by Mark Curtis
This chapter presents a brief overview of some aspects of the special relationship. Other features necessarily run through the rest of this book – notably in the chapters on Iraq, Afghanistan, the war against terrorism and the Middle East.
British support for US aggression – the long history
Under Blair, history is repeating itself. There is a long history of British backing for US aggression and covert action – from the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954 to the bombing of Libya in 1986 to the invasion of Panama in 1989, which I reviewed in a previous book, The Ambiguities of Power. I have covered other Anglo-US covert operations in other parts of this book – the 1953 overthrow of the Iranian government by MI6 and the CIA (see chapter 14) and joint complicity in the Indonesian bloodbath of 1965 (see chapter 20).
Britain sent troops to overthrow the democratically elected government of British Guiana in 1953 (see chapter 17), an intervention that was strongly backed by the US. The following year, Britain returned the favour by supporting the US overthrow of the government of Guatemala. The US organised and financed an invasion of the country to remove democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz, under what was to become the usual pretext of the international communist threat. The reality was that Arbenz’s land reform programme, which redistributed hundreds of thousands of acres to landless Guatemalan peasants, threatened the position of the country’s largest landowner, the US-owned United Fruit Company.
With the invasion under way, Guatemala took complaints about US aggression to the UN. There, Britain (and France) aided Washington by abstaining on Guatemala’s request for the Security Council to consider its complaints, and thus the request was rejected. This prompted President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles to express satisfaction with the British ‘willingness to cooperate in regard to the UN aspect’ of US policy, saying that this cooperation had contributed to the ‘happier situation in Guatemala’. With the threat of UN action removed, the US got on with removing the government.2
A new ruling junta took over, repealed the land reforms and the expropriation of United Fruit Company land, and eliminated the threat of independent, nationalist development. With Guatemala’s popular democratic experiment overturned, the way was paved for a succession of regimes that ensured that wayward socio-economic priorities would not be pursued. These regimes’ response to the popular movement seeking to reduce the grinding poverty of the majority was its physical extermination, amounting to around 100,000 deaths by government forces over the next four decades.
Britain publicly backed the US overthrow. The declassified files reveal that some British planners had some private misgivings about the way the US had removed Arbenz – that is, by organising an overt military invasion – but not the fact of it. The British position was that ‘we should be happy to see Arbenz disappear but would not exert ourselves to remove him’. The Foreign Office noted:
If the Americans had quietly worked for the overthrow of the Arbenz government, but nevertheless preserved the decencies of international justice, I think a different impression would have been left behind about the whole affair … We are glad Arbenz has gone, but, like Henry I with Becket, we do not like the circumstances attending his removal.3
This memorandum failed to elucidate how it was possible for the US to ‘overthrow’ the government while preserving international justice. Anthony Eden later recalled in his memoirs that:
Anglo-American solidarity was of overriding importance to us and to the West as a whole. I believed that even if we did not entirely see eye to eye with the United States government in their treatment of the Guatemalan situation, we had an obligation as their principal ally to go as far as we could to help them.4
Jumping forward a decade, it is commonly believed that Britain failed to support the US war against Vietnam, and the official history is that British troops did not take part. It is true that Britain publicly refused to commit troops. But it did much else to back the US in its terrible onslaught.
In fact, Harold Wilson approved US requests for MI6 to help the US in Vietnam. Britain’s SAS secretly took part in the war where they were attached to Australian and New Zealand SAS squads. An MI6 team of Malays and tribesmen from Borneo was also despatched on a tour of duty among ethnic Montagnards in South Vietnam.
Britain conducted secret air flights from Hong Kong to deliver arms, especially napalm and five-hundred-pound bombs. MI6 also assisted the Malayan government to transfer arms and other military supplies secretly to South Vietnam. British counter-insurgency experts were also seconded to Saigon as part of a British Advisory Mission. Some soldiers were seconded to Fort Bragg, home of the US special forces, and then inducted into the US army. Britain trained US, Vietnamese and Thai troops at its jungle warfare school in Malaya in the late 1960s, and for several years one of Britain’s leading counter-insurgency experts, a veteran of the war in Malaya, advised the Nixon regime on Vietnam policy.
Britain’s major contribution to the US was intelligence. This took various forms, including forwarding intelligence reports to the Americans from MI6 station heads in Hanoi. The British monitoring station at Little Sai Wan in Hong Kong provided the US with intelligence until 1975. The US National Security Agency coordinated all signals intelligence in Southeast Asia, and Little Sai Wan was linked to this operation. Its intercepts of North Vietnamese military traffic were used by the US military command to target bombing strikes over North Vietnam.5
At the diplomatic level, the Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson and Heath governments all effectively supported the US war to varying degrees. Conservative governments were especially enthusiastic but Labour leaders were also consistently sympathetic to basic US objectives and most of its actions. Despite occasional criticism of some specific US military strikes, one will search in vain for British government statements questioning the US’ basic right to conduct the war or questioning its supposed noble, moral motives. Britain often acted, as now, as an apologist for US atrocities. The Wilson government after 1964 refused to break with its ally even as the scale of US terror rose to unprecedented heights.
