Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World
By Mark Curtis
Vintage, 2003
512 pages, $24.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"We must at all costs maintain control of this oil", Britain's foreign secretary wrote to the US secretary of state in 1956. Western leaders committed to paper their considerable alarm at the nationalisation of Egypt's oil industry. This revealed the true motive behind Britain's invasion of Egypt in that year. The same motive — control of oil — was behind the British, US and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Web of Deceit: Britain's Real Role in the World, by Mark Curtis, gives us every reason to expect that, when the official records from the latest Western invasion of an Arab country are declassified, we will find that Jack Straw and Colin Powell (the latest transatlantic pairing of British and US ministers for imperialism) had Iraq's oil high in their minds.
Of course, such thoughts were roundly denied by Britain's Labour government. Prime Minister Tony Blair desperately searched for a moral pretext for the war against Iraq, writes Curtis, treating the British population "as a giant focus group to test each new argument", from eliminating "weapons of mass destruction" (WMD) and opposing terrorism to defending human rights.
The public held their noses at the smell of hypocrisy, however. If Blair was so concerned about WMD and terrorism, why not start with Britain's long practice of state terrorism or its possession of nuclear and other WMDs — including the WMD of illegal sanctions against Iraq, which killed more children each month, every year for a decade, than all people killed on September 11, 2001, in New York. If human rights abuses were the real issue, why wasn't Saddam Hussein's butchery a problem when he was "our" ally (and arms export market) during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Why the late discovery of Hussein's repression of Iraqi Kurds? Why was there no official British action against the Iraqi leader following the massacre of 5000 Kurds in Halabja in 1988. As Curtis notes, "London expressed its outrage over the use of chemical weapons by doubling export credits for Baghdad" and relaxing its already near-comatose guidelines on arms exports.
These decisions were kept secret because, as one Foreign Office official noted, "it could look very cynical if, so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales".
Hypocrisy rules in the world of British imperialism. There was defiance of the United Nations when it did not give the British government what it wanted (legal authority to invade Iraq). Turkey, unlike Iraq, can kill and torture its Kurds without fear of censure by British governments because Turkey is a NATO ally and arms-buyer. British assistance in the creation and support the mujaheddin (their training, via Britain's overseas intelligence agency, MI6, was Britain's largest covert operation since 1945) — which spawned Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and the Taliban — was praiseworthy when these "freedom-fighters" were part of the anti-communist crusade against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, but that country must be bombed when these "good" terrorists turn feral and start killing the "wrong" people.
British profits have always followed British bombs, from the naked grab for other people's resources to trade and investment on terms favourable to British capitalists. The "war on terror" is a convenient pretext for shoring up British allies (repressive regimes who govern their countries to suit Western capitalist interests) against enemies (dictators, governments or popular movements that don't). The wars against Iraq and Afghanistan ensured that the energy resources of Central Asia and the Middle East are now in the correct (US and British) hands, protected by a ring of military bases.
Spurning diplomacy for cluster bombs, the 1999 NATO bombing war on Yugoslavia not only demonstrated the "credibility" of NATO (now without its traditional Soviet bogey) but enabled the British ambassador to NATO to "reassure investors of stability" in the Balkans. That Blair did not suddenly become devoted to human rights in Kosova in March 1999 is demonstrated by his government's support for Russia's rulers while they committed worse atrocities in Chechnya barely three months later. As a Russian terror campaign of massacres, torture, rape and looting was unleashed, Blair and Russia's President Vladimir Putin toasted their friendship, and the "economic re-colonisation of post-Soviet Russia", with an evening at the opera in Moscow.
In the Middle East, British imperialism created the Gulf sheikdoms to keep Arab nationalism at bay and oil profits in the right pockets. Oman, Egypt, Bahrain, North and South Yemen, Palestine and Kuwait saw British khaki muscle at work when "regional order" was threatened. Criticism of British support for Arab despots was met with glib responses that British governments preferred "patient and discreet dialogue" — a strategy which failed spectacularly because the whispered words were about stitching up arms deals or swapping torturers' techniques.
MI6 supported the vicious security police in Iran, for example, following the British-instigated MI6-CIA coup in 1953 against the nationalist and reformist government of Mohammad Mossadegh. Fortunately for British Petroleum, the ensuing 26-year dictatorship that followed proved more "moderate" to British profits and restored private ownership of the oil industry — even if Iran regularly topped Amnesty International's list of torture states.
Land for colonial settlers and mineral resources for British mining companies won out over the human rights of 150,000 dead Africans in a British war against a nationalist movement in Kenya in the 1950s. In Malaya, from 1948 to 1960, it was a British "war in defence of the rubber industry" (as a secret Foreign Office memo noted) which did the human damage. In British Guiana in 1953, nationalists and trade unionists, said the British colonial secretary, "completely destroyed the confidence of the business community" in timber and bauxite. These movements was tamed in the familiar name of combating the "international communist conspiracy".
A million people died in Indonesia in 1965 when the US and British governments turned on the bloodbath taps for the coup by General Suharto against the elected President Sukarno and the mass-based Indonesian Communist Party. Upsets to this new, improved corporate "stability" in East Timor and Aceh were fought with the aid of British military and diplomatic support.
Fostering a "peaceful" economic climate for British profits is a key concern of the British state. Military attacks, MI6 subversion, arms sales (Britain, with 25% of the global arms market, is second only to the US) and economic and diplomatic power are deployed as necessary.
The post-war transition from colonialism to neo-colonialism in the British empire was politically managed to ensure that the approved rulers ran their newly independent country to benefit British-based corporations. More recently, Blair has championed corporate globalisation and its aim of opening up formerly protected world markets, through legally binding World Trade Organisation rules, to the full economic power of British corporations under the grossly misnamed "free trade" environment, in which the rich countries will dominate.
Moral camouflage to hide this staggering record of military and economic crimes against humanity is readily supplied by corporate and state media. This key accomplice of capitalism accepts the premise of British imperialism's "basic benevolence", skirting both the material interests of British capitalists in foreign policy and the human costs of British intervention in the world.
This enables the capitalist media to instinctively retail government propaganda as information and to privilege official spokespersons over radical critics. Freedom of expression in the "free press" is overwhelmingly restricted to disagreements amongst the political and "expert" elite over the tactics and timing, not the morality or motives of imperialist intervention.
Mark Curtis has produced a well-documented indictment of British capitalist and state power, based on self-incriminating official records and the private revelations of those in power. Liberally laced with satire, this is a book to proudly take its place alongside those by John Pilger and Noam Chomsky and, like theirs, to be used as a reminder that whenever Blair (or Bush or Howard) mount their next moral high horse, with their chests puffed out at military parades, lies dripping from their lips and blood from their fingers.
From Green Left Weekly, November 5, 2003.
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