7

            Foreign Policy Illusions of ‘Strong Leaders’

It would obviously be misleading to suggest that bad foreign policy decisions are taken only by those who fancy themselves to be strong individual leaders, endowed with special insights. However, such leaders are more prone to serious error because of their willingness to discount the accumulated knowledge of people with expertise on the part of the world in question. They are characterized also by a disinclination to promote uninhibited discussion, based on full access to information, with governmental colleagues who feel free to raise objections and to insist on consideration of alternative approaches. Worse decisions on foreign policy are, on the whole, taken in authoritarian regimes than in democracies (the gulf is still wider on domestic policy), and the worst of all are within autocratic, rather than oligarchic, regimes. There the preordained lack of dissent from the views of the top leader fortifies his belief that he is supremely qualified to make the decisive judgement call. Within a democracy, the Minister of Foreign Affairs (Secretary of State in the US, Foreign Secretary in the UK) is usually a very influential figure and there will be a Cabinet, Cabinet committee or National Security Council, with senior ministers involved in the making of international policy, although to a varying extent over time and from one country to another.

Prime ministers, however, for reasons elaborated earlier in the book, have played a growing role in foreign policy and there are special pitfalls for those who come to believe in the unrivalled quality of their own judgement. Leaders who pride themselves on being ‘strong’, or who are anxious to appear strong, may be especially tempted by military intervention in another country. War leaders often have a higher prestige than peacetime premiers and presidents, although the risks to their reputations – and, far more importantly, to other people’s lives – are also high. Leading a country into an unnecessary war, one which contravenes international law, which has been entered into on a false prospectus, or whose costs outweigh its benefits, can fatally undermine a leader’s standing. David Owen has observed ‘the hubris syndrome’ which takes hold of over-confident and high-handed leaders. Among the symptoms, to which such leaders are prone, are ‘a narcissistic propensity to see the world primarily as an arena in which they can exercise power and seek glory rather than as a place with problems that need approaching in a pragmatic and non-self-referential manner’; a belief that they need not feel accountable to mere colleagues but to something higher, ‘History or God’; and a lack of curiosity about what might go wrong, which amounts to a ‘hubristic incompetence’, since excessive self-confidence ‘has led the leader not to bother worrying about the nuts and bolts of a policy’.1

            FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSIONS OF TOTALITARIAN AND AUTHORITARIAN LEADERS

The greater part of this chapter will focus on the foreign policy illusions of democratic leaders and, most specifically, those of three British prime ministers – Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden and Tony Blair. Still more striking delusions, with often devastating consequences, are to be found, however, among the dictatorial leaders discussed in Chapter 6. Not all authoritarian leaders, however, seek foreign adventures. Some maintain a focus on consolidating their domestic regime and among such authoritarian states, those of Chinese cultural heritage have been the most successful in modernizing their countries’ economies.²

Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini could also lay claim to economic modernization, albeit with a bias towards military production, especially in the first two cases. What the three ‘great dictators’ of the inter-war era of the twentieth century had in common is that their most serious foreign policy misjudgements were a result of succumbing to their own myths. They came to believe in their own genius and in the triumph of their indomitable will. Self-consciously strong leaders, whether within dictatorships or democracies, have a tendency to become over time still more impressed by their own judgement, and less inclined to listen to objections even from within the executive. They also tend to be afraid of nothing so much as being perceived to be weak or to have shown weakness.

            Hitler’s and Mussolini’s Miscalculations

Foreign interventions which achieve their immediate objectives may be seen very differently in later perspective. Thus, Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia was initially entirely successful. With the Munich Agreement, Hitler secured the Sudetenland territory, but in the second half of October 1938, just a few weeks after that settlement, he was planning to breach its provisions. He gave the army instructions to prepare for the ‘liquidation of remainder of the Czech state’.3 The invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 was not physically opposed by other countries at the time, so it appeared to be indubitably a German gain. Yet it changed foreign opinion, not least in Britain. Thus, the lack of opposition to Hitler’s expansionism fed his hubris at the very time that the realization was growing in Europe that he could not be trusted. The seizure of the whole of Czechoslovakia not only broke the promise that no further territorial demands would be made but demonstrated also the falsity of Hitler’s claim that his goal was simply that of uniting German peoples in a single state.⁴ As ‘the most ardent believer in his own infallibility and destiny’, Hitler became more reckless from 1938 onwards and led Europe into disaster.⁵

The invasion of Poland in September 1939 brought Britain and its imperial and commonwealth allies, together with France, into the war, for both the UK and France had given guarantees to Poland that, if it were attacked, they would come to its defence. Hitler believed that he had secured a free hand by his agreement the previous month with Stalin to carve up Poland and the Baltic states with the signing of what became known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, named after the Soviet and German government’s foreign ministers who negotiated and put their signatures to the agreement. It did not declare eternal peace between two states which had been fierce ideological opponents, but committed them to avoid war with each other for a period of ten years. Allowing the Soviet Union a temporary share of the spoils suited Hitler, for it meant that, for the time being, Germany would not be fighting a European war on two fronts, even should Britain and France react differently to the invasion of Poland from the way they had responded to the takeover of Czechoslovakia. (And Hitler doubted whether they would.) It also suited Stalin because the Soviet Union was militarily weak at the time. That was in no small part because his pathological suspicion had led him to preside over the destruction of the high command of the Red Army.

With his customary ruthlessness and cynicism, Stalin agreed that hundreds of political refugees from Nazi Germany, including German Communists, would be handed over to the Gestapo. In many cases, they had already been arrested as part of the Soviet Great Purge. For some of them the transfer was directly from the Soviet gulag to a Nazi concentration camp.6 And with his barbarism and cynical disregard for any pledges given, Hitler was the first to break the Pact, ordering the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In terms of the Second World War’s outcome, this was Hitler’s most disastrous mistake of all, for German losses were far greater on the Russian front than on any other and contributed hugely to the Nazi military defeat and the consequent division of Germany, which persisted for more than four decades. Hitler’s last major meeting with his generals to brief them on the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union took place just a week in advance of it. He told them that though the Russians would put up tough resistance, ‘the worst of the fighting would be over in about six weeks’. A majority of his military audience were anxious about the implications of embarking on a two-front war, but the system was such, and the cult of the leader sufficiently internalized, that none of them raised any concerns.⁷

Hitler had written in Mein Kampf, with himself in mind, that ‘the combination of theoretician, organizer, and leader in one person is the rarest thing that can be found on this earth’ and it is this combination that ‘makes the great man’.⁸ While ‘theoretician’ was clearly an exaggeration, ideology mattered for Hitler, and he formed a few central notions which changed little from the early years after the First World War to his suicide in 1945. Among his most basic and unchangeable ideas were the belief that Germany needed more ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) and the need to dismember the Soviet Union, which Hitler linked with destruction of the Jews. Obsessed by ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, he believed that ‘the end of Jewish rule in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state’.9 It was in the first half of 1941 that Hitler decided that the time had come to bring these aims to speedy fruition with a victory over Russia, which would bring that country’s ‘immeasurable riches’ under German political and economic control. This would also facilitate the realization of what Ian Kershaw has called Hitler’s ‘twin obsessions’ – ‘removing the Jews’ and Lebensraum.¹⁰

Mussolini was in power for longer than Hitler, but it was in the 1930s that his foreign policy became adventurist, and it turned into tragedy for his country when he fully allied Italy with Nazi Germany. Earlier, he gave vigorous voice to sentiments, quite widely shared by his fellow-citizens, that Italy had lost out at a time when other European powers were accumulating empires as well as in the distribution of territorial rewards at the peace conference of 1919. With the League of Nations in place, different standards were meant to prevail by the 1930s from those of the late nineteenth century. Mussolini’s Italy, however, having first consolidated its control of Libya, which had been an Italian protectorate since before the First World War, invaded and conquered Ethiopia in 1935–36 and annexed Albania in 1939. Encouraged by these campaigns, Mussolini gave assistance from the outset of the Spanish Civil War to General Franco’s nationalist (and close to fascist) rebels, agreeing to send fifty thousand troops. When the Italians suffered severe losses, the Duce’s response was to send large quantities of aircraft, armoured vehicles and weaponry to Spain.¹¹ Mussolini’s support for Franco, and Italy’s provision of both personnel and materiel, made a significant contribution to the defeat of democracy in Spain and the establishment of Franco’s authoritarian regime. The commitment of Mussolini to the war in Spain was greater than that of either Hitler or Stalin.¹² He was, however, allying Italy ever closer with Hitler’s Germany from 1936 onwards and brought his country into the Second World War on the Nazi side in June 1940. The fall of France had left him in no doubt that he would be an important partner on the winning side. Yet Italy was to be very much a junior, and unsuccessful, partner in the war. Mussolini had lost the support even of the fascist Grand Council by the summer of 1943, was deposed by the king, rescued by the Germans, and led only a small puppet regime until he met his grisly end in 1945.

            Stalin’s Mixture of Realism and Illusion

Of the trio of ‘great dictators’, Stalin was the most cautious foreign policy actor. Moreover, whereas violence and territorial expansion on grounds of national or racial superiority were part of the fascist creed, Communist expansion could be justified only on the grounds – usually spurious, as it turned out – that they represented the wishes of the local population to replace capitalism with Soviet-style ‘socialism’. Clearly, the majority of citizens of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania did not wish to be incorporated in the Soviet Union, but following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, they were first forced to host Soviet military bases in 1939 and then annexed in 1940. There, as elsewhere, however, there were enough local Communists to do the Kremlin’s bidding. A determined minority, when backed by Soviet force, could install and sustain an unpopular regime. Finland had also been placed by the Nazi–Soviet agreement within the Soviet sphere of influence, but the Finns put up fierce resistance. In the Winter War of 1939–40, Finland lost territory to the Soviet Union, but Russian manpower losses were vastly greater than those of the Finns. As a result, a peace treaty was concluded in March 1940 which left Finland independent.13

Stalin, having seen the great difficulties the Red Army experienced in the Soviet–Finnish war, was much more reluctant than was Hitler to engage in a wider conflict. Better, in his view, for capitalist and imperialist states to fight a devastating war with each other, while the Soviet Union stood on the sidelines and benefited from their resultant weakness. What is of special relevance in the present context, however, is that Stalin’s faith in his own foresight led him to disbelieve a range of warnings he received – from Soviet diplomats in Germany, from the Soviet spy Richard Sorge in Japan, and from Winston Churchill, among others – of the impending German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.¹⁴ The variety of sources from which Stalin received the information that an all-out German attack was imminent should have led him to question his assumption that, for the near future, this was out of the question. One day before the Nazi invasion, the head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, hoping to avoid being a future scapegoat, wrote to Stalin that ‘I and my people, Iosif Vissarionovich [Stalin], have firmly embedded in our memory your wise conclusion: Hitler is not going to attack us in 1941.’15

It seemed that the more people warned Stalin of the coming German attack, the more he suspected a deliberate campaign of disinformation. Stalin, who is sometimes depicted as the ultimate realist in politics, was surprisingly gullible where Hitler was concerned. He evidently trusted the leader of Nazi Germany more than he trusted his own most senior officers, since three of the five Marshals of the Soviet Union were sentenced to death in 1937–38 and the two who were left were the least competent. Soviet losses in the earliest days of the war would have been nowhere near as great as they were, had the warnings been taken seriously, and had the Soviet high command not been savaged by Stalin himself. In the conduct of the war, Hitler and Stalin both added greatly to the loss of life in their own armies by refusing their commanders permission to retreat, even when they were in hopeless positions.