The myth that the South Vietnamese were being ‘defended’, and with the best US intentions, has been long-standing, and was often promoted by British governments. Prime Minister Douglas-Home, for example, informed the House of Commons in March 1964 that in recent talks with President Johnson ‘I reaffirmed my support for United States policy which … is intended to help the Republic of Vietnam to protect its people and to preserve its independence.’
The US ‘strategic hamlet’ programme was intended to control the population and deprive the liberation movement of support – in the course of which Vietnamese peasants were herded with violence into thousands of villages surrounded by concentration-camp-style fortifications. The British saw this programme as a justifiable, defensive operation. ‘The “strategic hamlet” programme’, then Lord Privy Seal Edward Heath noted in 1963, ‘is giving improved security to villagers and a chance to build up again the traditional system of Vietnamese village councils and communal activity.’ The US was drawing on the British practice of ‘villageisation’ in Malaya that was equally brutal (see chapter 16); a British expert served as an adviser during the US version in Vietnam.6
The aggressor in Vietnam was never regarded as the US, by definition. In 1962, as US aircraft were bombing South Vietnam and spraying chemical defoliants over the Vietnamese countryside, the British Foreign Office minister could still state that ‘the threat to peace in Vietnam does not arise from United States action but from the policies of the North Vietnam government’.
In March 1965 Harold Wilson could state: ‘We fully support the action of the United States in resisting aggression in Vietnam.’ This ‘resisting’ of aggression by then involved major escalations in the bombing of North Vietnam such as the beginning of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, lasting for most of the year, as well as the widespread use of napalm and chemical poisons.7
As the terro
r mounted following these escalations, the Labour government became more guarded in public in expressing support for US policy, arguing that its position as co-chair of peace negotiations precluded it from taking sides. In the numerous discussions of Vietnam in the House of Commons in the second half of the 1960s, Labour governments refused to condemn basic US policy, expressing only occasional opposition to specific acts, for example over the horrific saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong in 1968.
The Heath government was even more supportive. When the US launched another saturation bombing campaign in April 1972, in response to North Vietnam’s intervention in the South, the Foreign Office minister declared that the ‘American reaction is understandable’, with Heath noting that this ‘surely is an attitude to be respected’. In response to a parliamentary question noting that US violence was causing the destruction of houses, numerous civilian casualties and ‘pellet bombs dropped on individuals’, the Foreign Office minister replied that ‘it is not for us to make protests about individual types of weapons used’.8
During the Christmas 1972 US terror bombing of cities, meanwhile, the Observer reported that ‘the British government has no intention of joining in the international condemnation’ of the US. While the Foreign Office was saying nothing in public, ‘private comments leave no doubt that British official thinking supports Mr Nixon’s action’.9
US aggression in Central America in the 1980s was also strongly supported, this time by the Thatcher government. ‘We support the United States’ aim to promote peaceful change, democracy and economic development’ in Central America, the Prime Minister stated in January 1984; by this time, the US aim of destroying the prospects for peaceful change and economic development were abundantly clear. This was evidenced in US backing of the murderous regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala and in the CIA’s creation of a contra terrorist army to operate against the Nicaraguan government under the Sandinistas. British apologias sometimes reached astounding heights. The Foreign Office minister stated in 1985 – several years after contra operations had begun devastating Nicaragua – that ‘the American government have stated time and again that they are seeking a solution by peaceful means to the problems of Central America’.10
With a probable nod and a wink from Whitehall, the British private ‘security company’, KMS, trained some of the contras. KMS also organised the destruction of the El Chipote arms depot in the centre of Managua, and KMS helicopter pilots flew with the contras in Honduras. The company also recruited soldiers for the gun-running operation to the contras directed by Oliver North, helping to deliver planes full of military equipment into Nicaragua.11
London also used its diplomatic weight to back US positions. Foreign Office documents leaked in 1985 referred to Britain’s policy of helping to block loans to the Nicaraguan government and said: ‘We shall need to stick to our present line of claiming that our opposition is based on technical [that is, rather than political] grounds’ – ‘If we can find them!’, another Foreign Office official appended to the note. Whitehall could not bring itself to support international law, and abstained on the UN vote condemning the US for mining Nicaraguan ports. The World Court’s judgement that US actions in Nicaragua were illegal made no difference to British support. Throughout the US war, Britain preferred to maintain what Thatcher called ‘the fundamental alliance between Great Britain and the United States’.12
In November 1983 Britain and West Germany were the only EU states to abstain on a UN resolution expressing ‘deep concern’ at the human rights atrocities of the US-backed regime in El Salvador, which by then had reached staggering proportions. In 1984, London instructed its World Bank delegation to stop ‘opposing or abstaining on all proposals’ and to support all ‘developmentally sound projects’ in El Salvador. It then reintroduced a small aid programme to the country and offered military training in Britain to a few Salvadorean military officers.
