DURING THE FIRST session of Parliament following the 1992 general election Britain is threatening to take part in an attack on two countries with which it is not at war. This has provoked almost no interest at Westminster, prompting the serious question: What is Parliament for? It is a question I shall return to. Meanwhile, some background:
Prime Minister Major has told President Bush that the United States is free to use British air bases to attack Libya, and that Britain will take part in a renewed American assault on Iraq ‘if necessary’.117 The contingency for these attacks is justified with a UN resolution whose legitimacy rests on Article 51 of the UN Charter. This says that a member can defend itself, but in no sense does it endorse a prolonged campaign of counter-attack. Since the Gulf War, the United States and Britain have used the United Nations to conduct a campaign of attrition against Iraq, bleeding it; the sufferers have been primarily children, whose death-rate is said to have increased by an estimated 400 per cent.118
Now the United States and Britain are on the verge of bombing Iraq on the pretext that Iraq refuses to destroy its ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – when, in fact, Iraq has asked that some of its military industry be converted to civilian production laid waste by Allied bombing. The bombing would probably finish off Iraq’s industrial base.
A similar attack is likely against Libya. American and British domination of the United Nations on this issue has produced yet another ‘high noon’ deadline by which Libya must surrender two men accused of the Lockerbie bombing, or face sanctions and worse. That the evidence against the two is, at best, circumstantial, and their prospects of a fair trial in Scotland or the United States remote, are not considered relevant factors.
The Scottish Prime Minister (John Major) has told Parliament that the accused Libyans are ‘the perpetrators’ of the outrage. Alex Carlile, MP has similarly described them as ‘these two mass murderers’, who should be brought here for ‘a fair trial’.119 As numerous fitted-up Irishmen can bear witness, the fairness of British justice can no longer be guaranteed.
The American campaign against Libya, like its counterpart against Iraq, relies on the obsolescence of history. In the United States this is guaranteed by a standard assumption that the Libyans are guilty, thus providing the Bush administration with the kind of support it needs in an uncertain election year.
Few can doubt that Colonel Gaddafi runs an odious autocracy. However, if this was justification for blockading and bombing his country, most of the regimes propped up by the United States would be awaiting a similar fate. The truth is that Libya has been stitched up on several occasions since Libyan oil was nationalised in 1969 and Gaddafi refused to behave like the American client his predecessors used to be. In 1981, he was accused of sending a team of assassins to America, armed with surface-to-air missiles and led by ‘East German terror experts’ under orders from the colonel to kill Ronald Reagan, the secretary of state and secretary of defence. The Soviet Union was said to be behind it. Comic-book sketches of the would-be assassins were published.120
None of it was true. In 1986, TV Guide published a cover story entitled ‘Why American TV is So Vulnerable to Foreign Propaganda’, in which it claimed that the Libyan hit team story was really a figment of a KGB campaign to spread alarm and ‘to destabilise public opinion in the West’.121 The admission came shortly after American warplanes had bombed Libyan civilians from British bases. Libya’s ‘crime’ then was a terrorist bombing in Berlin that was later traced to the Assad regime in Syria. In 1990, the same Syrian regime was rewarded with millions of dollars’ worth of arms credits.122 ‘We have problems with their support of terrorism,’ said Secretary of State James Baker, ‘but we share a common goal.’123 The goal was the destruction of Syria’s old foe, Iraq.
That goal is now drawing closer, along with the goal of finishing off the uppity Gaddafi, a perfect hate figure in an election year. The United Nations will provide legitimacy for what are little more than acts of international piracy. As Francis Boyle, the distinguished American authority on international law, has pointed out, the US and Britain have violated both the Montreal Sabotage Convention and the UN Charter. ‘The conclusion is unescapable’, he wrote, ‘that the reason why the US and UK have illegally rejected all means for the peaceful resolution of this dispute with Libya is that both states know full well that Libya was not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing.’124
The ‘new world order’ strategists may, however, come unstuck in Libya. Arab hostility towards American dominance in Middle Eastern affairs has sharpened since the destruction of Iraq. The ripple effect on economic and political life in the region has reinforced fundamentalism, as recent events in Algeria demonstrate. The Arab world has identified the essential hypocrisy of UN pressure on Iraq and Libya. Israel, having repeatedly thumbed its nose at UN resolutions, is under no such pressure.
As for Britain, it is the tenth anniversary of the Falklands War and the British foreign policy establishment is reminding itself of the debt it owes to Washington, without whose satellite intelligence Margaret Thatcher might not have been able to call upon us to ‘rejoice’. However, Britain’s role during the past decade has been more active than that of indebted loyal lieutenant. As John Gittings has pointed out, the British have ‘exalted the values of war over peace, of unilateral settling of scores rather than multilateral negotiations of differences’.125 It was Thatcher who promoted these values more than Reagan or Bush. In accepting cruise missiles in Britain, she single-handedly accelerated the nuclear arms race.
Great power nostalgia and pretensions are always close at hand in Britain. The Conservative election manifesto emphasised the need for Britain ‘to regain . . . rightful influence’ and to ‘lead the world’. Labour wanted to ‘partner’ the United States in reducing nuclear weapons. Instead of calling for a total moratorium on arms sales to the Middle East, Labour wanted to ‘control’ the arms bazaar. Like John Major’s ‘arms register’, this would have merely screened the scandals and corruption of the British arms industry. So the question is put: What is Parliament for?
In supporting the slaughter during the Gulf War – Tory and Labour together – Parliament failed in one of its primary obligations: to represent and articulate the misgivings of a large section of the population. Since then, Parliament has been instrumental in the covering up of a report into Britain’s biggest arms contract with one of the beneficiaries of the war and the principal Western client in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia.
Parliament’s public-spending ‘watchdog’, the Public Accounts Committee, has refused to publish the results of a three-year enquiry into the Saudi deal, which is for British Tornado aircraft worth £20 billion. The chairman, Robert Sheldon, a Labour MP, says that he has spent ‘many hours worrying about this decision, but there really are enormous amounts of jobs at stake’.126 He says that there is ‘no evidence of corruption or of public money being used improperly’.127 If this is true, why can’t the report be released? What are parliamentary committees for if not to shed light on that which officialdom wishes to conceal?
In the case of the Saudi deal, like so much to do with British ‘interests’ in the Gulf, secrecy and stink go together. The National Audit Office, which refused to show its own report to Sheldon’s committee, has found that the Saudi contract was written in such a way that huge ‘commissions’ running into hundreds of millions of pounds may have been paid by British Aerospace to Saudi and British middlemen.128 How does this square with Sheldon’s statement that there is ‘no evidence of corruption’? And is it not true that when the National Audit Office announced that it was to hold an enquiry, the Saudis threatened to pull out of the Tornado deal?129
According to the Observer, Mark Thatcher may have received as much as £10 million from one of the main British Aerospace agents involved in the Saudi deal, which was negotiated while his mother was prime minister.130 He has been named in a civil action in the United States as having helped British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce to win a helicopter defence contract in Saudi Arabia. A confidential memorandum refers to $4 billion ‘mentioned in connection with M. Thatcher’s son’.131 If none of this is in the public interest, what is? Parliament should find out the facts and tell us. That is what it’s for.
April to May 1992