Stalin, however, was better than Hitler at calculating the likely reactions of Western governments – including the administration of the most powerful country, the United States – to his actions. Thus, with the ending of the Second World War, he got away with the creation of what became the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe. In the immediate aftermath of war with Germany, there was no appetite in the West – or by 1945–46 the physical resources in Western Europe – for embarking on another war, this time against their most important ally in the defeat of Nazi Germany. Stalin, moreover, knew where to draw the line. The Soviet Union was as physically and materially devastated by its wartime victory as was Nazi Germany in defeat and in no position at that time to combat American military strength. Even after Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe had been secured, with the establishment of Communist states all loyal (initially at least) to Moscow, Stalin was opposed to helping Communists come to power in Greece. He withheld Soviet backing for them in order to avoid direct conflict with the Western powers and thus risk the loss of the Soviet Union’s recent gains on the European continent.¹⁶

The creation of Soviet client states in Europe was in the long run of no advantage to Russians and the other nations that made up the Soviet Union. The Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe was the principal cause of the Cold War, leading to vast military expenditure on both sides, which was a greater drain on the smaller Soviet economy than on that of the United States. Stalin’s insistence not simply on having regimes in East-Central Europe which would not be a threat to the Soviet Union but also on the establishment of Soviet-type oppressive systems in those countries meant there was little chance of winning hearts and minds in the ‘people’s democracies’. His preference for ‘Muscovite’ Communists (those from East-Central Europe who had spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union and had managed to avoid disappearing in the NKVD maelstrom of the late 1930s) over ‘national Communists’, who had actively engaged in the anti-fascist resistance of the domestic underground, only made that task harder. Popular unrest in central Europe at various times – in addition to the refusal of Tito (who had spent plenty of time in Moscow but, more crucially, had led the Partisan resistance to German occupation) to take orders from Moscow – brought major headaches for the Kremlin. Ultimately, the animosity towards the Soviet Union of a majority of the population of central and eastern Europe as a result of having Communism imposed on them meant that for the Soviet successor states, and Russia in the first instance, there was a legacy of distrust that was only partially redeemed by the transformation of Soviet foreign policy under Gorbachev.

Stalin showed a mixture of caution and bravado in the run-up to the Korean War. The initiator of the proposal for North Korea to attack the South and extend the Communist regime to the whole of Korea was Kim Il Sung. He had, however, to seek Stalin’s agreement, for he was not only heavily indebted to the Soviet Union for bringing him to power, he also needed Soviet weaponry. When in March 1949 Kim first proposed to Stalin a North Korean surprise attack on the South to unite the country, Stalin vetoed the idea. At that time there were 7,500 American troops in the South and Stalin was anxious to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States. The Americans did not, however, expect an attack from the North and later that year their troops began a withdrawal. By the end of January 1950 Stalin was won over by Kim. Much had changed in the meantime. The withdrawal of US troops was almost complete, with only some five hundred remaining. More significantly, the Chinese Communists had emerged victorious in their civil war and had established a Communist government in Beijing. Should it turn out that the North Koreans could not achieve victory on their own, this raised the possibility of China supplying troops to ensure a successful outcome. Stalin had no intention of involving Soviet troops, but would supply materiel.17

Mao, for his part, was reluctant to commit China to participation in a Korean war. The country and especially the army were exhausted, and Mao in those days had to listen to opinion within the Politburo where there was a strong feeling that China should focus on domestic reconstruction. Stalin, however, was accepted even by Mao as the senior and most authoritative figure within the worldwide Communist movement (a deference he never showed to any subsequent Soviet leader). Mao also felt some obligation to the North Koreans who had sent tens of thousands of troops to fight on the Communist side in the Chinese civil war. They were now returning to Korea, battle-hardened, and ready to fight in the South.¹⁸ Having eventually agreed in principle to supply troops, Mao was slow to follow through after North Korea launched the war on 25 June 1950. Initially, it did not seem necessary, for the element of surprise had been effective and the North Koreans had soon captured Seoul, the capital of the South. However, the tide was to turn when the US led a United Nations-sanctioned multinational force to assist the South Koreans who themselves supplied the largest contingent of troops. Neither the South (Republic of Korea) nor the North (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) was a member of the UN. More importantly, neither was the People’s Republic of China. In the face of American refusal to recognize the new Chinese government and accord it the seat reserved for China in the UN, the Soviet delegation was currently boycotting the United Nations. In their absence from the Security Council, that body voted by 9 to 0 (with Yugoslavia abstaining) to condemn the North Korean attack and (two days later) to call on UN members to resist it.

The UN forces drove the North Korean troops back beyond the 38th parallel, the dividing line drawn in 1945 between the Soviet- and US-controlled zones. Stalin called on Mao to send a fighting force, writing that he did not think it would draw them into a ‘big war’, but if it did, this was not something they should fear ‘because together we will be stronger than the USA and England’.¹⁹ When China did commit troops, it was on an enormous scale. Three million soldiers crossed into Korea and, according to US estimates, they suffered as many as 900,000 casualties, taking together the killed, missing or wounded; among those killed, in an American air raid, was Mao’s eldest son.20 Inconclusive armistice talks began in 1951, but by 1952 Kim Il Sung had become more ready to make peace, having realized that the attempt at reunification on his terms would not succeed. With the Soviet Union supplying massive amounts of armaments but no troops, while the Americans suffered losses, Stalin, however, had no wish to call a halt. Nor did Mao, in spite of the scale of Chinese casualties. The stalemate might have gone on for much longer, with a still higher death toll, had Stalin not died in March 1953. The new collective Soviet leadership looked to improve their relations with the Western world and were ready to seek a compromise agreement to end the war. After three million Koreans had been killed (approximately a tenth of the peninsula’s population), an armistice was signed in July 1953, with Korea divided along the line of the ceasefire.²¹

After his initial caution about supporting Kim Il Sung’s attempt to unite Korea under Communist rule by force, Stalin had been firmly committed to continuing the struggle, however heavy the cost in other people’s blood. For Stalin the Korean War had the advantage of ensuring that China was in alliance with the Soviet Union against the United States and he believed that the main loser from the conflict was the US – the ‘main enemy’. Right up to the time of his death Stalin was urging Mao and Kim Il Sung to drag their feet in the ceasefire talks. Stalin’s confidence in the wisdom of his support for the war was, however, misplaced. As a leading Russian historian, Vladimir Pechatnov, has observed, the Korean conflict had very negative consequences for the Soviet Union in the longer term. It ‘led to a massive rearmament of the United States and NATO’s transformation into a full-fledged military alliance’ and ‘it also boosted the United States’ long-term military presence in the region’.²²

            Autocrats and Oligarchs in Chinese and Soviet Foreign Policy

If Mao is compared with the post-Maoist Chinese ruling group and Khrushchev compared with his successors, we find that they fit the pattern whereby the more autocratic individual leader was the readier to take major foreign policy risks than the more collective leadership. The two men were themselves on a collision course from 1956 onwards. They were both dominating personalities and they were moving politically in different directions. That combination precipitated the Sino-Soviet split. As Khrushchev embarked on destalinization, Mao became more ideologically extreme. The Chinese leader was scarcely less ruthless than Stalin in disposing of opponents, real or imagined, within the ruling party, although his Great Leap Forward and especially the Cultural Revolution were dissimilar from Stalin’s style of rule. Even after Stalin had become an object of attack in the Soviet Union, Mao continued to defend him, and the Soviet vozhd’s works were republished in China long after they had ceased to appear in Russia. Although Stalin had at times treated Mao less than respectfully, Khrushchev’s debunking of him was not to Mao’s taste and threatened his own ‘cult of personality’ – even though that had not yet approached the heights it reached a decade later during the Cultural Revolution when the ‘Little Red Book’ of quotations from Mao was treated with a reverence greater than that accorded the entire works of Marx and Lenin.

Sharp foreign policy differences also emerged. The post-Stalin Soviet Union was the first of the two major Communist powers to seek better relations with the United States and, in spite of Khrushchev’s impetuousness and inconsistency, the Soviet leadership as a whole were vitally concerned to avoid nuclear war. Mao, in contrast, took a recklessly irresponsible view of the prospect of all-out war. He told the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954 that ‘the socialist camp would survive a nuclear war while the imperialists would be totally wiped off the face of the earth’. Three years later he shocked East European Communists when he told a gathering of the international Communist movement in Moscow in November 1957 that, in a nuclear war, the world would lose a third, or perhaps a half, of its population, but those numbers would soon be made up, and as a result of the war the imperialists would have been utterly defeated ‘and the whole world will become socialist’.23

In the remaining years of the 1950s following Stalin’s death, Khrushchev was strengthening his position within the Soviet leadership which remained, however, essentially collective. It was from the early 1960s, by which time he had set himself above his colleagues and frequently made policy on the hoof, that Khrushchev was at his most wilful and dangerous. Of nothing was that more true than his idea of installing nuclear weapons in Cuba. This led to a stand-off with the United States which could have led, had either side refused to compromise, to catastrophic nuclear war. In the end, good sense prevailed. The Kennedy administration made major concessions, but won the public relations battle. The United States agreed that they would not in future sponsor any interventions to topple the government led by Fidel Castro in Cuba. They further promised that they would, after a decent interval, remove their missiles from Turkey, where they had been installed in easy reach of the Soviet Union. It was agreed, however, that there would be no announcement of the latter concession. Thus, when the Soviet missiles were withdrawn from Cuba, it appeared as if only Khrushchev had backed down. There had been major doubts in the Soviet leadership and in the military about placing missiles in Cuba in the first place, but being forced to ship them out was seen by the army (and by Castro) as a humiliation. When Khrushchev was deposed in October 1964, one of the major errors of which he was accused was the Cuban missile escapade.24 More generally, his colleagues, most of whom had treated him fawningly in the years of his ascendancy, spoke of his ‘impulsiveness and explosiveness, his unilateral, arbitrary leadership, his megalomania’.²⁵

One of the stimuli to Mao Zedong’s break with the Soviet Union was what Mao took to be Khrushchev’s desire to reach an accommodation with the United States (no matter how inconsistently the Soviet leader went about it). He was to be at least as concerned by the relative cosiness of the Nixon–Kissinger relationship with the Soviet leadership in Brezhnev’s time. Mao himself, though, was prepared to flirt with the United States to avoid having a simultaneously fractious relationship with both military superpowers. In common with the entire Beijing leadership, he also had the longstanding goal of shifting the US from its position of support for the Taiwanese (Republic of China) government as the one legitimate Chinese state. The belated recognition by the United States of the statehood of the People’s Republic of China was accomplished by Richard Nixon in 1972, although a fuller normalization of US–Chinese relations did not occur until 1979 when it was achieved by President Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping.²⁶ It was only after Deng emerged as Mao’s most authoritative successor in 1978 that his policies of ‘reform and opening’ saw China begin ‘the process of integrating itself, really for the first time, into the international system’.²⁷ Deng’s first foreign trip after returning to the centre of power was to Singapore which he had last visited almost sixty years earlier. In 1920 it had been a ‘colonial backwater’, now it was ‘a powerhouse’.28 It had, in the words of the major architect of that transition, Lee Kuan Yew, gone ‘from Third World to First’. Lee, who had got to know a vast number of world leaders during his long political career, wrote of that 1978 conversation with Deng: ‘He was the most impressive leader I had met. He was a five-footer, but a giant among men. At 74, when he was faced with an unpleasant truth, he was prepared to change his mind.’²⁹ Deng, for his part, was much impressed by Singapore’s progress. He went on to establish good relations with Lee and to accept that his country had much to learn from those Chinese who had experience of making market economies work.