Britain was the only European government not to send observers to the 1984 elections in Nicaragua, won by the Sandinistas. Though the elections were regarded by independent observers as free and fair, Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe’s view was that ‘free and fair elections could not be regarded as having taken place’. ‘In El Salvador’, Howe assured the House of Commons, ‘a real transfer of power took place; but that was not the position in Nicaragua.’ In other words, the wrong side won.13
Britain and the US were the only major donors that gave more aid to Nicaragua in the last few years of the brutal Somoza dictatorship than in the first few years under the Sandinistas. This was despite a British government minister’s recognition that Nicaragua under the Sandinistas had ‘a good record in the spending of development aid’. According to the British chargé d’affaires in Managua, Nicaragua had a ‘very impressive record on social development’, one which was ‘amazing’ in comparison with El Salvador and Honduras; yet the latter received 100 times more British aid than Nicaragua.14
Other US acts of aggression in the 1980s were also strongly supported by Britain. Britain allowed the US to use its bases for the 1986 bombing of Libya, described by Thatcher as an act taken ‘in self-defence’. Britain was the only major state to support publicly the US invasion of Panama in 1989. Only the 1983 invasion of Grenada caused a ripple of concern in Whitehall, since Washington invaded a commonwealth country with the barest of consultation with London. But ministers were careful not to criticise the US invasion in public, in contrast to the condemnations from virtually all other states.
The current phase
The special relationship has reached new depths under New Labour. The Blair government is certainly comparable to Thatcher’s in the level of its support and apologies for US aggression. But 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 postwar – 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.
When President Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks against Sudan and Afghanistan in August 1998, Blair offered reflexive British support. These attacks came two weeks after 224 people had been killed by bomb blasts at American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. The US attacked the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, claiming that it was producing nerve gas for use in possible terrorist attacks. Donald Anderson, former US ambassador to Sudan, conceded later that ‘the evidence was not conclusive and was not enough to justify an act of war’. The US never provided the ‘evidence’ it claimed it had, while Sudan’s proposal for the UN to investigate was vetoed by the US.15
Tony Blair stated that ‘I strongly support this American action against international terrorists.’ He explained that ‘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’ – and so that was enough. Privately, however, it was reported that some British officials and ministers thought the strikes counter-productive, though they never said so publicly.16
As for violating international law, Britain’s Attorney General – the government’s top legal officer – explained that ‘the legality of the US action against the Al Shifa factory in Khartoum is a matter for the United States’, perhaps a bit like saying that Yugoslav intervention in Kosovo was a matter for Yugoslavia or, an even closer parallel, that Iraqi action in Kuwait was a matter for Iraq. This somewhat contrasts with the government’s statement in a later human rights report that: ‘blatant contempt for international law can never be regarded as an internal matter’. This double-think is possible, and normal, since it is obvious that international law, and human rights, are simply tools to be wielded in support of elite objectives, and discarded when not of use.17
As a result of the attack on Sudan, a Boston Globe report estimated that tens of thousands of people had died from malaria,
tuberculosis and other treatable diseases. The bombing had destroyed the life-saving medicines in the factory which produced 90 per cent of Sudan’s major pharmaceutical products. Sanctions against Sudan made it impossible to import the necessary quantity of medicines to cover the gaps left by the destruction of the plant. Germany’s ambassador to Sudan, Werner Daum, wrote that:
It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction of the Al Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess.18
So, perhaps tens of thousands of people died as a result of this US attack, fully backed by the British government, and which followed a long list of other violations of international law reviewed in the previous chapters. All of this occurred before September 11th. We should, therefore, already have ridiculed the stance of Blair, Bush and others as they professed their commitment to civilisation versus barbarity on September 11th.
The current phase of British soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder with the US military comes when it is crystal dear that our primary ally is in fact the world’s greatest outlaw state. Under Bush, the US could hardly demonstrate greater open contempt for the international cooperation to which Britain is rhetorically committed. The Bush administration has scuppered the biological weapons convention, torn up the anti-ballistic missile treaty, rejected the international criminal court, backed off signing the landmine treaty, undermined the small arms treaty and refused to sign the climate change treaty. It remains the protector of Israel, the supporter of repressive Middle Eastern Arab regimes, the new-found ally of totalitarian regimes in Central Asia, and the leading architect of a fundamental reshaping of the global economy to empower Western corporations.