The Path to Power m-2

by Margaret Thatcher

  Sightseeing during my short stay in Egypt was a diplomatic necessity as well as a pleasure. But even this contained risks. Having climbed the great Cheops Pyramid, and still a little breathless, I came down to find a small group of cameramen, journalists and officials standing beside a camel. The camel driver’s name was Ibrahim and the camel was called ‘Jack Hulbert’, perhaps so named by an English Tommy after the popular long-jawed British comedian of the 1930s and forties. He was, it seems, a distinguished beast, and had been ridden on a previous visit by Alec Douglas-Home when Foreign Secretary. Everyone seemed to assume that I would follow suit. The possibilities flashed across my mind, not just getting on but staying on. I firmly declined. Ibrahim claimed to be most offended. If Jack Hulbert was good enough for Sir Alec, why not for Mrs Thatcher? I caught a gleam in the driver’s eye and suggested that paying double the fare for no camel ride might suit both of us. With a great show of reluctance he agreed. And so the newspaper photographs in Britain showed me being welcomed by President Sadat, rather than in some less dignified posture.

  On Friday afternoon I flew to Damascus. President Assad had recently marked the fifth anniversary of the military coup which brought him to power by a judicious air-drop of gifts in Damascus and large pay rises for civil servants and the army. He was already a proven survivor in a country where previous heads of state had never served for more than two or three years. A member of the Alawite minority, presiding over a government containing people from a wide variety of religions, tribes and political affiliations, Assad had demonstrated a high level of political cunning to attain and hold power. His Ba’athist Party was itself an odd mixture of elements derived from both socialism and Islam, but founded in the 1940s under the slogan of ‘one Arab nation with an eternal mission’. Assad had developed to a fine art that particular mixture of radicalism, pragmatism and ruthlessness which success in the violent, turbulent world of Middle Eastern politics required. He was considered the most anti-Western leader in the region and was held responsible not just for many of the difficulties in the Arab-Israeli peace process but also for engineering the destruction of Lebanon. Western policy’s main error, which unfortunately continued for many years, was to underrate him and to exclude him from talks. But he made it easier to do this because of his subservience to the Soviet Union and his support for international terrorism.

  Syria was a tightly controlled police state. Romanian-style eavesdropping was clearly the order of the day at the official Guest House in which we stayed. On our arrival, Gordon Reece and I went up to our rooms to wash and change. But Gordon found that he had no towels in the bathroom and so knocked on my door and asked to borrow one. I had barely gone to fetch it when a maid scurried up to hand him his own.

  That evening our hosts would have found their guests’ private conversation more interesting. The Syrians had without warning invited me to a secret meeting with the PLO the following day. I was not going to agree to this. I would not meet them formally at all, still less in secret, because the PLO had refused to renounce terrorism. But I agreed, indeed welcomed, the opportunity to pay a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp and it was arranged that I would be taken to one on the outskirts of Damascus.

  The following day began with a long, bumpy ride to Qunaitra, the last town on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights. It had been demolished by the Israeli army when they withdrew in 1974. They were even alleged to have desecrated graves, and the whole town was now a showcase for the evils of Zionism. I was told that there was only one inhabitant now, an old lady who had refused to leave and had lived through the occupation. Predictably, I bumped into her on my way round.

  We stopped at the Palestinian camp on our return journey to Damascus. ‘Camp’ turned out to be something of a misnomer. It was an enormous settlement with roads, tents, social halls, shops, hospitals and schools. I was shown one school, where the children were assembled in a large hall, being addressed by a woman teacher with great earnestness. I imagined that this was some kind of prayer assembly and asked my guide what the woman was saying. The answer came: ‘She is reminding these children that they are privileged to be at this school because at least one of their parents has been killed by a Jew.’ Now I understood why it was named the ‘School of the Martyrs’.

  That evening after my return I had dinner with the President at his comfortable but modest house. He was obviously highly intelligent and knew precisely what he wanted. Though I was impressed, there was little meeting of minds. We talked about a draft Security Council Resolution which the Arab countries intended to put forward on the Palestinian question. It seemed to me that there was everything to be said for framing this responsibly so as not to attract the American veto. But of course I could not know quite what the Syrian President’s objectives in this matter really were: given Syria’s general stance of opposition to peace talks with Israel, he might well have been happier to have a strong pro-Palestinian Resolution vetoed than a weaker one passed. In any case, it was plain at that time that the Lebanese civil war was his real preoccupation, as he insisted again and again that Syria would never tolerate the partition of Lebanon. I was not surprised a few months later when Syrian troops intervened there in force. But I felt, oddly enough, that we had struck up some kind of relationship of mutual respect. He walked with me to the garden gate and jokingly asked whether I had been woken up early by the muezzin from the nearby mosque. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am up even before the Mullahs.’