Whereas Mao aimed to dazzle the world with the power of his radical ideas and of China’s revolutionary example, his successors have pursued more pragmatic policies. The course was set by Deng, even though he did approve one major military enterprise – the attack on Vietnam in 1979 in response to the Vietnamese driving the Pol Pot regime out of Cambodia. On a visit to the United States, Deng informed President Carter of China’s concern about the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia and their intention to ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’. Carter was prevailed upon by his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, not to try too hard to dissuade the Chinese from this action.³⁰ Deng told his White House interlocutors that it was China’s intention that it should be a short war. It may have been even shorter than he had in mind, for it was far from a triumph for the Chinese forces. They were forced to withdraw within less than a month, in which time they had suffered an estimated 42,000 casualties in the face of fierce Vietnamese resistance.³¹

In the years since then China has modernized its armed forces, but has relied much more on its growing economic power to exert influence throughout the world. It has taken a fairly narrow view of its national interest, punishing with fewer high-level political contacts and a reduction of trade and investment opportunities those countries which offered support to the Dalai Lama, raised too vociferously abuses of human rights in China, or suggested that Taiwan might become a fully independent state. The pragmatism, however, has extended to improving relations with Taiwan – to such an extent that a majority of Taiwanese prefer their present situation of de facto autonomy within a pluralist democracy to the option of political integration with Communist China or to de jure independence. That last option would not only end the mutually beneficial economic relationship which the island now enjoys with mainland China but also raise the serious possibility of a Chinese invasion and the further risk of a wider conflict involving the United States. Post-Maoist China has established close economic ties with countries in every continent of the world, using the tools of direct foreign investment and also overseas aid. Much of China’s international economic and diplomatic activity is related to its energy and raw material needs, but some is connected with the search for political support in international bodies. Even a small Caribbean country has, after all, a vote in the United Nations.32 China’s economic power has been used by its post-Maoist leadership as an important instrument of foreign policy in a way it never could be in Mao’s time, since he so disrupted the country’s economic development with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.*

In general, China’s more collective leadership in the years since Mao’s death has been quite risk-averse in its conduct of foreign policy. Being vulnerable to criticism of its own human rights record and lack of political freedoms and democracy, twenty-first-century China has been, along with Russia (which in the same period has seen an increasingly drastic curtailment of independent political activity), a firm advocate of the doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of other states. Yet, even that doctrine has been laced with a cautious realism. China was opposed to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq but, as Odd Arne Westad notes, it did not wish to take the lead in the campaign against something that was going to happen anyway. They were content, therefore, to leave the task of ‘main opponent of unilateral US action’ to Russia as well as to such European allies of the United States as France and Germany.33 Moreover, the foreign policy team in Beijing had ‘concluded that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were weakening the United States, rather than making it stronger’.³⁴

The post-Khrushchev collective leadership in the Soviet Union (as well as post-Soviet Russia) also conducted a fairly cautious international policy. Conflicts in Africa saw the United States and the Soviet Union backing different sides, fighting proxy wars with African lives, but when Cuban forces played a major part in the war in Angola, repulsing troops of the South African apartheid regime, this was on the initiative of Fidel Castro, not the Kremlin. Castro later observed: ‘Never before had any Third World country acted in support of another nation in a military conflict outside its own geographic region.’³⁵ Even the worst Soviet foreign policy decisions of the Brezhnev era, the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of Afghanistan in 1979, were not expansionist undertakings, although the Afghan venture was interpreted as such in Washington at the time. The use of military force was seen in Moscow to be in both cases essentially a defensive measure, designed to restore the status quo ante. In the case of Czechoslovakia, it was to put an end to an attempt to combine political pluralism with socialist ownership, while the country remained a Soviet ally, although a more enlightened Kremlin leadership would have been interested in seeing the experiment run its course. The intervention restored an orthodox Soviet-type system and served as a warning to other European Communist states of the limits of Soviet tolerance. It also helped to ensure that the break with the Soviet Union, when it came at the end of the 1980s, would be comprehensive.

Sending Soviet troops to Afghanistan had the aim of ensuring that this neighbouring country would not produce a regime hostile to the Soviet Union. The decision was only in the most formal sense made by the Politburo as a whole. It was planned in secrecy by a very small group, albeit not the edict of just one person. Indeed, the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, whose health was poor by this time, was brought into the discussions only at a late stage. By no means the most hawkish member of the group, he did not want a further deterioration of relations with the United States and had to be persuaded that the occupation of Afghanistan would be a short-lived affair. Among the senior members of the Politburo (and they alone were involved in the decision), the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Aleksey Kosygin, was the most opposed to military intervention. When the leader of the more radical of the two factions into which the Afghan Communists were bitterly divided, Nur Mohammad Taraki, in March 1979 insistently requested direct Soviet military participation to consolidate the government that had been installed in Kabul, Kosygin said that only arms and technical assistance would be provided, adding: ‘Our enemies are just waiting for the moment when Soviet troops appear in Afghanistan.’36 It was, however, the General Secretary Brezhnev who had the last word, for on a major foreign policy decision his consent was essential. The three people who persuaded Brezhnev that the Soviet Union should intervene militarily in Afghanistan were the KGB Chairman Yuriy Andropov, the Minister of Defence Dmitriy Ustinov and the Foreign Minister Andrey Gromyko, with Andropov and Ustinov the most decisive duo.

The Afghan Communists’ seizure of power in April 1978 had taken the Kremlin by surprise, for it had been achieved by the faction less connected with Moscow and less favoured there. Communists in Afghanistan were to bring far more troubles for the Soviet leadership than had the traditional leaders of the country, with whom relations had been uncomplicated. After they gained power, Afghanistan’s Communists devoted as much of their energy to killing each other as to suppressing their traditional opponents. By the time of the Soviet invasion in December 1979, Taraki had been imprisoned and executed by his successor, Hafizullah Amin, a murderous rival from the same faction as Taraki. Andropov, Ustinov and Gromyko distrusted Amin, with Andropov and the KGB, in particular, fearing that he might ‘do a Sadat’ and switch sides to the Americans.³⁷ He had studied in the United States and within the chronically suspicious KGB there were those who wondered if he might have been recruited by the CIA.

Since Amin, like his predecessor Taraki, had been seeking direct Soviet military participation to consolidate Communist rule in Afghanistan, he held a lunchtime party on 27 December 1979 to celebrate the fact that the Russians had finally arrived. The KGB used the occasion to poison him. Amin survived, but was still suffering ill effects when Soviet troops stormed his palace that night and shot him dead. That was the easy part. The Soviet leadership found it much harder to get out of Afghanistan than to get in. Before Gorbachev became general secretary in March 1985, his predecessors were already aware that they were making limited progress at best and that the prolonged war had damaged their international standing. They had lost friends in the Third World and had seen a deterioration in their relations with both the US and China. From the outset of his leadership, Gorbachev intended to bring Soviet troops home but, like Western leaders in similar situations (including an American president with troops in Afghanistan in the second decade of the twenty-first century), he wanted the withdrawal to occur in a manner that would not be seen in the outside world as a humiliating retreat. Like them, he could not tell parents of dead soldiers that their sons had lost their lives in vain, although, as he observed to his foreign policy aide Anatoliy Chernyaev in the summer of 1987, he found it ‘awful when you have to defend Brezhnev’s policies’.38 By the time the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan in February 1989, over 25,000 of their comrades had died there, with more than 50,000 wounded, while many others suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. Afghan losses were vastly greater. More than a million of them were killed during the Soviet war.³⁹

Cold War paranoia led to many foolish decisions on both sides of the ideological divide, and armed interventions without major unintended consequences are rare. Time and again governments think that the military part of the operation will be over in a matter of weeks or months, after which the right kind of government will be securely installed. Outside specialists, as distinct from senior KGB officers, were given no opportunity to influence the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan. The director of an institute for economic and political analysis, which contained more radical reformers than any other in Moscow, Oleg Bogomolov, sent a critical memorandum to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party on 20 January 1980 which spoke of the ‘hopelessness and harmfulness’ of the military intervention.⁴⁰ By then it was too late. The decision to intervene (planned for late December) had been formally ratified at a Politburo meeting on 12 December 1979, in which all the members present had to append their signatures. The principal opponent of the intervention, Kosygin (who more than once commended to the Afghan Communists the example of the Vietnamese who, he said, had seen off both the Americans and the Chinese without the help of any foreign troops), was absent from that Politburo meeting.⁴¹ The pros and cons of intervention were never debated in the Politburo as a whole, and the opposition of Kosygin was disregarded by the small inner group who took the decision to invade Afghanistan.

            THE SELF-DECEPTION OF BRITISH ‘STRONG LEADERS’

If we turn to democracies, Britain provides several examples of prime ministers intent on dominating their colleagues and coming to disastrous conclusions on the basis of a misplaced faith in their own judgement on foreign policy. The two most clear-cut cases are those of Anthony Eden and the collusion with France and Israel to invade Egypt in 1956 and of Tony Blair and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the latter case, the prime mover was, of course, the United States, where the decision was somewhat more consensual. The USA would have intervened militarily in any event, whether or not Blair volunteered British lives and resources to the joint effort.42

There are arguments about the extent to which these leaders deceived the public, that deception being especially clear in Eden’s case, but they were guilty, above all, of self-deception, of believing what they wanted to believe. Eden and Blair disregarded the knowledge and judgements of those best qualified to assess the likely consequences of their actions. While the support subsequently greatly diminished, initially public opinion was fairly evenly split, with millions of British citizens prepared to take at face value the word of both prime ministers on a major international issue and especially inclined to support British troops in action.*

In the Suez crisis the attack on Egypt was opposed by both the main opposition Labour Party and the small Liberal Party. In the case of the Iraq war, the Conservative Leader of the Opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, appeared to be trying to outbid Blair and the Labour government in his enthusiastic support for the policy decided upon by the US government. The war was opposed in Britain by the Liberal Democrats and by the Scottish National Party, as well as by a substantial minority of Labour MPs, a much smaller group of Conservative dissidents and millions of citizens who did not belong to any party. Bad foreign policy decisions often go along with, and may be influenced by, misleading historical analogies.43 Suez and Iraq both brought out the most hackneyed of all the comparisons to be regularly recycled since the Second World War. It has been Neville Chamberlain’s posthumous misfortune to be held up time and again as exemplifying the one model which must not be followed – that of appeasing dictators. His style of rule provided much justification for holding him personally responsible for policies based on the belief that it was feasible to do a deal with Hitler and Mussolini. Yet in their attempts to concentrate a major foreign policy decision in their own individual hands, prime ministers who have been most anxious to distance themselves from Chamberlain have been in that respect his closest imitators.

            Chamberlain and Appeasement

Chamberlain was, nevertheless, more in tune with the broad thrust of public opinion in September 1938 than were either Eden or Blair. As compared with those who opposed the British government’s action in 1956 and 2003, it was a much smaller proportion of the population in 1938 who were against the appeasement policy. Few felt ashamed of Chamberlain’s description of the conflict Hitler was stoking between Czechs and Sudeten Germans as one ‘between people of whom we know nothing’. Moreover, the words with which Chamberlain prefaced those remarks had a wide resonance. He said how ‘horrible, fantastic, incredible’ it was that ‘we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here’ because of a quarrel in that ‘far away country’. When he returned from Munich in 1938 and proclaimed on 30 September that ‘I believe it is peace for our time’, Chamberlain received a rapturous reception.44 After the carnage of the First World War, the intense desire to avoid another such conflict was more than understandable. In retrospective justification of Chamberlain, it can be also argued that it was to Britain’s advantage to go to war with Germany a year later, by which time rearmament had proceeded further and Nazi Germany’s subsequent aggression meant that the British population was more psychologically prepared for battle and sacrifice.

