UPDATED: OCT 7, 2007
LETTERS FROM THE UK
AFTER BLAIR (5)
In my last column on the 26th of August, I wrote that in October, following the parliamentary recess, Gordon Brown was likely to announce that British troops were to be withdrawn from Iraq early next year. He needed to be able to do so without appearing to renege on his - or rather Blair’s - commitment to Bush. He had, I wrote, found a formula which would enable him to do this – namely, to claim that the withdrawal was on the advice of British military commanders on the ground who consider that the British presence in Basra no longer serves any useful purpose This would accord with what Bush was saying about any future decision concerning U.S. troops in Baghdad, while side-stepping the inconvenient probability that General Petraeus would support the Bush/Cheney argument that more U.S. troops were needed in order to “finish the job”. However, during the past week doubts have been raised about whether the confidently expected announcement of the withdrawal of British forces from Basra, will be made in October.
Brown let it be known that there is “no timetable” for a British withdrawal. He said that Britain would honour its commitments to “the international community”. This seems to suggest that, contrary to expectations, he is reassuring Bush that Britain will not “cut and run” - a phrase much used by those who want to portray opponents of the war and advocates of withdrawal from Iraq as cowardly capitulators to terrorism. There is no doubt that members of the Bush administration are worried about Brown’s intentions. The vibes are not good and they are not getting the unqualified public support from Downing Street that they had when Blair was in office. Also, they will not have failed to notice that Brown is allowing his foreign secretary, David Miliband, a freer rein in interpreting foreign policy priorities than his predecessors in that office while Blair was prime minister. Immediately following Brown’s “no timetable for withdrawal” statement, Miliband told an interviewer on the BBC’s Today programme that decisions concerning British troop withdrawals from the Basra area would be made solely in Britain’s “national interest” and would not be influenced by any U.S. interest that did not accord with it. It is highly unlikely that Miliband could have said what he did without Brown’s tacit agreement.
All this is indicative of the pressures on Brown. He knows that Blair’s fall from grace in the eyes of the British people was due largely to his perceived subservience to Bush. Bush is a reviled and ridiculed figure in this country – so much so that Brown and his ministers studiously avoid mentioning him by name – a practice that has also been extended to Blair, who is now almost always referred to as “the previous prime minister”. British casualties continue to rise, both in Iraq and, increasingly in Afghanistan. As long as troops remain in the Basra area (and there is nowhere else that they can be deployed) they are sitting targets for the hostile Shia militia. There is no longer the pretence that they have any power or influence in Basra itself. But if they are withdrawn, U.S. supply lines from Kuwait will be dangerously exposed. What the Bush administration would really like is a British “surge” in Basra, but there is no chance that this will happen, so, if and when the British army leaves, the U.S. will have to fill the vacuum. This will require even more troops, with just as little prospect of success as the escalation in Baghdad. Brown knows that sooner or later – and sooner rather than later – the army must be brought out. This will lead to public tensions with the U.S. but will be popular at home. It will, however, be met with extreme hostility in the most right wing sections of the British press – particularly in the Murdoch papers, The Sun and The Times, which have consistently supported Bush and the Iraq war. They will attack Brown as “disloyal” to “our closest ally”, in the “war against terror”. The Tories will also oppose a British withdrawal using similar arguments. If he fudges the issue Brown will seem to be putting U.S. interests before British, just as Blair did. This will probably put an end to the honeymoon he has enjoyed with members of his own party. So, his “Atlanticism” is likely to be tested very soon.
This brings me to the point where I ended my last column – the discussion of the “special relationship” and its origins. Because British subservience to the United States appeared particularly blatant during Blair’s premiership, it is easy to forget that the relationship of subservience, in which Britain has somewhat euphemistically been referred to as a “junior partner”, goes back a long way. To explain this, a little historical excursion is necessary. Dean Acheson’s observation, made in 1962, that Britain had lost an empire but had not yet found a role, may serve as a point of departure.
Between the two world wars the British Empire was at its greatest territorial reach. The defeat of the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires left France and Britain, as the two dominant European victors, in a seemingly unassailable position. They dominated the newly formed League of Nations. Through the mandate system they exercised control over the former Ottoman territories in the Middle East and determined the fate of the former German colonies. Following its success in the civil war and the wars of intervention, the newly established Soviet Union withdrew into an isolationist effort to construct “socialism in one country” under Stalin. The United States, despite Wilson’s enthusiasm for the League, under Republican administrations, largely withdrew from European affairs.
In spite of the appearance of imperial strength, both Britain and France had been seriously weakened by war. The European empires were in terminal decline. During the 1920s it became clear that the rising world power, despite its formal isolationism, was the United States, upon whom the European states, including the defeated Germany, were economically dependent. The U.S. was the real victor of World War One.
The British governing class had one important objective during the 1920s and 1930s: To avoid another war at all costs in order to maintain Britain’s independence from any continental power and retain control of its empire. This objective remained unchanged throughout the years of the World Depression of the 1930s. In the late 1930s, Chamberlain realised that if Britain became involved in a war with a resurgent Nazi Germany on the continent, it would be impossible to hold on to the Empire. This led to the policy known as “appeasement”, which meant, in effect, allowing Hitler to dominate Central and Eastern Europe in breach of the post war treaties, as long as he did nothing that would oblige Britain to intervene. A German invasion of France would oblige Britain to go to her assistance and thus lead to war with Germany. Thus, it was important to dissuade France from honouring her treaty commitment to Czechoslovakia. Whatever encroachments Hitler intended to make in Eastern Europe could be accepted as long as they were achieved without armed force.
Chamberlain believed that German hegemony over Central and Eastern Europe would not threaten Britain and the Empire. Another section of the governing class, represented by Churchill, saw that German imperialism, under Nazi command, would respect no territorial boundaries and represented a dire and immediate threat to Britain and the Empire. It is also likely that Hitler’s hostility to “bolshevism”, shared by Chamberlain and his supporters, may have been a factor in their appeasement policy. In this respect, Churchill, the supreme anti-bolshevist, was also a realist. For him Stalin’s Russia did not threaten Britain or the Empire in 1939; Hitler’s Germany did. But, as remarked earlier, he was also an unrealistic romantic in his belief that, in what would inevitably be an unequal wartime alliance with the U.S., he could somehow uphold British independence and hold on to the Empire. Britain’s role as a subordinate partner in the “special relationship” was sealed in 1941. The seeds of the destruction of the British Empire (and, indeed, of the French Empire) were already germinating before World War Two. The war simply hastened the process.
By1945 the world of the European “Great Powers” had gone forever. In the bi-polar world that emerged with the “Cold War”, there was to be no place for the old style colonial imperialism. The new independence movements, inspired and emboldened by the world wide struggle against fascism and racism, were on the march and would not be thwarted. The British Empire would soon be gone, but the delusion of British imperial grandeur would survive, anachronistically, into the decades ahead. The delusion took the form of the romantic notion of a “partnership” of the two “great” nations of Churchill’s “English-speaking peoples”. The nation born of the former colonies would be the senior partner of the former great colonial power.
Last Update: 10/13/2007