  I had sought to be the perfect diplomat in both Egypt and Syria, but questions were put to me at my final press conference in Damascus which I felt required greater directness. Members of the Arab press corps pressed me on Britain’s attitude towards the PLO, demanding to know why we did not recognize it. Fresh from my visit to the camp, I set out the balanced policy described above, but I roundly condemned the PLO for its reliance on terrorism and said that you could not have peace between nations unless on the basis of law rather than violence. Their protestations at this provoked me to remind them that they themselves would not be free to ask questions if they did not benefit from some kind of rule of law. I also said that I disagreed fundamentally with the anti-Zionist Resolution, which described Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination, passed by the UN General Assembly. One journalist pointedly reminded me that Jewish groups in Palestine had also committed terrorist acts. I was fully aware of that. Any English person of my age remembers only too well the hanging of two Liverpool sergeants and the booby-trapping of their bodies by Irgun in July 1947. But one act of terrorism does not justify another. Some people at the time thought this plain speaking was something of a diplomatic gaffe. That would not have mattered to me, because I felt strongly about the principle. But in fact it would shortly stand me in good stead.

  In March I made my third visit to Israel. One of my early meetings was with the former Prime Minister, Golda Meir, whom I had first met when she was in office. I had developed the greatest respect for her and, perhaps as another woman in politics, I particularly understood that strange blend of hardness and softness which made her alternately motherly and commanding. She was deeply pessimistic about the prospects for peace and was particularly apprehensive about the Syrians. But she warmly congratulated me on what she described as my bravery in criticizing Palestinian terrorism in Damascus. She also strongly approved of my speeches on the Soviet threat, which she flatteringly linked with Solzhenitsyn’s statements. In her view the West was not nearly tough enough.

  I found that my remarks about the PLO had made a similar impression on the other Israeli politicians to whom I spoke. Now and on later visits as Prime Minister, the fact that I had not flinched from condemning terrorism and had consistently defended Israel’s right to a secure existence allowed me to speak frankly, but as a friend, to the Israelis. In my discussions with Mrs Meir and later with the Foreign Minister Yigal Allon, the Defence Minister Shimon Peres and the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, I relayed my impressions gained from Egypt and Syria that Arab
leaders were now thinking along lines which made a settlement possible. I also sought to persuade my hosts to consider not just Israel’s security — which I fully recognized must be their prime objective — but also the long-term need to reach a settlement with moderate Arab regimes. But the politicians I spoke to were generally pessimistic, particularly Prime Minister Rabin, who seemed at this time to have little understanding of the difficulties Arabs faced in dealing with their people’s desire to see justice for the Palestinians.

  As always, however, I found much to admire in Israel — the commitment to democracy in a region where it was otherwise unknown, the sacrifices people were prepared to make for their country and the energies which had put the huge sums received from America and the Jewish diaspora to productive use: they really had made the desert bloom. One institution, however, which never appealed to me was the kibbutz. I visited one for lunch close to the Golan Heights. Living in a kibbutz in such areas was partly a requirement of security, partly a matter of economics. For me, however, it was also a rather unnerving and unnatural collectivist social experiment. I admired people who could choose such a life but would never have wanted to be one of them. Not so my daughter Carol. As a teenager with some left-wing leanings she had told Denis and me that she wanted to spend some time in a kibbutz. We were concerned about this, but we knew of one which seemed suitable and finally agreed. Life there was extremely hard and conditions rudimentary. One of Carol’s tasks was to inoculate young chickens. She would take them from one box, inject them and drop them in another. Unfortunately, every now and then a fighter plane would roar over, the chicks would jump up and get mixed together. Carol returned with an unromantic view of the tasks of the farm labourer. Moreover, as Denis remarked to me later, she may not have been very good at inoculating the chickens, but she was certainly inoculated against socialism.

  I was taken up on the Golan Heights by an Israeli general — a professor in civilian life. I was impressed by the balance and moderation of his opinions. At one point he told me that where we stood was not Israeli land, but rather held in trust against the day when there was a secure settlement. He was a considerate man, and seeing that I was shivering in the cold wind which swept across the mountains he lent me his flak jacket. I was photographed in this and there followed furious Syrian objections. And so my first major Middle Eastern foray ended amid the endemic misunderstandings of the region.

  In retrospect, my visit to the Middle East occurred at an important time of transition between the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1978–79 American-brokered Egyptian-Israeli peace settlement. Although the Camp David Agreements ultimately failed to solve the deeper problems, they were a remarkable tribute to the principal participants — Jimmy Carter, Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat. At the time I became Prime Minister they still seemed to form the best basis for progress. In fact, however, the rise of armed, aggressive Islamic fundamentalism, principally financed by and focused on Iran, was to upset all such calculations.

  I was one of the last senior Western politicians to visit Iran while the Shah was still in power. The troubles had already begun. There were riots in Tabriz in February 1978 against the Shah’s programme of Westernizing reforms, which the Mullahs described as impious attacks on Islam and which, alas, ordinary people often experienced as the forced disruption of their traditional ways of life. As the disturbances increased, the Carter Administration vacillated in its attitude to the Shah. At times, it would offer him support as a bastion of Western influence in a strategically important part of the world; at others it would denounce his human rights record and demand the introduction of liberal reforms. What this recommendation failed to bear in mind was well summed up by the Shah himself: ‘I will behave like the King of Sweden when my subjects behave like Swedes.’ In any event, the Carter Administration’s blowing hot and cold only served to undermine the Shah and encourage his opponents — a fact not lost among America’s potential allies in the Middle East.