Chamberlain, however, did not sign an agreement with Hitler primarily to buy time, any more than Stalin was simply buying time with the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Both men actually trusted Hitler to keep his word, and Chamberlain believed that it was a ‘peace with honour’ he had secured, not a mere delay before hostilities began.⁴⁵ His predecessor, Stanley Baldwin, had been no less anxious to avoid conflict, although he was averse to maintaining a constant interest in foreign policy. He told the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, in the autumn of 1936 not to bother him with foreign affairs, since he would be focusing on the problem presented by the king and his mistress, which led to the abdication of Edward VIII. As this remark followed a period of three months in which Eden had not had a comment from the prime minister, he found it ‘an astonishing doctrine’.⁴⁶

In his biography of Baldwin, Roy Jenkins suggests that Baldwin was ‘as much of an appeaser as Chamberlain, but less dogmatic and self-righteous’.⁴⁷ The second part of that statement is undoubtedly true, the first part more questionable. The Earl of Swinton (Viscount Swinton at the time), who was Air Minister in both Baldwin’s and Chamberlain’s governments until Chamberlain dismissed him, did not dissent from the view that Baldwin ‘avoided foreign affairs’, declaring: ‘I do not think he liked foreigners, and he certainly did not understand them.’⁴⁸ However, Swinton’s own efforts, and that of others in the Air Ministry, to invest in new types of aircraft – Hurricanes and Spitfires – and in the development of radar were never obstructed by Baldwin who allowed ministers to get on with the job. Chamberlain, who intervened constantly in policy matters, did not give a high priority to rearmament, and that was reflected in his removal of Swinton from the Air Ministry at the end of May 1938. Years later Churchill told Swinton: ‘You were sacked for building the Air Force that won the Battle of Britain, and they couldn’t undo what you did.’49 Baldwin was much criticized, especially by Winston Churchill, for a speech he made in the House of Commons in November 1936 in which he said that if he had gone to the country in the previous election and said that Germany was rearming and ‘we must rearm’, he could not think of anything that in ‘this pacific democracy’ would have made electoral defeat more certain.⁵⁰ Swinton points out that at the time of the 1935 election Britain was in fact rearming (albeit more slowly than Churchill deemed necessary) and, in particular, committing itself to a vast increase in expenditure on the Royal Air Force.⁵¹ This, of course, had more to do with the departmental minister concerned than with the prime minister.

Chamberlain’s leadership style could not have been in sharper contrast with Baldwin’s emollient and consensual manner. As Swinton noted, it was when Chamberlain ventured for the first time in his life into foreign affairs that he became especially ‘autocratic and intolerant of criticism’. The very field in which he was most inexperienced was the one in which ‘he became almost intolerably self-assertive, sometimes even making personal decisions and taking personal initiatives without consulting either his colleagues or the experts’.⁵² As a Foreign Secretary who had complained about Baldwin’s lack of interest in international affairs, Eden now had good reason for concern that Chamberlain was going to the opposite extreme. The relationship was strained from the outset between ‘a headstrong old man and a headstrong young man’ and ‘Eden rightly resented the secrecy with which Chamberlain surrounded his personal contacts, his hush-hush messages from and meetings with mysterious go-betweens’.⁵³ The Foreign Secretary, whose emphasis on collective security and the League of Nations put him at odds with Chamberlain, nonetheless found himself often defending policies which were essentially the Prime Minister’s and with which he was out of sympathy. Somewhat belatedly, he decided he could put up with this no longer and resigned in February 1938 over Chamberlain’s plan to begin, without preconditions, discussions with Mussolini. The resignation stood Eden in very good stead in the longer term, for he escaped collective responsibility for appeasement and its failure. It led to his being Churchill’s choice as Foreign Secretary (after a brief period as War Minister) in 1940, a post he held for the remainder of the Second World War and in the government which Churchill led from 1951 to 1955.54

Chamberlain preferred to surround himself with people who would support his foreign policy views and kept out of the government the most vigorous Conservative critics of appeasement. Thus, he was happy to appoint Lord Halifax as Eden’s successor. Alfred Duff Cooper, the most anti-appeasement member of the Cabinet, deplored the change, writing in his diary that ‘Halifax will be a bad Foreign Secretary’, for he ‘knows very little about Europe, very little about foreigners, very little about men.’ Halifax was also a ‘great friend’ of Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times, whose influence was ‘pernicious’.⁵⁵ Harold Nicolson, a member of the government coalition as a ‘National Labour’ MP (and an anti-appeaser with a strong international background whose views became increasingly close to those of his fellow backbencher Winston Churchill) wrote of the prime minister in his diary entry of 26 August 1938: ‘Chamberlain has no conception really of world politics. Nor does he welcome advice from those who have.’⁵⁶

One of the most pro-rearmament Labour MPs, Hugh Dalton, wrote of Chamberlain that not only was he ‘inexperienced, gullible and ill-informed’ in foreign affairs, but that he also ‘preferred advisers with these same qualities to men of experience, shrewdness and knowledge’. Thus, when he went to negotiate with Hitler, he did not take with him any senior official from the Foreign Office, but instead Sir Horace Wilson whose expertise was in industrial disputes, not in international relations.⁵⁷ Chamberlain had, said the Earl of Swinton, ‘a personal faith that he could handle the dictators and make them see reason’.⁸⁸ As Swinton observed: ‘Neville was running a one-man band, and became angry if anyone appeared to question his judgment. All the negotiations and secret or official contacts with Mussolini were his own. Munich was his own. He was convinced that he, and he alone, could understand and get on with the dictators and secure a peaceful settlement with them.’⁸⁹ Already out of office by the time of the Munich agreement, Swinton was, nevertheless, asked for his view of it by Chamberlain. He answered that he thought it had been worthwhile ‘buying a year’s grace’, for in the course of a year much of the aircraft production programme would come to fruition. Provided the prime minister would do everything possible to advance rearmament, he would support Munich on that basis. ‘But I have made peace,’ replied Chamberlain.90

Until the point that it became clear that Hitler cared nothing for any apparent agreement he had reached with Chamberlain, only a minority in parliament opposed the prime minister’s efforts to avoid war. The Labour Party had failed to resolve its dilemma of being both strongly anti-war and vehemently anti-fascist and had actually voted against the sharp rise in expenditure on the air force proposed by Swinton when the Air Estimates came to the House of Commons in 1935.⁹¹ Although there was a minority of Labour MPs in favour of accelerated rearmament, the official Opposition opposed the government primarily on the grounds that an arms race was leading to war.⁹² Chamberlain was personally and politically disliked by Labour politicians, but he had more than enough doting followers on his own benches. None more so than Sir Henry (‘Chips’) Channon, the American who, after his marriage to Lady Honor Guinness, became a leading London socialite and a Conservative MP.* When Chamberlain proudly announced to the House of Commons on 28 September that Hitler had ‘invited him to Munich tomorrow morning’, Channon recorded in his diary that he felt ‘an admiration for the PM which will be eternal’ and ‘longed to clutch him’. He described the scene in the House: ‘We stood on our benches, waved our order papers, shouted – until we were hoarse – a scene of indescribable enthusiasm – Peace must now be saved, and with it the world.’⁹³ In his diary Duff Cooper provides a more balanced picture: ‘The scene was remarkable, all Government supporters rising and cheering while the Opposition sat glum and silent.’⁹⁴

Duff Cooper was one of the very few people in the Cabinet who was prepared to stand up to Chamberlain in the face of the prime minister’s utter self-belief. He had been Secretary of State for War when Baldwin was Prime Minister and was moved from being the minister in charge of the army to charge of the navy by Chamberlain. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper’s discontent with Chamberlain grew. Noting in his diary that Chamberlain ‘hates any opposition’, he took it upon himself to provide some.95 Within the Foreign Office there was a range of opinion, but its best-informed members tended to take a firmer and more realistic line on the dictators of Germany and Italy than did the prime minister. Duff Cooper refers to an ‘admirable’ Foreign Office telegram he read on 11 September 1938 which instructed the British ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, ‘to make it quite plain to the German government where we should stand in the event of war’. Henderson, who was an arch-appeaser, sent a series of messages back which were ‘almost hysterical, imploring the Government not to insist upon his carrying out these instructions which he was sure would have the opposite effect to that desired. And the government had given way.’⁹⁶ By ‘the government’, Duff Cooper noted, was now meant just four people – the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and the Home Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare.⁹⁷

As the crisis in relations with Germany developed in late September 1938, Chamberlain spoke on the radio at eight o’clock on the evening of 27 September. For Duff Cooper, ‘It was a most depressing utterance. There was no mention of France in it nor a word of sympathy for Czechoslovakia. The only sympathy expressed was for Hitler whose feeling about the Sudetens the Prime Minister said that he could well understand. And he never said a word about the mobilization of the Fleet. I was furious.’⁹⁸ A Cabinet meeting was held later in the same evening. Duff Cooper wrote in his diary that night: ‘I spoke at once. I thought it important to get my oar in before the Big Four, as once they had spoken I knew that the yes men who are the majority of the Cabinet would agree with them.’⁹⁹ He said that Henderson in Berlin ‘had shown himself a defeatist from the first’ and expressed his disappointment that Chamberlain in his broadcast had been unable to give any encouragement to the Czechs and ‘reserved all his sympathy for Hitler’, adding: ‘If we now were to desert the Czechs, or even advise them to surrender, we should be guilty of one of the basest betrayals in history.’¹⁰⁰ On 29 September Chamberlain flew to Munich and came back with the ‘agreement’ that allowed the Germans to march into Czechoslovakia and gave Hitler the concessions he wanted, albeit accompanied by assurances that Britain and Germany would never go to war with each other. Chamberlain was greeted in London the following day with what Duff Cooper called ‘scenes of indescribable enthusiasm’. He added that he ‘felt very lonely in the midst of so much happiness that I could not share’. Duff Cooper condemned the agreement at a Cabinet meeting that same day and resigned from the government.101

Even after Hitler had annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia the following year, Chamberlain was seen by his critics, such as Harold Nicolson, to be following a ‘dual policy’, an overt stance of arming and a covert practice of appeasement, using Horace Wilson as his personal envoy. Chamberlain reorganized the government in April 1939, but in his diary entry of the 20th, Nicolson wrote that ‘Chamberlain’s obstinate refusal to include any but the yes-men in his Cabinet caused real dismay’.¹⁰² There were no easy choices for a British government in the late 1930s, faced by the expansionism of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, especially since the choice of Stalin’s Soviet Union as a potential ally was unpalatable for most members of the government headed by Chamberlain and certainly anathema for the Prime Minister himself.*

Chamberlain’s guilt did not lie in trying to prevent a war. There are grounds for deep scepticism about Churchill’s belief that war with Hitler’s Germany could have been avoided if it had been made clear much earlier that Britain (and its still-existent empire) was prepared to fight and had armed itself adequately for that purpose. What might deter a rational actor, even if that person was an authoritarian ruler, would not necessarily have had the same effect on Hitler, given his personality and the nature of Nazi ideology. It was Chamberlain’s illusion that he understood foreign policy better than those with far greater knowledge and experience of the world beyond British shores, and that he was uniquely capable of preserving peace through establishing a constructive relationship with the dictators, that was blameworthy. This involved him in playing down the foreign aggression and domestic crimes of the German and Italian regimes. Not least important, Chamberlain’s exclusion of formidable critics and potential rivals in his own party from membership of the Cabinet stifled debate at the highest governmental level, making his conduct of foreign policy a still pertinent illustration of the dangers of a prime minister concentrating an excessive power in his (or her) own hands.

