(1) Much has been written about the export of high-technology military equipment from the armament centres of the great and once great powers. All the four wars listed above were fought with weapons manufactured in other countries, whether from the Western or Soviet blocs. In none of the conflicts was either one of the pairs of combatants capable of manufacturing the major weapon systems they deployed. These were indeed wars seeded and nurtured from outside. The terms by which the arms deals were transacted could differ. Sometimes the weaponry was acquired on credit, sometimes as outright aid, sometimes as in the Iraq-Iran war it was mostly acquired for cash—which gave the belligerents a significantly greater degree of political autonomy. But however they were obtained financially, the fact remains that without the external supply the conflicts could not have taken place in the way they did. The shipment of weapons from North America, Europe, the Soviet bloc and China has proved to be the precondition for a rash of terrible small wars. Furthermore, there is a systemic logic to the transfer of armaments in this fashion, in addition to the political decisions which dominate the trade. Once one neighbour has modern weapons, then the other ‘needs’ to acquire them for self-defence. As each successful war leads to a victory and defeat, so the example of the fate of the vanquished and the new conquests of the victor motivate their surrounding neighbours to further purchases.3
(2) At the same time as many Third World countries have become dependent upon outside sources for their arms, they have also begun to demonstrate a degree of independence backed by their new military capacities. Argentina is only one example of this trend, whereby weapons bought from a number of suppliers have ensured an absolute dependency on none. But even when there is a single supplier of arms from outside, the recipient can strike further than the donor might desire. China probably did not want Pol Pot to persist in being quite so reckless. The Soviet Union assured Ethiopia that Somalia would not attack the Ogaden with its Russian supplied army. Autonomy can increase even when the means of destruction are only imported.
Perhaps the most remarkable sign of this was the war between Iraq and Iran. When most of the world’s attention was concentrated upon the spectacular confrontation in the South Atlantic, the battle for Khorramshahr proceeded. Tens of thousands of troops battled each other along the fault lines of Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shi’ite within the Islamic World. The battle may still prove to be a decisive turning point. The Iranian victory, paving the way for a counter-invasion of Iraq, has shifted the balance of power within the Middle East and thus the world’s chief oil exporting region; it will also have a profound effect on the geopolitical position of the Soviet Union, which borders Iran and is fighting inside Afghanistan to its east. What is perhaps most unusual about the Iraq-Iran war, given its importance, is that neither side has the support of the United States in any direct fashion. Indeed, both are clearly independent of the two great powers, rather than dependent upon either one of them, despite the fact that their armed forces were originally created thanks to Washington and Moscow.
(3) There is a third aspect to the conflicts between developing states. This is the way in which the burden of a top-heavy, ‘modernized’ state machine is socially unstable. Incapable of leading their socially divided, backward economies to a stable capitalist democracy; unwilling to open the way to a drastic socialization of the economy; unable to arouse the kind of popularity a properly fascist state can mobilize; trapped by the tremendous economic, political and cultural pressures of the rest of the world, which bear down on an inevitably proud ‘new’ country with terrific force—many of these regimes turn to militarization and terror. The arms provide the means; political independence provides the opportunity. The unstable military dictatorship which may result provides the impetus, as it seeks to preserve itself by exploiting the combination of means and opportunity to strike outside its borders.
Wars initiated by a Third World state that attacks across its defined border are only one variant amongst a constant rash of conflicts which can be observed in almost all the world’s regions. As the British threw their ring around Port Stanley, N’jamena fell to a rebel army in Chad, as Gaddafi withdrew, while Israeli forces bombed and shelled Beirut. A major Soviet offensive was taking place in Afghanistan. The Pol Pot forces had suffered severely from a Vietnamese campaign in their Thai-supplied bases inside Cambodia. The whole balance of force in the Middle East was threatened by the Iranian victory. Meanwhile the efforts of the Polisario in the Western Sahara and, possibly most important of all, the struggle in El Salvador, continued. We should not forget to mention the consolidation of Indonesian supremacy in East Timor, which it is forcibly incorporating into its territory after the most clear-cut case of genocide in recent times—a genocide materially supported by the same Anglo-Saxon countries which fought for the ‘self-determination’ of the Kelpers: Britain, the USA, Australia. At least 200,000 civilians out of less than one million were starved to death in East Timor.4
To bring such divergent terrors into a single global canvas would be beyond the unifying imagination of a contemporary Goya. But we can imagine that each of the local belligerencies may be fed into a Pentagon computor, its specificity coded in terms of American interests. It will not be difficult to guess the cumulative result: these things get out of the West’s control. Somehow, therefore, the capacity of the United States to impose its will through the technological might and co-ordinated skill of its men needs to be reinstated after Vietnam. Politically, the Falklands crisis seems to reinforce a legalistic ideology that restrains America from imposing its own wishes through armed expeditions. But the actual example of the British Armada could be different. It has ‘shown’ the world what the West can do through its intimidating example. One of the consequences of the Falklands expedition could be that it has so raised the force level of the West’s response to ‘misdemeanors’, that subsequently it will appear quite mild if America sends just a few planes to El Salvador … Thatcher may thus have helped to solve the crucial problem of successive American administrations since 1975, by making it acceptable once again to intervene abroad directly. Almost certainly the enthusiasm for co-operation with the British that the Pentagon has displayed stems from this possibility. As far as Britain is concerned, then, the Falklands conflict represents a novel escalation which does bear a resemblance, however miniature, to the US war in Vietnam.