  For my part, I had no doubt about the strategic importance of Iran for the West. Moreover, although by most definitions only peripheral to the Middle East, Iran, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, had a large potential influence in the region. In any case, I admired the Shah personally and believed that his policy of modernization along Western lines was ultimately the right one. In retrospect, I can see that its success depended upon its being carried out more gradually and taking into account the customs and mores of his people. But it was certainly preferable to the retreat into fundamentalism and medieval economics which have reduced the standard of living of the Iranian people and forced the regime to distract them with political and religious adventurism abroad.

  All this was in the future, however, when I arrived in Tehran on the evening of Friday 28 April to be met by Tony Parsons, our Ambassador there. I found Iran to be, on the surface, a bustling, prosperous, Western-style country. There were plenty of new cars in the crowded streets. Shops sold luxury goods to sophisticated, well-dressed women. Moreover, the consumer society was underpinned not just by oil but by new industrial investment, as at the ultra-modern Iran National Automobile works which I visited.

  Tony briefed me on the situation. Not only was he on good personal terms with the Shah himself: he had a vast detailed knowledge of what was happening throughout the country. At this time the accepted wisdom was that the main threat to the Shah’s strongly pro-Western regime came from the communist-backed opposition, the Tudeh. Judging from his public pronouncements, even the Shah himself seemed to believe this. But Tony Parsons had perceived that the Mullahs and their supporters were also a threat. That turned out to be all too true. Tony is, however, candid enough to admit in his own account that he thought the army would be capable of holding the situation. That turned out to be all too false. But none of us foresaw how quickly the Shah’s position would crumble.

  On Saturday morning I was received at the palace by the Minister of the Court, Amir Abbas Hoveyda. Hoveyda was an urbane and distinguished man, who was later executed by the Ayatollah’s regime after a show trial which I saw on television.

  When I met the Shah he began by expressing concern about the recent communist-backed coup in Afghanistan: he said he had expected one eventually, but that it had occurred ten years earlier than he envisaged. He talked repeatedly of Iran as being in the front line against communism. He gave no hint of resentment against his wavering Western backers, though he had reason to feel it. Not only was there the uncertainty about the Americans’ commitment to him, but the Iranians also maintained that the Persian-language BBC World Service reports consisted largely of propaganda against the Government. I went away impressed by his grasp of world affairs. But, of course, no amount of such wisdom is proof against the kind of subversion which he was facing at home.

  The Shah was a handsome man, with somewhat gaunt features which I later understood were the early signs of the cancer that would kill him. There was nothing in his manner to suggest he believed that time was running out. It was ominous perhaps that when he went to inspect his troops he travelled by helicopter: I was told that nowadays he always travelled that way rather than through the streets because of the threat of attack. I also noticed that on my visit to Isfahan, to see the ancient mosques, my personal security was particularly tight.

  On reflection, my impressions of Iran seem to have something of the quality of those paintings in which the French nobility on the eve of the Revolution disport themselves amid contrived pastoral scenes. Within a year, the Shah would have fled the country, the Ayatollah Khomeini would have returned, an Islamic Republic would have been proclaimed, and bloodshed and terror would prevail. Yet here I was, invited to admire the glorious trappings of the Peacock Throne, to wonder at the spectacular crown jewels, to be enthralled by the illuminated grandeur of the ruins of Persepolis.

  Could the Shah have been saved? If the Americans had been more robust, if the French had insisted that the Ayatollah refrain from political activity in Iran as a condition of
asylum in Paris, if the Shah had appeased moderate Islamic opinion, perhaps things could have turned out differently. As it is, the forces unleashed by the Iranian revolution are still unchecked and represent one of the greatest threats to international peace and stability.

  ASIA AND THE FAR EAST

  Between the autumn of 1976 and the spring of 1977 I visited no fewer than eight states in Asia and the Far East. This provided me with a range of contacts and a fund of experience which would prove useful when I was Prime Minister. Inevitably, though, since so many countries were fitted into such a short time — among them Pakistan, India, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia and China — I received only a series of political snapshots which would have to be supplemented by wider reading and discussion.

  As I reflected later on what I had learned, however, it seemed to me that two general themes stood out. First, in varying degrees and from different standpoints, countries throughout the region were becoming more alert to the extension of Soviet power and influence: this would be sharply reinforced in 1979 by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Secondly, it was still an open question as to how China, Japan and possibly India would arrange a new Asian balance of power. In each case, the rise to dominance was distracted at least as much by self-created obstacles as by external circumstances. The years 1976–77, therefore, were ones full of interest for an apprentice Western statesman. And, in spite of criticisms in the British press for spending too much time away from home, I never regretted making these visits.