            Eden and the Suez Crisis

Sir Anthony Eden, who succeeded Winston Churchill as Prime Minister in 1955, had a very different background from that of Neville Chamberlain. Whereas Chamberlain’s previous political experience had lain in domestic policy, Eden was very much a foreign policy specialist. He was also someone with long experience of the Middle East and a Persian and Arabic speaker. Yet in the year after he entered 10 Downing Street it was a calamitous error of judgement in foreign policy, in relation to the Middle East in particular, that did permanent damage to his reputation. His folly could not be put down to ignorance of the wider world, as Chamberlain’s could. A major part of the problem was that Eden, having been perceived as a weak leader, wished to show that he was strong. Writing in his diary during Eden’s short prime ministership, Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh (who had earlier been Eden’s Private Secretary and by this time was Under-Secretary in the Foreign Office dealing with the Middle East) observed: ‘He is far away, thinking largely about the effect he is making, not in any way strengthened in character, as I had hoped, by the attainment of his ambition’ of having become prime minister.103 Eden was acutely sensitive to press criticism which included the charge that he was indecisive. As Keith Kyle, the author of the major book on Eden and the Suez crisis of 1956, noted: ‘He became obsessive about not appearing to dither’.¹⁰⁴

Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser had come to power in Egypt, following an officers’ coup of 1952, in which he was before long to emerge as the most determined and popular political figure. Following a power struggle, he became Egyptian president in 1954. He was an Arab nationalist opposed both to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (one of whom tried to assassinate him) and to domestic Communists. The fact that he imprisoned Egyptian Communists, however, did not prevent him from developing within a very few years friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Eden as Foreign Secretary had initially sought good relations with Nasser and had adopted a relatively conciliatory policy towards Egypt. The UK and Egyptian governments had reached an agreement in 1954 that all British troops based in Egypt would leave the Suez Canal zone by 1956. Churchill was far from enthusiastic about this policy of ‘scuttle’, but went along with it. Some right-wing Conservative backbench MPs, who became known as the ‘Suez group’, were outspokenly critical.105 Just six weeks after the last of the British troops left Egypt, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.¹⁰⁶ This was partly triggered by Egyptian disappointment that the United States and Britain had the previous year changed their minds about financing the Aswan Dam on the River Nile, a project dear to Nasser’s heart. It was later to be built with the support of the Soviet Union.

The nationalization of the Suez Canal, which had previously been owned by the Suez Canal Company, in which there were British and French interests, was announced by Nasser in a speech on 26 July when he stated that Egypt had begun ‘to take over the Canal Company and its property and to control shipping in the Canal . . . which is situated in Egyptian territory, which is part of Egypt and which is owned by Egypt’.¹⁰⁷ Although Nasser offered compensation to the shareholders, Eden reacted with outrage, which was shared by a large part of the British establishment. Even the Labour Party leader, Hugh Gaitskell, who was to become an outspoken and effective critic of the subsequent Israeli-Anglo-French invasion of Egypt a little over two months later, said in a speech in the House of Commons: ‘It is all very familiar. It is exactly the same as we encountered from Hitler and Mussolini.’¹⁰⁸ It was a popular but highly misleading analogy, used by the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, and by the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, both at the time and in retrospect.¹⁰⁹ Eden was aware that he was seen in some Conservative circles as an irresolute leader, too ready to make concessions to those opposed to British interests to have the full approval of his own parliamentary party. The dubious references to history, portraying the Suez crisis of 1956 as analogous to the appeasement dilemmas and viewing Nasser as a new Hitler or Mussolini, added to the muddle. Egypt, in contrast with Nazi Germany, was not a major industrial power, and Nasser was neither a fascist nor a Communist, but a nationalist.

The British and French governments decided that they would not only take the Suez Canal back under international ownership but that they would also topple Nasser, by force if necessary. After the nationalization of the canal, an ‘Egypt Committee’ of the British Cabinet was established, and only four days after Nasser had effected the Canal takeover, made clear its readiness to advocate the use of force to achieve what would now be called regime change. The minutes of the meeting of 30 July of this committee – which was to become, in effect, a War Cabinet – stated: ‘While our ultimate purpose was to place the Canal under international control, our immediate [purpose] was to bring about the downfall of the present Egyptian Government.’110 There was much talk about how important the free flow of maritime traffic through the Canal was to Britain and to the international community, and patronizing aspersions were cast on Egypt’s ability to maintain this. However, no disruption of shipping actually occurred, and life proceeded normally outside the hothouse atmosphere of 10 Downing Street.

There was no similar appetite for military action in the White House. President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, took scarcely a more favourable view of Nasser than did their British counterparts, although they were more concerned about his possible tilt towards the Soviet bloc and Communism than with historical comparisons with fascism. Eden merged his own particular obsessions with the different preoccupations of the US administration in his communications with Eisenhower. Thus, in a telegram dispatched to the President on 1 October 1956, he wrote: ‘There is no doubt in our minds that Nasser, whether he likes it or not, is now effectively in Russian hands, just as Mussolini was in Hitler’s. It would be as ineffective to show weakness to Nasser now in order to placate him as it was to show weakness to Mussolini.’¹¹¹ In the political context of the Cold War, Eisenhower was aware that international opinion would not take kindly to operations that smacked of old-fashioned imperialism on the part of Britain and France, and he made plain that he was opposed to a military invasion of Egypt. In 1956 he had, moreover, a presidential election to fight, in which the former general was concerned to be seen as a peacemaker. Eden was aware of Eisenhower’s opposition – he had it in black and white in letters from him – but he deceived himself into believing that the American president would accept the outcome of military intervention once it was presented to the United States as a fait accompli.

Nasser was an authoritarian leader, but one whose brand of pan-Arab nationalism was for a time hugely popular at street-level in the Middle East, particularly because of his championship of the Arab cause vis-à-vis Israel, which would eventually suffer a heavy blow in the Six-Day War of 1967. What Eden in 1956 had in common with Chamberlain in 1937–39 had far less to do with a struggle against fascist dictators than with a similar domination of the decision-making process and disregard of the views of those best qualified to give advice – most notably, in Eden’s case, the Middle Eastern specialists within the Foreign Office and the government’s Law Officers.112 Nasser’s nationalization of the Canal was not illegal. It was Britain and France, together with Israel, who were to be in breach of international law. Britain’s ambassadors in the Middle East, the Foreign Office specialists and the principal law officers within the government were opposed to the military intervention in Suez, even without knowledge of the most dishonest element in the policy, the collusion with Israel, although some of them suspected it.¹¹³

Eden and Lloyd had already agreed on a policy proposed by their French counterparts that Israel would attack Egypt and that Britain and France would then intervene, ostensibly to separate the warring parties, while going on to finish the job by reasserting control over the Suez Canal and removing Nasser from power. It became known as the Challe plan, for it was first elaborated to Eden at Chequers on 14 October 1956 by General Maurice Challe, deputy head of the French General Staff.* This method of bringing down Nasser had been thought up in Paris and discussed with leading figures in Israel, including General Moshe Dayan, the Chief of the General Staff. The Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, persisted in calling it ‘the British plan’. Initially he viewed it warily, regarding it as ‘the best of British hypocrisy’, but he came round to it.114

The details of the plan were worked out at a meeting on 22–24 October in Sèvres, on the outskirts of Paris.¹¹⁵ The Israeli delegation was headed by Ben-Gurion, the French team was led by the premier Guy Mollet. The head of the British group was the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd (rather than the prime minister), although Lloyd did not stay for all three days of the conference.¹¹⁶ The meeting was so sensitive and secret that Eden was adamant that no written record of it should be kept. He was dismayed, therefore, when he discovered that the senior Foreign Office official present, Sir Patrick Dean, had after Lloyd’s departure signed a document summarizing what had been agreed.¹¹⁷ Eden dispatched another diplomat to Paris the next day to retrieve it, and that British copy was then destroyed. It was Ben-Gurion who had proposed that a protocol binding on all three parties be drawn up, partly to make sure that the British, of whom he was suspicious, did not double-cross him.¹¹⁸ The French government’s copy of the Sèvres protocol was subsequently lost, but the Israeli one was deposited in the Ben-Gurion Archive and surfaced only in the year of the fortieth anniversary of the Suez affair, 1996.¹¹⁹*

On 29 October 1956 Israeli troops began their attack on Egypt. The next morning the French premier Guy Mollet and Foreign Minister Christian Pineau flew to London, supposedly to draw up an Anglo-French ultimatum to the belligerents, telling them to stop fighting otherwise British and French forces would intervene to separate them and to seize the Canal. The document had, in fact, been drawn up five days earlier.120 During the night of 31 October–1 November, British aircraft, fulfilling a promise that had been made to Ben-Gurion, attacked four Egyptian airfields, destroying most of Egypt’s bomber force.¹²¹ British and French paratroops were dropped on Port Said on 5 November and, following fierce fighting, controlled the area before the end of the day. By 6 November the Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, was able to announce that both Egypt and Israel had accepted an unconditional ceasefire and Britain and France were asked to do likewise. There had been threats and bluster from the Soviet Union, although the Soviet leadership were secretly delighted by the Anglo–French folly, for it took attention away from the suppression of the Hungarian revolution on which they were simultaneously engaged and about to brutally intensify. Khrushchev had flown to Yugoslavia to seek Tito’s support for the crackdown in Hungary. He told Tito that Britain, France and Israel had ‘provided a favourable moment’ for the further intervention of Soviet troops. The uproar in the West and at the UN about Soviet actions in Hungary would be less because of the distraction of Suez.¹²²

Far more decisive than Soviet criticism, more crucial even than condemnation at the UN or from large-scale opposition at home, was the pressure on the pound sterling and American insistence that there would be no financial bailout for Britain unless and until hostilities in Egypt ceased. At that time the pound was still a reserve currency and a flight from sterling was underway. Harold Macmillan had hoped that his wartime friendship with Dwight Eisenhower would lead the president to offer a helping hand, but though they were to go on to re-establish excellent relations after Macmillan had succeeded Eden as prime minister, it did not lead to a softening of Eisenhower’s opposition to the Suez venture. In a letter to an old army friend on 2 November, Eisenhower wrote that Britain was reacting ‘in the manner of the Victorian period’. He went on: ‘But I don’t see the point in getting into a fight to which there can be no satisfactory end; and in which the whole world believes you are playing the part of a bully, and you do not even have the firm backing of your entire people.’¹²³ In a telephone call to Macmillan, Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey told the Chancellor of the Exchequer: ‘You’ll not get a dime from the US Government until you’ve gotten out of Suez.’ Macmillan, taken aback, said: ‘That’s a frosty message you have for me, George.’ Humphrey had, for the sake of privacy, retreated to a refrigerated domestic meat safe to make the call, so he replied: ‘Well, it’s a frosty place I’m ringing from.’124

The British Cabinet, much influenced by Macmillan’s total turnaround, now prevented Eden from continuing with the military option. As Keith Kyle put it: ‘Throughout the three-month build-up of the crisis Eden had played an absolutely determining role. He dominated those around him, according to his Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, to a greater extent even than Churchill in time of war, and he had taken on the detailed direction of every move in the game.’ Although he did not wish to abort the operation, ‘he felt he could not go against the voices of his Cabinet’. That was all the more so because of the seniority of those who had decided that the game was up. Not only Macmillan but also Butler (more sceptical from the outset) and Lord Salisbury were among those now firmly against continuing with the Suez operation in defiance of the United States, the Commonwealth and the United Nations.¹²⁵

