The Hindu : The U.K. and the U.S.

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Thursday, Feb 13, 2003

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The U.K. and the U.S.

By Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

British sovereignty, the cause of fierce tensions within the U.K. when it comes to the European Union, has been handed over to the U.S. without any public discussion.

THE FORCEFUL stand taken in the last few days by the Governments of France, Germany, and Russia to back the United Nations strongly over further weapons inspections in Iraq, together with intensified spy-plane flights and a U.N. military presence, has done more than infuriate the pro-war sections of U.S. opinion. It has starkly illuminated the differences between Europe's two largest states on the one hand and the third largest, the United Kingdom, on the other. In particular, it has put the U.K.'s relationship with the U.S. under the spotlight.

Those who cannot understand, let alone believe, the U.K. Government's current, and apparently uncritical, support for the U.S. Government's rapid and unrelenting preparation for the colossal escalation of the two countries' decade-long war in Iraq may take some comfort from the fact that substantial proportions of the U.K. population — 70 per cent according to some polls — are just as bewildered.

To start with, British sovereignty, the cause of fierce tensions within the U.K. when it comes to the European Union, has been handed over to the U.S. without any public discussion. At the height of the Cold War, there were 140 U.S. military bases in the U.K. In 1948, the then U.K. Labour Government had handed over the bases, and control over all decisions affecting them, to the U.S. with no formal agreement. In 1986, the U.S. unilaterally launched attacks on Libya from some of these bases, leading to widespread allegations that the U.K. was no more than a U.S. aircraft-carrier.

In addition, British high-tech military facilities have been put at U.S. disposal without even being asked for. Pre-eminently, the early-warning listening stations in the north of England have already been included in the U.S. programme to breach the Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and to weaponise space — star wars, in other words. The British Government, to the fury of the Opposition and the squirming embarrassment of its own backbenchers, has done this without even telling Parliament.

This kind of thing is not new. British documents recently declassified under the 30-year rule include a remarkably sycophantic letter from the then Prime Minister, Ted Heath, to the then U.S. President, Richard Nixon, accompanying a birthday gift despite a stated agreement between the two not to exchange birthday gifts. (In sharp contrast, when the then French President, Georges Pompidou, told Nixon the dollar had to be devalued, he promptly complied.) It might be expected that in return for such fawning support and help the U.S. would treat the U.K. as a favoured ally. But the truth has always been the exact opposite. After the U.S. Civil War, the British Government paid the U.S. a sum equivalent to 150 billion pounds today as compensation for damage inflicted by a warship it had built for the southern or Confederate forces (the side which wanted to maintain slavery). In 1895, a border dispute over Venezuela and the then British Guiana almost turned into a U.S.-U.K. war.

As to the two World Wars of the 20th century, the U.S. entered both of them late, and both times it did so only because it had been attacked. Until then, the U.S. had maintained strict neutrality. It did lease warships to the U.K., but at rates which stripped British dollar reserves, and it continued that process via the terms of the post-war loans to the U.K. And after entering the war, the U.S. tried to pressure the U.K. politically, for example suggesting that the Indian National Congress be promised Indian independence in return for cooperation in the war effort (Churchill's fury at this was such as to make it one of the few occasions on which the U.K. has not given in to the U.S.).

Even in the last year or two, the U.K. Government's much-vaunted loyalty to the U.S. has been met with little less than a kicking. The U.S. has imposed import tariffs on U.K. steel exports (effectively killing what little was left of British steel production), and has simply ignored British — let alone other European — anger over U.S. Federal Government subsidies of $ 180 billion to the mammoth corporations of American agribusiness. (The World Trade Organisation, for its part, has done nothing about the U.S. subsidy, and several economic analysts have pointed out that the aim of the subsidies is to enable U.S. agribusiness to destroy millions of the world's poorest farmers in Latin America.)

In respect of the U.K.'s other international dealings, U.S. support has consistently been less than explicit. When the then military dictatorship of Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, the U.S. took ten days to decide whether its support would go to its purported transatlantic friend or instead to the spearhead of its anti-communist strategy in Latin America. Privately, the British Government was livid, but its public face was one of earnest negotiation with the U.S. over the matter.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the indifference and even contempt in which the U.S. holds the U.K. has to do with the bitterest, most violent, and seemingly most intractable problem in British politics — Northern Ireland. With a substantial population of Irish-Catholic extraction, the U.S. Government has been at the very least cautious in assisting the U.K. Government. The then U.S. President, Bill Clinton, provoked enormous anger in the U.K. when he approved the issue of a U.S. visa to the Northern Ireland Catholic leader, Gerry Adams, whom many in the U.K. considered a terrorist. The U.K. Government had even been so worried about alleged fundraising activities on behalf of the IRA in the U.S. that its Ministry concerned, the Northern Ireland Office, felt obliged to open a branch of its own in America in 1992.

Yet, the impact of U.S. involvement over Northern Ireland, and U.K. dependence on the U.S., was such that when Mr. Clinton met Mr. Adams the latter heeded his advice to attend peace talks. Indeed, the resulting and successful talks held in Northern Ireland in 1998 were chaired by the former U.S. Senator, George Mitchell. It is virtually certain that without this U.S. commitment there would have been no agreement at all.

The Northern Ireland agreement, hugely significant though it was in the U.K., did not connote any great change in the overall U.S. attitude to the U.K. When the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, offered to host Middle Eastern peace talks, Mr. Clinton brusquely told him to keep out; and Mr. Blair went quiet. Earlier this year, when the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, banned Palestinian representatives from travelling to London for fresh talks, the U.S. simply watched as Mr. Sharon snubbed both the Palestinians and the U.K. Government.

While it is unlikely that those in the inner circles of the British Government have any illusions about the U.S. attitude, the real victims of the situation are the British voters, who have for centuries been ill served by a feudal culture of official secrecy, which in turn is backed by some of the tightest official secrets legislation in the world. The U.K. Government's energetic maintenance of the `special relationship' fiction, often assisted by much of the British press, serves above all to conceal the truth from the British public. At long last though, the British public's stubborn scepticism about the justifiability of the escalation of the war in Iraq may well generate a further and long-overdue scepticism, namely about the so-called special relationship.

(The writer is lecturer in politics and law at Taunton's College, Southampton, U.K.)

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