialistic, and lost in a welter of pornography and sexual licence. Moreover, it was American money which armed, and maintained the existence of, Israel as an independent state. And the existence of Israel, especially in its post-1967 borders, was a cause of resentment far beyond the borders of that country itself–whatever those borders happened to be.
The growth of Islamism was something which the Western world noted with a mixture of indifference and incredulity. Had not the Islamic world always thrown up, from time to time, figures such as the Mad Mahdi whose followers murdered General Gordon of Khartoum? And then the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Mahdi, or whatever name it happened to possess in any one generation, faded away and the Muslim world resumed its peaceful, sleepy existence. That was the romantic idea, though ever since the West linked itself to dependence upon oil, and ever since large numbers of poor Muslims from the former Pakistan and elsewhere had migrated through the Western world, it was not a very realistic picture.
One fine day in the United States, 11 September 2001, four aeroplanes were hijacked by Islamist suicide-murderers. American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles was diverted and flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York at 8.46 a.m., killing all on board and, within the building, an untold number. United Airlines Flight 175 Boston to Los Angeles was diverted and flew into the South Tower of the World Trade Center fifteen minutes later. The Twin Towers collapsed and the total casualties were almost 3,000 people. Meanwhile, American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington’s Dulles airport to LA, also taken over by maniacs, was diverted, and, having flown in the direction of the White House, switched course and flew at the Pentagon at full speed, killing all 64 people on board and 125 Defense Department personnel. Donald Rumsfeld was in his office, but was uninjured, though he felt the impact of the crash on the building. A fourth flight, United Airways 93, left Newark, New Jersey, at 8.42 bound for San Francisco. Because the plane had taken off late, the flight controller was able to warn it, when in midair, of the danger of attack. It crash-landed in a field in Pennsylvania killing everyone on board.
It was after these events that the world became conscious of the words Al Qa’eda, a fanatical terrorist Islamist organisation, and of its evil genius, Osama bin Laden (born 1957), the seventeenth child of a Saudi construction engineer who had a total of fifty-seven children. Bin Laden money was ‘new’. Osama’s grandfather had been a penniless immigrant to Saudi from South Yemen, but the new money had bought for the bin Ladens the attributes and manner of life of European ladies and gentlemen. There were many bin Ladens in London. One of Osama’s brothers had a nice house in Kensington Square. Osama, having led the life of a rich playboy, had recast himself in the model of a prophet. His long face, Jesus painted by El Greco, was soon to become one of the most famous of the age.
The morning after the 9/11 attacks, the band had assembled outside Buckingham Palace as it does every morning at the Changing of the Guard, and, when the music began, it struck up ‘The Star Spangled Banner’. It was a spontaneous response to the tragedy, and representative of majority British opinion. Most people in Britain must have shared the feeling, of which the band music was a symbol, that the two great English-speaking peoples of the Western world, the United States and Britain, have a deep bond of friendship. The fact that many Britons perished on 11 September in New York was not the primary reason for the sense of shock and shared outrage in Britain. The British felt that the attack on America was an attack on their closest ally and strongest friend.
Such feelings in Britain are shot through with ambiguities and ironies, and in the weeks which followed the attack some of these ambiguities turned to expressions of outright anti-Americanism. There was even a perception, especially on the left, that ‘the Americans’ had in some sense ‘had it coming to them’ that they ‘deserved’ or had been ‘asking for’ some such retributive act of violence against its innocent civilian population. Ever since the end of the Second World War, certainly since Suez, there has been a strong vein of anti-Americanism in the British psyche–‘over-sexed, over-paid, and over here’. But it would be easy to misread this. Many who would complain about the ‘bloody Yanks’ would also feel a natural kinship with them. Although the unfolding Iraqi crisis, the war and its aftermath, would allow anti-American feeling to be voiced by all the usual suspects, and it certainly increased anti-American feelings throughout the world, there was no notable increase in anti-Americanism in Britain, despite the best endeavours of the BBC, and some sections of the press, to whip such feelings into flame. Indeed, as the extent of the Islamist terror threat became clear, with explosions in the London transport system (see Chapter 27), there were increased feelings of solidarity with the Americans in their desire to go after the perpetrators of 9/11 and get’em.
But how could such an elusive individual as bin Laden be found? And how would it be possible to distinguish between the need to get back at the mass murderers, and the need to construct a plausible Middle Eastern policy which would contain the rogue states?
The Americans had continued to receive intelligence about the dangers posed to world peace by Saddam Hussein, and a key source was the cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi whose codename was Curveball. In the evidence gathered by the Presidential Commission on the reasons for pre-war misinformation guiding the Oval Office, it was stated that ‘of all the disproven pre-war weapons claims from aluminium centrifuge tubes to yellowcake uranium from Niger, none points to greater levels of incompetence than those found within the misadventures of Curveball’.4
Curveball had originally surfaced in Germany, where he had persuaded his minders that he had worked as an Iraqi chemical engineer and supervised one of Saddam’s mobile biological weapons labs. Curveball’s real name was Rafid Ahmed Alwan. A 601-page report released in March 2005 by the US government conceded that Curveball and the CIA had been ‘dead wrong’ in all their pre-war assessments of the Iraqi situation.5
US relations with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had, broadly speaking, known three phases. There had been the phase, from September 1980, when this exceptionally brutal dictator had authorised the invasion of neighbouring Iran. For the next six years, America supported the Iraqis in their war against the Iranians. The war ended in a stalemate, and amazingly, Saddam survived it, in spite of uprisings by Kurds and Shias, which he suppressed with merciless severity. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the Americans changed their view of him. He became a villain who was trying to steal oil. Following his humiliating defeat in the Desert Storm war it was a prodigious achievement on his part to survive. But he did so. The Israelis and their allies were never to forget that he launched scud missiles which landed in Tel Aviv. Economic sanctions over the next years brought Iraq to a state of near collapse. In 1998
, a nationwide health survey of Iraqi children showed that 9.1 percent were actively undernourished, 26.7 percent undernourished and 22.8 percent underweight. The health service was at the point of collapse. Iraqis were leaving their country in droves. In New Zealand alone, there were 30,000 Iraqi refugees, most of them highly skilled or professional.