As General Sir Charles Keightley, the Commander-in-Chief of Middle East Land Forces, who had been put in charge of the military side of the Suez operation, concluded: ‘The one overriding lesson of the Suez operation is that world opinion is now an absolute principle of war and must be treated as such.’¹²⁶ Two junior ministers resigned from the government in protest at Britain’s military intervention in the Middle East, Sir Edward Boyle and Anthony Nutting. The latter’s resignation was potentially the more damaging, for he was Minister of State at the Foreign Office and had negotiated the Anglo-Egyptian Agreement of 1954. The Suez venture achieved almost the precise opposite of what had been intended. It was meant to show that Britain was still a power in the world, not least in the Middle East. It demonstrated instead its comparative weakness and accelerated the ending of its pretensions to imperial grandeur. The aim had been to show that Britain could take military action even when the United States stood aloof or was opposed, whereas the speed at which the government succumbed to American pressure suggested the opposite. It was intended to ensure that the Suez Canal remained open, whereas the Egyptians had closed it at the outset of the hostilities. The toppling of Nasser was supposedly going to send an encouraging lesson to the conservative Arab leaders who counted as Britain’s friends in the Middle East, for they had felt threatened by the Egyptian president’s ambitions and popularity. Instead, Nutting observed, by ‘making Nasser a martyr and a hero, we had raised him to a pinnacle of power and prestige unknown in the Arab world since the beginning of the eighteenth century’.127

The Canal was not reopened to shipping until April of the following year. Eden, who had hoped to consolidate his own national and international standing by playing the leading role in the overthrow of Nasser, was himself undermined, both politically and in his fragile health. He resigned the prime ministership on 9 January 1957 and retired from active politics. On 18 January he boarded a ship for a holiday of recuperation in New Zealand. Nigel Nicolson, one of the band of Conservative MPs on the opposite wing of the party from the ‘Suez Group’ who had opposed Britain’s military intervention in Egypt, wrote to his father, Sir Harold Nicolson, on 22 January: ‘I suppose you know that Eden left on Saturday to go to New Zealand the other way round, via the Panama Canal, because, for some reason, the Suez Canal was not open.’¹²⁸*

            Blair and the War in Iraq

For the second time since the Second World War, in 2003 a British prime minister led his country into a war fought on a false prospectus, with Tony Blair following in the footsteps of Eden in 1956. There were, of course, major differences. Eden took this action against the wishes of a Republican administration in the United States, whereas Blair acted as the junior partner of a much less knowledgeable Republican president than Eisenhower. Moreover, thanks in no small part to the American opposition, the Suez war of 1956 was short-lived. The Iraq conflict, in contrast, led to a new spiral of violence. Following the removal from power of a secular dictator, internecine and sectarian conflict was still taking a heavy daily toll of lives and limbs more than a decade after the US-led invasion occurred. A study, led by Gilbert Burnham (a public health specialist, medical doctor and former military officer), conducted at the Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US, estimated an excess mortality of 655,000 in the first forty months after the invasion of Iraq. This high figure has tended to be either ignored or dismissed by those who supported the invasion, but has stood up to further professional scrutiny.129 Even the Iraqi government’s estimates put the number of civilians killed in the first five years after the invasion as between 100,000 and 150,000. By 2009 over 4,300 Americans and 170 Britons had been killed in Iraq, while more than 31,000 foreign soldiers had been wounded by the insurgents.¹³⁰

The decision to invade Iraq was very much an American one, and already in the summer of 2002 it seemed highly probable that it was going to take place, with or without the participation of Britain or other countries. Saddam Hussein headed a viciously authoritarian regime, but one which the United States had assisted, with Donald Rumsfeld as President Reagan’s special envoy, when it was at war with Iran.* The attacks of 11 September 2001 on the twin towers in New York and on the Pentagon were seized upon by those within the US administration who were looking for a pretext to attack Iraq. That these particular crimes had nothing whatsoever to do with Saddam Hussein, who was no friend of radical Islamists, was confirmed by the Central Intelligence Agency. As Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Adviser in the run-up to the invasion, observes in her memoirs, ‘the CIA felt strongly that there had been no complicity between Saddam and al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks and said so’.¹³¹ Ever since the Gulf War of 1991 a no-fly zone had been imposed on Iraq and enforced, mainly by American aircraft but with UN support. Vice-President Dick Cheney had been Secretary of Defense at the time of that earlier war and he regarded Saddam Hussein’s continuing rule in Iraq, however constrained and even intermittently bombed by international forces, as ‘unfinished business’. From the outset of the Bush presidency in January 2001 Iraq was for him a high priority.132 President Bush was receptive, especially after 9/11, to the view that Saddam Hussein, with his supposed weapons of mass destruction, constituted a threat which must be confronted.¹³³ The fact that he was a tyrant, although far from the only one among contemporary world leaders, did not provide a reason consonant with international law for his removal.

International law, however, was the least of the concerns of Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz who were the most intent on regime change in Iraq. Wolfowitz refused to believe that an organization headed by Osama bin Laden could have carried out the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington without a state sponsor and, furthermore, that Saddam Hussein must be the sponsor.¹³⁴ The 9/11 attacks were used as ammunition in the campaign of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to move towards an invasion of Iraq. Despite the CIA’s position that ‘there was simply no convincing case’ for the linkage, Condoleezza Rice noted: ‘The Vice President and his staff, however, were absolutely convinced that Saddam was somehow culpable.’¹³⁵ Cheney, in his memoirs, offers a lame retrospective rationalization of that position, writing, ‘When we looked around the world in those first months after 9/11, there was no place more likely to be a nexus between terrorism and WMD capability than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. With the benefit of hindsight – even taking into account that some of the intelligence we received was wrong – that assessment still holds true.’¹³⁶

When Tony Blair, because of his eagerness to commit British troops to the coming war in Iraq, faced strong opposition in the UK and an impending difficult debate in the House of Commons, President George W. Bush called him at the beginning of March 2003 and ‘made clear that he would think no less of the prime minister if Britain did not participate in the invasion’. Blair’s response was: ‘I absolutely believe in this. I will take it up to the very last.’ Bush ‘heard an echo of Winston Churchill in my friend’s voice’.¹³⁷ Blair evidently heard the same echoes. He told an official who urged caution on Iraq: ‘You are Neville Chamberlain, I am Winston Churchill and Saddam is Hitler.’¹³⁸

To win the support of the House of Commons for the UK joining in the attack on Iraq, Blair felt obliged to rest his case on Saddam having weapons of mass destruction which posed a threat not only to his region but to Britain. To invade another country in order to change its regime is, after all, a clear contravention of international law.139 Blair thus said: ‘Iraq continues to deny that it has any weapons of mass destruction, although no serious intelligence service anywhere in the world believes it.’ Although he listed a number of the iniquities of the Saddam Hussein regime – adding ‘I accept fully that those who are opposed to this course of action share my detestation of Saddam’ – Blair insisted: ‘I have never put the justification for action as regime change.’¹⁴⁰ In a memorandum to his chief of staff Jonathan Powell exactly one year earlier, however, Blair had written (in a document that has now been declassified): ‘Saddam’s regime is a brutal, oppressive military dictatorship. He kills his opponents, has wrecked his country’s economy and is a source of instability and danger in the region. I can understand a right-wing Tory opposed to “nation-building” being opposed to it [military invasion] on grounds it hasn’t any direct bearing on our national interest. But in fact a political philosophy that does care about other nations . . . and is prepared to change regimes on the merits, should be gung-ho on Saddam.’¹⁴¹ Blair himself was certainly ‘gung-ho’.

In the House of Commons debate on Iraq three days before the invasion took place on 20 March 2003, Robin Cook, who had been Foreign Secretary for four years before becoming Leader of the House, made a speech which more than a decade later has withstood the test of time.¹⁴² Cook said that if the uncertain American presidential election of 2000 had gone the other way and Al Gore had been president, he suspected the issue of committing British troops to Iraq would not have arisen. He added that the British people ‘do not doubt that Saddam is a brutal dictator, but they are not persuaded that he is a clear and present danger to Britain. They want inspections to be given a chance, and they suspect that they are being pushed too quickly into conflict by a US Administration with an agenda of its own.’¹⁴³ Pointedly, Cook said:

Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion . . . We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target. It probably still has biological toxins and battlefield chemical munitions, but it has had them since the 1980s when US companies sold Saddam anthrax agents and the then British government approved chemical and munitions factories. Why is it now so urgent that we should take military action to disarm a military capacity that has been there for twenty years, and which we helped to create?144

Cook could without qualms reproduce in full his resignation speech of 17 March 2003 in the memoir he published later that year, whereas Blair’s speech in the same Commons debate, much acclaimed at the time, has not worn well. One hundred and thirty-nine Labour MPs voted against the Iraq war. A senior member of the 10 Downing Street press office, Lance Price – subordinate to the formidable Alastair Campbell – later wrote: ‘Had every Labour MP, including those with ministerial jobs, voted with his or her conscience it is almost certain that Blair would have been the one to go . . . He survived thanks to the Conservative Party’s backing for the war.’¹⁴⁵ The number of opponents of the invasion grew when it turned out that much of the intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ was outdated, misleading or fabricated by unreliable informants, and that any weapons in that category which Iraq formerly possessed had been destroyed. Moreover, the way the intelligence was used by Blair, and also by President Bush, went beyond, in its certainty of tone, what the intelligence analysts themselves could vouch for at the time.

Tony Blair referred to critics of his intention to commit British troops to the invasion of Iraq as the ‘anti-Americans’.¹⁴⁶ If understanding the folly of the enterprise and the false premises which underlay the decision were to be criteria of anti-Americanism, their ranks would include the current President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his Secretary of State, John Kerry. The latter, in November 2005, accused President Bush of orchestrating ‘one of the great acts of misleading and deception in American history’ and of manipulating flawed intelligence to fit a political agenda.¹⁴⁷ In 2006 – and in the same week as Tony Blair described as ‘madness’ what he called ‘anti-American feeling’ of some European politicians – former President Jimmy Carter said in a BBC interview: ‘I have been really disappointed in the apparent subservience of the British government’s policies related to many of the serious mistakes that have been originated in Washington.’ Carter, who opposed the war in Iraq, added: ‘No matter what kind of radical or ill-advised policy was proposed from the White House, it seems to me that almost automatically the government of Great Britain would adopt the same policy without exerting its influence.’148

Two years earlier Carter’s former National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had made that point especially cogently:

That the US, led by a president who likes simplistic Manichean slogans, might err in a region unfamiliar to it – and that it might do so especially because of the shock effects of the 9/11 attacks – is perhaps understandable, even if still deplorable. It is up to us, Americans, to correct our own missteps. It is more difficult to understand why an ally with an intimate knowledge of the Arab world and a deep grasp of Islamic culture would have been so feckless as not to urge a wiser course of action. Had the UK, America’s most trusted ally, spoken firmly as the stalwart voice of Europe instead of acting as the supine follower in an exclusive Anglo-American partnership it could have made its voice heard. The US would have had no choice but to listen.¹⁴⁹

The problem was that, while Britain did have greater expertise on the Arab world both in the Foreign Office and in academia, Blair was not prepared to take seriously views that contradicted his own certitude or got in the way of his desire always to be close to the American president, whichever president that might happen to be. Charles Tripp, a leading specialist on Iraq, was among those who attended a 10 Downing Street meeting in November 2002, at which Tony Blair and the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw met with academics familiar with the Middle East. Tripp noted that ‘ominously, Blair seemed wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and puzzling political society, wanting confirmation merely that deposing Saddam Hussein would remove “evil” from the country’.¹⁵⁰ A former British ambassador in the Arab world, who could see in 2002 that the war was likely to happen, said: ‘It will be a disaster. They’ve got no idea what they are getting into. Iraq is a terribly complicated country. And they are not listening to us.’¹⁵¹ There was deep disquiet among the Middle Eastern specialists in the Foreign Office, among senior army officers,¹⁵² and in MI5, the security service with the major responsibility for countering terrorism within the UK. The head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller, said that prior to Blair’s gamble, there had been a ‘very limited’ threat posed by Saddam Hussein and that invading Iraq would ‘substantially’ increase it. Since then the radicalization of many young Muslims in Britain had left MI5 ‘pretty well swamped’ by terrorist threats. She regarded the Iraq conflict as a distraction from combating al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, her warning that the UK would be at greater risk of terrorist attack if Blair pursued the military option against Saddam Hussein’s regime has been borne out. ‘What Iraq did was produce a fresh impetus of people prepared to engage in terrorism,’ Manningham-Buller told the Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War. She was dismayed by the bombings in London of 7 July 2005, but said in 2010 that she had predicted such an event.153