The war between Britain and Argentina over the Falklands was a peculiar combination of different types of conflict. So far as Argentina is concerned, it can be seen as an example of a Third World war, of the sort described. So far as the UK is concerned it is in part a colonial ‘war of defence’ and also a post-colonial war of intervention. For both countries it is a frontier dispute which has come about because of the virtually uninhabitable nature of the Falklands. More than large enough to house a community, but not fertile enough to be the basis for an autonomously viable community that could become independent in its own right (a factor that will be discussed in the next chapter), the Falklands-Malvinas remained an eccentric spot, subject to overlapping claims. If one looks at any atlas of frontier disputes one sees a world covered with the rash of contention. The only region which appears to have settled its borders is Europe, where there are more frontiers to the square mile than any equivalent zone. Yet more blood has probably been lost to resolve the placement of these boundaries than anywhere else. Millions have been killed to reach ‘agreement’ about its various sovereignties we now see delimited in our atlases and car-maps. Furthermore, in many cases it was Europeans who drew up the borders that are now subject to contention in other continents. While wars are endemic to human society to date, the modern pattern of aggressive international nation-states is European in origin. The new wars between developing countries may be seen as one of Europe’s gifts to the world, as armour and infantry are launched in surprise attack. Europe was not the first to cultivate the art of war in ancient times, but it pioneered its industrial application. Now the underdeveloped world is �
��catching up’, as its members seek their own national ‘definition’. By holding on to the Falklands, the British government found itself entangled by just such a development and was drawn into a war in the Third World.
Notes
1 The schema is sufficiently broad to absorb the fact that Somalia has seen much less terror than Ethiopia, for the main point is that the latter country has undergone a more profound social transformation.
2 New York Times, 2 May 1982; Guardian, 1 June 1982.
3 On the important questions of arms sales and the Falklands, see Mary Kaldor, Guardian, 17 May 1982. Ian Watson, Deputy City Editor of the Sunday Telegraph, noted cheerfully, ‘Nobody may like to see headlines like “Galtieri is good for GEC”, or “It’s take-off time for defence shares”, but that’s the world we live in.’ To which the appropriate response is surely, ‘For how long?’; The Magazine, June 1982.
4 Not to mention all the Third World conflicts of the recent past—the wars of the Indian sub-continent, the fighting around the periphery of China, the Israeli wars in the Middle East….
7 A Just Settlement?
ON 14 MAY The Times warned against any compromise solution. The Peruvian peace initiative was, in its view, a close call, as its terms came near to betrayal. The Task Force was off the Falklands and it was necessary to press on; not least because ‘The crisis has shaken the British people out of a sleep, and the people, once woken, will not lightly forgive those leaders who rang the alarm and then failed to fulfil their responsibility …’ It would be more accurate to say that the British public had been caught napping. Will future historians really look back to April 1982 and see a people waking from a long sleep? Will they judge The Times to have provided notable guidance? Or will they see it as a ‘top’ sleepwalker distressed by the daylight?
Whatever the answer, the British ‘tradition’ of judicious intelligence showed little vitality through the crisis, while the propagandists for war had a field day and not just in the House of Commons. The greatest advantage of the Right and the war party was their quickness of reflex, not least as they moved in on concepts such as ‘sovereignty’, the ‘right to self-determination’, the sanctity of the British ‘way of life’, and the imperative that ‘aggression should not pay’.
The Times editorial which asserted that the British people were now woken and determined not to retreat, was designed to muster support for the feature article on its facing opinion page by Enoch Powell. He was jubilant:
All of a sudden, thoughts and emotions which for years have been scouted or ridiculed are alive and unashamed. In both universities [a revealing phrase], where, until recently, anyone who mentioned ‘sovereignty’ or ‘the nation’ or ‘the British People’ would have been lucky not to have been rabbled, students discuss with respect and approval arguments and propositions which presuppose those very things.
It is noteworthy that a man who thinks there are only two universities in Britain worthy of mention, should regard himself as a spokesman for ‘the British people’. But not all of his account is false, however slanted and triumphalist. Words like ‘sovereignty’ did indeed go virtually uncontested, as they were usurped by Powell and his kindred spirits.
The Left’s response tended instead to dwell on the hypocrisy of Tories who suddenly took it upon themselves to denounce the ‘fascist Junta’ in Buenos Aires. It needs little exercise of the imagination to hear those same Tory voices a few months previously expressing a very different sentiment, in response to complaints that they should not arm a regime like Argentina’s, which had ‘disappeared’ so many of its citizens. (‘I agree that it has been awful for lefties and people like that Jewish fellow Timerman, but you know, old chap, there are plenty of us Brits out there, and a pretty thriving Anglo-American community, and they don’t complain, far from it.’)
