10 February 2009 10:19 AM
Down with the Special Relationship
When I lived in Washington DC I tried for many months to find the famous
'Special Relationship' which I had heard so much about back home. It was
not there. I could find nobody, including our then Ambassador, who
admitted its existence.
What was more, I noticed that my country was pretty unloved in the
American capital, despite the increasingly shabby and embarrassing
Winston Churchill and/or Margaret Thatcher cults common among a certain
type of American.
In fact I was later able to witness, at very close quarters, the
complete diplomatic defeat of Britain in Washington by the tiny Irish
Embassy. Bear in mind here that the British Embassy on Massachusetts
Avenue is a relic of Imperial grandeur, both magnificent and huge. The
Ambassador's residence, a fine piece of Lutyens in a sort of semi-
country-house style, is a rather melancholy reminder that we were once
great. The nearby Embassy buildings, though architecturally frightful,
are large and suggest (correctly) that Britain maintains a very large
staff here, much of it devoted to military and intelligence cooperation,
or attempts at cooperation.
Yet, during 1994 and 1995, this whole apparatus knew less about the
White House and its intentions than the Irish, and was quite unable to
win a diplomatic battle over what amounted to American recognition of
the Provisional IRA as a negotiating partner.
I was once phoned up by a White House official who had become aware that
I was writing uncomplimentary articles about this. She wanted to brief
me into softening my views. But she wrecked the whole thing by comparing
Bill Clinton's intervention on the side of Gerry Adams with his
involvement in Yugoslavia.
'So', I said to her 'You regard Britain, your wartime ally, a sovereign
democracy with a thousand years of history, the origin of your own
constitution, as the equivalent of Serbia?'
She went very quiet. Because in fact that is exactly how the White House
then regarded Britain, and I should think is pretty much as the White
House regards us now.
This was nothing new. There's a very good scene in Ian Curteis's
excellent Falklands Play (still yet to be broadcast on BBC1 or BBC2) ,
during which Margaret Thatcher goes intercontinental when Al Haig
suggests that the US ought to be even-handed between Britain and
Argentina.
And it's been clear for ages that, in its desire to have a 'single phone
number' when dealing with what some Americans refer to as 'Yerp', the US
State Department has been anxious to cram Britain into a European
Superstate. In fact it's often been suggested that the CIA has been
involved in various backstairs pro-EU campaigns in the past. I've never
been quite sure how the various neo-conservative admirers of the USA,
Eurosceptics to a man, cope with Washington's strong pro-Brussels
policies. I expect they just ignore them.
Now, I love the USA as much as many and more than most. I'm glad it's
there. If we can't be top nation any more (and we can't), I'm glad it's
the USA that has taken over the position. But I won't get sentimental
about it. They don't. The American national anthem is an anti-British
song about the Royal Navy's bombardment of Baltimore, in which the
presence of British soldiers on American soil is referred to as 'their
foul footsteps' pollution'. At the CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia (to whose foyer I was once admitted) stands a statue of Nathan
Hale, America's first spy, hanged by...us, the British. American
schoolbook history is full of dubious stuff about British oppression of
the Colonists, and many Americans believe the sort of tripe encapsulated
in Mel Gibson's appalling film 'The Patriot", in which British officers
are portrayed as being more or less like the Nazis. Meanwhile the cruel
and intolerant treatment of the very large numbers of pro-British
loyalists left in the USA after the revolutionary war is forgotten.
Canada, where they mostly fled, is their memorial.
More recently, it was our ally the USA which ended British naval
supremacy (and in effect put a stop to our Asian Empire) with the 1922
Washington Naval Treaty. This was in truth the moment at which the
British Empire was finished, though we had to go through several defeats
before we believed it. And of course there was the desperate
indebtedness of Britain to the USA after the Second World War, which
enabled Washington to demand the dismantling of the Empire in return for
aid.
Not to mention Suez, where the US Sixth Fleet actively harassed British
warships on their way to Egypt, and President Eisenhower threatened us
with bankruptcy if we didn't withdraw.
Well, that's all right. Why should it be otherwise? America's accession
to the topmost rank could only have come at our expense. America's
interests are different from ours. Nations don't have eternal
friendships, as Palmerston long ago pointed out.
But in that case isn't it time we stopped the pretence, which survives
only in London, that we are somehow specially close to the Americans?
Mightn't we actually get more out of them, and have a more healthy
relationship, if we rather more frequently told them we were not doing
as they wished?
France, through stroppiness and refusal to cooperate with the USA, has
probably received just as much military help and support from Washington
as we have, if not more, and its nuclear forces are more independent
than ours.
Now here's an opportunity to declare independence, as we might put it.
The miserable behaviour of the British government, in ordering the
suppression of a British court judgement on the allegations that Binyam
Mohamed, is deeply embarrassing to anyone who believes either in truth
or in national sovereignty. Our judges cannot say what they wish,
apparently, because of a fear that we will then be denied US
intelligence cooperation.
Then let it be so. I am sure that no American judge would be silenced by
British government threats of this kind, even if they had any substance
to them. The case of Mr Mohamed isn't even the point. The point is, do
we run our affairs or not? And if the answer is that we cannot run them
without annoying the Americans, then let us annoy the Americans. What
good has our slavish following of US policy in Iraq or Afghanistan
actually done us, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan? I am told that
relations between the two militaries are now poorer than they were
before, which isn't much of an achievement. If this is what being
special involves, I would rather not be special any more.
Http://hitchensblog
relationship.
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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