Former senior civil servants and ambassadors were free to make public their view that the invasion of Iraq was likely to be a disastrous error in a way in which officials still in post were not. Sir Michael Quinlan, who was the top official in the Ministry of Defence when the Cold War came to an end, could see in August 2002 the way things were going in Washington, and observed that the time had come for Britain to oppose the US administration. He wrote: ‘No definite proposition is on the table. But anyone who has worked within government, and particularly with the US, knows that once one is tabled, the time for effective influence is past; minds have been made up and domestic consensus negotiated; psychological if not public commitment will often have gone too far for reversal.’¹⁵⁴ As Quinlan noted more than half a year before the invasion of Iraq:

A majority of people polled in a recent survey of opinion on the Arab street believed that a Zionist conspiracy was behind the September 11 attacks; given such sentiment, it would be naïve to assume that a US-led overthrow of Mr Hussein would be hailed with general relief. And there remains the problem of governing Iraq afterwards. Claims about viable regimes-in-waiting, especially ones likely both to please the US and to enjoy popular support, carry little conviction.¹⁵⁵

Sir Rodric Braithwaite, who chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee in the Cabinet Office in the early 1990s, wrote in 2003 that ‘if Blair has had any influence on US policy in the last six years, it has been on packaging only’ and ‘his blind adherence to the US position on Iraq has left his wider policy in tatters’. Braithwaite is sceptical of the influence that the ‘special relationship’ gives Britain in the US even at the best of times, regarding it as flattering mainly for the egos of prime ministers and their entourage. It had made Blair ‘a hero in America’ (although not, it should be said, in the most liberal circles), adding: ‘He and his advisers like that.’156

Most Cabinet Secretaries who served during the period when Blair was prime minister have been critical of the way he did business – and in relation to Iraq quite specifically. Lord Wilson, Cabinet Secretary from 1998 to mid-2002, in the last meeting he had with Blair before leaving that post warned him of ‘the dangers of what was going on and I reminded him of the legal position’. On Blair’s attitude to military action, he recalled: ‘I would have said there is a gleam in his eye which worries me.’ Lord Turnbull, who succeeded Wilson, said that the Cabinet was not shown ‘crucial material during the countdown to war, including a March 2002 paper laying out the UK’s strategic options regarding Iraq and a July 2002 document outlining military alternatives’. By the time they were given a supposed choice at a meeting in March 2003, it was too late to turn back. It would have led to Blair’s resignation and the Cabinet ‘were pretty much imprisoned’. The prime minister’s ‘favourite way of working’, said Turnbull, ‘was to get a group of people who shared the same endeavour and to move at pace’.¹⁵⁷

Lord (Robin) Butler, who was Secretary of the Cabinet from 1988 to 1998 and thus worked in that position with three prime ministers – Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair – has been critical of Blair’s style of rule on a number of occasions. The forums included the official committee of inquiry which produced, under Butler’s chairmanship, a Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction.¹⁵⁸ Concerned to protect intelligence judgements from political pressures, the committee recommended that the post of Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee be held by ‘someone with experience of dealing with Ministers in a very senior role, and who is demonstrably beyond influence, and thus probably in his last post’. The final recommendation in the report was still more pertinent in its aspersions on Blair’s style of rule. Butler and his colleagues said that ‘we are concerned that the informality and circumscribed character of the Government’s procedures which we saw in the context of policy-making towards Iraq risks reducing the scope for informed collective political judgement. Such risks are especially significant in a field like the subject of our Review, where hard facts are inherently difficult to come by and the quality of judgement is accordingly all the more important.’159

US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld embarrassed Blair by saying in public less than a month before the invasion what President Bush had indicated to the prime minister in private, namely that the attack could perfectly well go ahead without British participation.¹⁶⁰ This was a war of choice for the United States and it was the Bush administration as a whole, with some members much more enthusiastic about the impending action than others, which had made the choice. In Britain, it was essentially Blair’s choice because of the degree to which he had concentrated foreign policy-making power in 10 Downing Street. Although Blair, at a moment when it had been politically convenient to do so, admitted that statutory powers are conferred directly on Secretaries of State and other ministers and not on the prime minister, the Cabinet Office was reorganized to serve the prime minister personally rather than the Cabinet as a whole.¹⁶¹ The Defence and Overseas Committee of the Cabinet, which had traditionally been the key body for collective decision-making on foreign policy, fell into desuetude during Blair’s premiership and did not meet at all in the months preceding the Iraq war.* Instead, there were ad hoc committee meetings summoned by Blair, in many of which no minutes were taken. The Cabinet itself was not shown documents that were essential if they were to come to an informed judgement. These included the provisional legal opinion of the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, that without a UN resolution specifically authorizing an invasion of Iraq, the occupation of that country would be illegal under international law. (Following a visit to the United States, Goldsmith changed his mind.)162

When the military might of the USA was brought to bear, it is not surprising that the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was accomplished. But his removal did not, and could not, carry the legitimacy that it would have done if achieved by his own people. The invasion of Iraq underlined the relevance of the already-quoted lesson General Sir Charles Keightley drew from the unsuccessful Suez venture that ‘world opinion is now an absolute principle of war and must be treated as such’. The Iraq invasion and occupation was condemned by the Secretary-General of the United Nations,¹⁶³ by most of its member states, by international lawyers and, as survey research has shown, by the overwhelming majority of Arabs.¹⁶⁴ The initial support in the United States evaporated as the conflict continued and American lives were lost. In Britain, where opinion was more evenly divided at the time the troops went in, the war became progressively more unpopular. It did not eliminate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, for they had already been destroyed. The invasion led to inter-communal conflict in Iraq and switched the balance of power from Sunni to Shia Muslims and hence brought Iraq closer to Shia Iran.

Moreover, the chances of the Taliban being defeated in Afghanistan and the prospects for the political success of that military intervention were seriously undermined. Victory in Afghanistan was always going to be a dubious prospect in the long term, but the dispatch of an international force there had a legitimacy at the outset which the Iraq invasion lacked. The intervention in Afghanistan was given United Nations backing in late 2001, since an attack on al-Qaeda bases in that country was seen as a valid response to the 9/11 attacks in the United States. However, the extension of the ‘war on terror’ to an Arab country made more plausible the idea that the United States and its coalition partners were waging an anti-Islamic ‘crusade’.¹⁶⁵ The onesidedness of US support for Israel in the Arab–Israeli disputes lent credence to that view.¹⁶⁶ As most of those best qualified to judge, including the head of the agency charged with countering terrorism in Britain, have testified, the invasion of Iraq was a stimulus to Islamist extremism and led to a great increase, not reduction, in the number of small groups planning murder and mayhem (most of which MI5 in the UK succeeded in foiling). The response to 9/11, which, inter alia, was supposed to bring culprits ‘to justice’, involved degrading ill-treatment of prisoners in Iraq and the indefinite imprisonment without trial of others in Guantánamo Bay. Al-Qaeda, which had no chance to be effective in Saddam’s Iraq, has become more active there since the invasion. Its greatest setback occurred when the ‘Arab spring’, brought about by citizens of Middle Eastern countries themselves, produced the first real hope of democracy – thus far, only very partially fulfilled – in the region.

These consequences of the invasion were, of course, unintended, but they did immense damage to the international reputation of the United States and, to the extent that it too was involved, Great Britain. For politicians who supported the invasion it is not good enough to say that the idea of attacking Iraq was right and the errors were only in implementation. In their memoirs, the American protagonists, in particular, blame other officials and agencies for incompetence and lack of foresight. Rumsfeld, for example, writes: ‘In the list of intelligence shortcomings, the failure to highlight the dangers of an insurgency was among the more serious. Intelligence reports occasionally discussed the possibility of post-war disorder and instability, but I don’t recall seeing a briefing that anticipated the likelihood of a sustained guerrilla campaign against the coalition.’167 That the invasion would be regarded as illegitimate in Iraq and the foreign troops treated as hostile occupiers did not come as a surprise to specialists on the Arab world. Many of the ill-effects of the invasion of Iraq were not only predictable but were indeed predicted by critics in advance of the war, not least in Britain. For Charles Tripp the sectarian conflict and armed resistance against the occupying powers appeared ‘a surprise only to those in the United States and the UK who had engineered the military occupation in the first place’.¹⁶⁸

            Lessons of Iraq: Policy, Process, and ‘Strong Leaders’

Saddam Hussein could have avoided the invasion. He bore a huge responsibility for the suffering that was imposed by the intervention as well as for the regime which preceded it. His spokesmen had denied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but Saddam had been more than content to maintain ambiguity. Obstacles were put in the way of the UN weapons inspection team led by Hans Blix sufficiently often to feed the suspicion that Saddam had something to hide. Blix himself believed that some weapons of mass destruction probably still existed, but he wanted time to track them down and was against the invasion. Saddam had, as it turned out, something he felt he must hide or concerning which he must, at least, keep the outside world guessing – the fact that he no longer had such weapons. He had spent all his years as Iraqi leader burnishing his image as a strongman and the main reason he was unwilling to demonstrate clearly that Iraq no longer had chemical and biological weapons was that he did not wish to appear weak, especially in the eyes of Iran. That was what Saddam told his FBI interrogators after his capture.169 It was almost certainly true.

Western leaders, including those who opposed the war, assumed that Saddam had some weapons of mass destruction because he had them in the past and he behaved as if they still existed. Opponents of the war did not see that as a reason to abort the Blix mission or to invade and occupy Iraq, thus assuming responsibility for what followed. David Fisher, who, after working in the UK Ministry of Defence for many years was the senior defence official in the Cabinet Office from 1997 to 1999, with access to all the intelligence reports, likewise believed that Saddam still had some chemical and biological weapons. The big mistake made, he now argues, was to analyze Saddam’s behaviour as if the Iraqi leader had been governing in a democracy, since no sane politician there would incur ‘the penalties of immensely damaging economic sanctions against his people and the threat of military action’. But though no Western democratic leader could survive after behaving the way Saddam did, ‘a ruthless Arab dictator could or, at least he could for twelve years’.¹⁷⁰ A leading specialist on Saddam and on the Baath party, Joseph Sassoon, has written that ‘the principle of being strong at all times and at any cost accompanied Saddam Hussein throughout his life’. Process is important even within an authoritarian regime. Compounding his obsessive need to show strength, Sassoon writes, was Saddam’s ‘stubbornness once he had reached a decision and his reluctance from the mid-1980s until his demise to accept negative views’.¹⁷¹

Contrary views to those of the US president and the British prime minister could, of course, be raised within the executive and, it goes without saying, outside it in the United States and in Britain. There were, however, flaws in the policy process which contributed to ill-conceived policy in both countries in the run-up to the military intervention in Iraq. In the United States it has not been uncommon for the State Department and the Defense Department to be at logger-heads. It happened during the Reagan administration, but, ultimately, on the big issues Reagan preferred the judgement of the former (and specifically George Shultz over Caspar Weinberger) when it came to dealing with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. In the approach to Iraq the alliance between Cheney, an unusually influential vice-president, and Rumsfeld gave the Defense Department an advantage over State. Although Bush could override the objections of both Cheney and Rumsfeld (as he did when he went along with Tony Blair’s wish to get a UN resolution specifically authorizing the attack, a diplomatic effort which predictably failed), he allowed the Defense Department to determine, to a significant extent, Iraq policy before and especially after the invasion. Condoleezza Rice, one of whose main tasks as National Security Adviser in the White House was to facilitate cooperation between the relevant departments and agencies of government, reports the response of the vice-president when she tried to impress on him the need for inter-agency coordination just after US forces had entered Baghdad. ‘The Pentagon just liberated Iraq,’ Cheney said. ‘What has the State Department done?’172