Indeed, it was a simple matter to prove beyond question the hypocrisy of the House of Commons as it waxed indignant about the right to self-determination of the Kelpers. Both Labour and Conservative governments had, in succession, approved the wholesale removal of an equivalent island population from their remote homeland of Diego Garcia, lock, stock and barrel, and quite against their wishes. In 1966 there was an Anglo-American military agreement to make this Indian Ocean coral atoll available as a US military outpost. The island is much smaller than the barren Faklands archipelago, but its tropical setting makes it far more advantageous for settlement and subsistence. Yet once it became an Anglo-Saxon staging post in the cold war there was deemed to be no room for its inhabitants. So they were forcibly deported to Mauritius over a thousand miles away, and dumped in poverty for more than a decade until the final adjudication—ironically coincident with the beginning of the Falklands crisis—awarded them a mere £4 million for their confiscated home.1 The size of the indigenous communities involved in both cases is almost the same: 1,200 deportees from Diego Garcia; 1,300 native-born resident Falklanders. Could it be any more obvious, therefore, that the bi-partisan attachment in the Commons to the principle of self-determination for small island communities does not exist, or at the very least, is racially selective?
In allowing the eviction of the Diego Garcians (to make way for US Marines) Parliament undoubtedly committed an action worse, both in principle and practical impact, than the Argentinian seizure of the Falklands. It may not be a formal act of aggression to remove one’s ‘own’ island people from their homes, but as a unilateral act of force against people it clearly overshadows the behaviour of Argentina in the Falklands, where the invaders killed nobody and apparently tried to ensure at first that life went on more or less as before.
If we simply desire to score points, the House of Commons would lose, were it not that it has better access to the press and television. But is not such argument a diversion anyway? In terms of ya-boo, custard-pie politics, we can show that the parliamentarians are hypocrites. What is new? Such noises are in fact the stuff of Parliament itself and the whole British ‘debating’ tradition, with its empty sounds. Party leaders seek to have it all ways, and do so: that is what their politics is about. Just to expose their double standards, and leave it at that, will impale us—if we have some genuine attachment to the concerns involved. Politicians with a light touch and slipper fingers can manipulate talk about ‘rights’ and ‘principles’. Those who desire to mean what they say, on the other hand, can handle such terms only with care and difficulty. Hence the awkwardness when we are confronted by Thatcherite appeals to international standards. She may be a hypocrite but we cannot easily evade the issues without appearing shabby and underhand. If it was wrong to expel the Diego Garcians, for example, it must also be wrong to surrender the Kelpers unprotected to the Junta.
There are four key questions posed by the debate over the Falklands conflict: (1) the inhabitants’ right to ‘self-determination’; (2) the nature of territorial sovereignty; (3) the inhabitants’ right to freedom and the preservation of their way of life; and (4) the argument that ‘aggression should not pay’. In order to argue out these four often ideological issues as they relate to the war in the South Atlantic, it will be best to debate them within the framework of what a genuinely just and realistic settlement might have entailed.
As, I have indicated earlier, there were important pre-existing elements for a peaceful and democratic resolution of the problem. These could have been drawn upon to make a practical and principled settlement which could have encompassed:
(1) The ceding of formal sovereignty over the Falklands to Argentina, provided adherence to the following:
(2) The withdrawal of all Argentinian and British troops and police—the demilitarization of the area.
(3) Local self-government through an elected Falklands council in liaison with a civilian representative of the central government in Buenos Aires.
(4) The guarantee of the indigenous inhabitants’ present rights of law, language, religion, speech, assembly and travel.
(5) The appointment of an International Control Comm
ission to supervise these conditions.
Such an agreement would have ensured peace; it could have met the rational demands of both sides. Sovereignty is transferred to Argentina, yet the democratic rights of the local people are preserved (the legitimate core of any British objection to the forcible takeover). It is dangerous to over-simplify arguments into slogans, but the approach that I will try to justify here could be summed up by saying that the Argentinian flag should fly over the Falkland Islands, but that the Junta’s police should not be allowed their jurisdiction.
1. Self-Determination
By common consent today, sovereignty is a matter to be decided by the people: people themselves should be the arbiter of their national identity, this is the fundamental democracy which belongs to them. However much this might be denied in practice (while being proclaimed by leaders everywhere), the principle is of immense importance. It marks a fundamental, if as yet unrealized, step forward in the struggle for human emancipation from repression.
The immediate problem which the idea poses at its most general level is as mundane as the principle itself is lofty. Sovereignty may be something that belongs to the people, yet its actual shape is carved out in soil. The limits of sovereignty are defined in each case territorially. While the principle of self-determination is something exercised by people, its practical effect is to mark boundaries; land becomes the sacred definition of the democratic right. This in itself need not make for difficulties, provided there is a clear match of territorial demarcation and people who desire separate sovereignties. One of the ways in which determining sovereignty by popular consent can become difficult and often intractable is when the two aspects do not coincide and different peoples claim sovereignty in the same land.
Iron Britannia Page 21