Secretary of State Colin Powell, as a former army general, had far more experience of real war than the others, in addition to his background as National Security Adviser to the first President Bush. He was, though, less of a master of Washington turf wars than were Cheney and Rumsfeld. Rice, who was often caught in the middle, witnessed the extreme distrust between Powell and Rumsfeld, with the former ‘a cautious consensus builder in international politics’ and the latter ‘confrontational’.¹⁷³ Within the National Security Council, Rumsfeld argued that the US was not obliged to have a view on what would come next in Iraq after the ousting of Saddam Hussein – ‘If a strongman emerged, so be it.’¹⁷⁴ Rice surmised that a major reason why Powell did not put more strongly and directly to the president his complaints that the Defense Department, aided and abetted by the vice-president, were encroaching on matters which should primarily belong to State, was his reluctance as a former professional soldier to challenge the commander-in-chief. There was also the more delicate factor in Colin Powell’s relationship with Bush that, as Rice puts it, Powell ‘had to be aware that he probably would have been President had he chosen to run’.175 Drawing on his experience as British Foreign Secretary until 2001, Robin Cook observed that one reason why the UK Foreign Office’s influence was limited, so far as decision-making on Iraq was concerned, was ‘the fact that the State Department itself had little influence on what was happening in Washington’.¹⁷⁶

Cook’s successor, Jack Straw – unlike the four UK Foreign Secretaries who were his immediate predecessors (three Conservative, one Labour) – supported the invasion, although with far less ‘gung-ho’ enthusiasm than did the prime minister. Straw takes the view, however, that Blair’s reputation has justly suffered from his preferring informal methods of decision-making to proper use of the Cabinet and Cabinet Committees. In his memoirs, Straw writes that ‘it would have been far better – for Tony and his reputation, as well as for good government – if he, and I, and the Defence Secretary, had had to discuss progress with, and seek decisions from, a National Security Council, in turn reporting to the Cabinet – and on paper, not by way of oral briefing’.¹⁷⁷ Straw adds that he is confident that the decision to join with the US in the invasion would ultimately have been the same. However, an unnamed senior British minister was quoted as saying soon after the 2003 invasion that ‘If Colin Powell had been US president and Jack Straw the prime minister you can be pretty sure there would not have been a war.’¹⁷⁸ If the departments they actually headed had been the prime institutional actors, the same would still more surely have applied.

Given the extent to which Blair’s colleagues had allowed him to get away with the strange and egocentric notion that whether or not Britain would go to war was a matter for him to decide, even due process might not have prevented the same decision being reached. There was, moreover, a vast difference between the political stature and public standing of Geof Hoon, Secretary of State for Defence in Blair’s Cabinet at the time of the invasion, and that of Denis Healey who held the office from 1964 to 1970 during Harold Wilson’s prime ministership. Wilson has been given credit for keeping Britain out of the Vietnam War – which did him no favours in Washington – but in an interview in 2006 Healey said that ‘Wilson was tempted and I said “Absolutely not”.’179 That was the proper relationship between a minister and prime minister. If either one of them had been sufficiently dissatisfied with the position of the other, then the pros and cons needed to be argued out in a properly constituted Cabinet committee and subsequently in the Cabinet. In this case, Wilson had enough sense to bow to the superior judgement of the senior minister departmentally responsible who had deep knowledge and long experience of foreign and defence policy (following active service as an army officer in the Second World War). In a non-presidential system, a prime minister should have to work hard to persuade colleagues of high party and national standing on the merits of a policy he or she favours, and not be allowed to pull rank. Better-informed collective judgement, in the case of the Iraq war, should have led to serious scrutiny of easy assumptions about what would follow the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.*

*

Lack of due process places more power in the hands of a premier and of his unelected advisers and has an impact on policy outcomes. In the three cases looked at here, Chamberlain, Eden and Blair all acted high-handedly and kept colleagues inadequately informed about important discussions and documents. Bypassing the appropriate government structures becomes all the more dangerous when the prime minister concerned is desperately anxious to be seen as a strong leader. Of the three, Eden was the most guilty of deceiving the British public, but he circumvented correct procedures slightly less than did Chamberlain and Blair. While Chamberlain resented opposition, it was Eden and Blair who were the most preoccupied with being perceived to be strong leaders. A British journalist who has followed Tony Blair’s career closely and (in the main) sympathetically since the 1990s, Andrew Rawnsley, wrote as early as Blair’s first year as prime minister: ‘Mr Blair has many strengths. Among his greatest weaknesses is an obsession with not looking weak.’180 That has been accompanied by Blair’s unsubstantiated faith in his own judgement.

The way intelligence was interpreted in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, by Blair in Britain, and also by Cheney, Rumsfeld and, ultimately, Bush in the United States, was a good illustration of ‘premature cognitive closure’. Beliefs simplify reality and mould the way in which information is processed. They screen out inconvenient facts and are systematically more receptive to information consonant with prior beliefs than to information that runs contrary to those convictions.¹⁸¹ If a head of government – whether a Chamberlain, Eden or Blair – becomes so wedded to his beliefs that all he wants is for them to be reinforced by those whom he consults, he finishes up a victim of self-deception and illusion. It is, therefore, essential that foreign policy decision-making should not be the province of one leader, helped by his or her loyal advisers. Undoubtedly, developments discussed in an earlier chapter – not least, the dramatic increase in speed of travel and communications – have led to more direct interaction between premiers and presidents, requiring them to speak on behalf of their countries. This makes it more, not less, important that the policies they espouse should have been worked out collectively within the elected government. Determination of policy is not a task that should be left to a premier’s placemen, but is the responsibility, which they should not shirk, of politicians of independent standing and appropriate departmental responsibilities who, in many cases, will not share all of the leader’s predispositions.

* More worryingly for other countries, however, China has developed cyber intrusions to such an extent that it has been described as ‘the most aggressive cyber state in the world today’ (although there are other strong contenders). See David Shambaugh, China Goes Global (Oxford University Press, New York, 2013), p. 297. Misha Glenny, however, writes: ‘For the moment, the United States is the acknowledged front runner as developer of offensive cyber weapons. But the Chinese, the French and the Israelis are snapping at their heels, with the Indians and British not far behind.’ (Misha Glenny, Dark Market: CyberThieves, CyberCops and You, Bodley Head, London, 2011, p. 178.)

* On 1–2 November 1956, just after the British air attack on Egyptian military targets had begun, an opinion poll found only 37 per cent answering ‘right’ to the question, ‘Do you think we were right or wrong to take military action in Egypt?’, with 44 per cent saying it was wrong. Once British ground forces were engaged in Egypt, some rallying of support for the action occurred, with 53 per cent on 10–11 November satisfied with what Britain was doing in the Middle East and 32 per cent against (with 15 per cent undecided). See Hugh Thomas, The Suez Affair (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1967), p. 133. The Iraq war likewise divided the British people, but there was a clearer majority in favour of the action initially than there had been for the Suez venture. The fact that both the major political parties supported it was an important difference with 1956 when the Labour Party opposed the use of military force. A Mori poll taken between 28 and 31 March 2003 found 47 per cent approving of Tony Blair’s handling of Iraq, as compared with 44 per cent disapproving. The military action itself was supported by a wider margin, 56 per cent for and 38 per cent against. In contrast, the war evoked a much more positive response in the United States. A poll conducted in the USA at the same time as that in the UK found 69 per cent agreeing with George W. Bush’s handling of Iraq. See http://ipsos-mori.com/newsevents/ca/180/Iraq-Public-Support-Maintained-8212-The-State-Of-Public-Opinion-On-The-War.aspx. In both countries, majority support for the war turned into substantial majorities against within a very few years.

* A characteristic entry (of 19 June 1938) in Channon’s diaries reads: ‘The “Sunday Express” today published a most extraordinary paragraph to the effect that I am really 41 instead of 39, and hinted that I had faked my age in the reference books. The awful thing is that it is true’. (Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, edited by Robert Rhodes James, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970, p. 198.)

* His successor, Winston Churchill, who was second to none in his anti-Communism, was profoundly relieved when the Soviet Union in June 1941 did enter the war. The American ambassador to London, Gilbert Winant, who had succeeded Joseph Kennedy in that role, spoke with Churchill on 21 June 1941, the day before Nazi Germany invaded Russia but when Churchill was certain it was about to happen. To his aide John Colville’s suggestion that Churchill as an ‘arch anti-Communist’ would be in an awkward position supporting the Soviet Union, the prime minister’s response was: ‘Not at all. I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’ See Churchill, The Second World War, Volume III: The Grand Alliance (Cassell, London, 1950), p. 331; and Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries 1939–1955 (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1985), p. 404.

* In 1961 Challe became the leader of an attempted military coup to oust President de Gaulle, for which he was sentenced by a military court to fifteen years of imprisonment. See Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavour (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1971), pp. 105–111; and Kyle, Suez, pp. 296–297.

* By the time of the 1959 general election in Britain, Suez was no longer an especially salient issue. If the contents of the Sèvres protocol had been revealed in the late 1950s, the combination of deceit and debacle which Suez represented would have been very damaging for the Conservative Party. Harold Macmillan, who led the party in that victorious election, had played a curious role in the Suez crisis, which was aptly summarised as ‘first in, first out’. He had been among the most hawkish of ministers in supporting military intervention, but as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was the first to see that pressure on the pound, and the unwillingness of the American government to help until the military action was stopped, meant that the troops would have to be speedily withdrawn.

* Nigel Nicolson’s own political career was halted by his opposition to Eden. He was deselected by his Conservative constituency association in Bournemouth East and thus his parliamentary life ended with the election of 1959.

* That visit in 1983 was at a time when Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction and when Saddam had demonstrated just how dangerous the foreign policy of an overweening leader could be. He it was who initiated the war with Iran which lasted from 1980 until 1988, killed more than half a million people, and ended with neither country gaining any territory or changing the other’s regime. During Reagan’s first term, it was deemed, however, that Saddam was one of the ‘less bad’ Middle Eastern rulers, in comparison especially with those of Iran and Syria. See Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, London, 2011), pp. 3–8, especially p. 4.

* A National Security Council was created as recently as 2010. The functional equivalent of the old Defence and Overseas Policy Committee of the Cabinet, it is chaired by the prime minister and based in the Cabinet Office, with a National Security Secretariat, headed by a former senior member of the Foreign Office who has the title (new in UK politics) of National Security Adviser. The ministerial membership includes the Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, Defence Secretary, International Development Secretary, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change and, in the Coalition Government formed in 2010, the Deputy Prime Minister (the leader of the minority party in the coalition).

* David Fisher who, as a senior defence official, did not oppose the invasion of Iraq at the time, reached the conclusion some years later that it did not meet the criteria of a just war. Fisher writes: ‘As casualties have mounted in the years since 2003, it has become increasingly difficult to maintain that more good than harm was produced by military action, however evil and oppressive the Saddam regime had undoubtedly been. Moreover, however the balance sheet is scored, what is clear is that the careful assessment of consequences required by the just war tradition before a war is embarked on was not undertaken. Nor was there adequate planning to ensure the prompt restoration of peaceful conditions after military operations and the establishment of a just peace.’ (David Fisher, Morality and War: Can War be Just in the Twenty-first Century?, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, p. 213.)