Martial heroism is a quality the British have always venerated. The names of great British battles and famous native warriors loom large in their tribal mythology. Not for nothing are British daytime television schedules crammed with World War II movies. An old country with a vast population of elderly people, Britain abounds in armchair generals who are forever reliving World War II, forever teaching the Germans and the Japanese a lesson they will never forget.
In many ways, the British have defined themselves in terms of their military prowess. Nor do they like to acknowledge that their soldiers have ever been anything other than triumphantly successful; even their military setbacks are commemorated as legendary achievements. Think of Dunkirk, the bedraggled British retreat from France early in World War II. By some rum piece of mental gymnastics, this essentially humiliating episode has been remembered as a source of national pride.
To this day, there is no subject about which the British (so often seen by the rest of the world as cold and remote) are apt to become so emotional as their armed forces. To an extravagant degree, military service has been bound up in the public imagination with honor and patriotism, death and martyrdom, and the sense that the British are a special breed, charged with a divine mission to fight the good fight and vanquish the forces of darkness.
All this helps to explain the mindset of Britain’s pious yet bellicose Prime Minister Tony Blair. It perhaps helps to explain, too, why opinion polls now indicate that a majority of British people (albeit marginal) have decided to endorse their country’s participation in what has been described by Le Monde as “la guerre Americaine.” As soon as British troops were deployed, a new national consensus sprang into existence: That all decent people were bound to support “our boys” — notwithstanding the fact that as much as two thirds of the British public had previously baulked at the prospect of a war without the backing of a second UN resolution.
Many believe that in his defiance of widespread opposition to the war, Tony Blair has shown great courage and integrity. A prime minister notorious for his abject reliance on “focus groups,” for his pursuit of nothing but predictably popular policies, Blair is felt to have displayed an independence of mind of which he had hitherto seemed incapable. Yet the truth is that this seasoned political opportunist was well-acquainted with the inveterate tendency of the British to rally behind their troops the moment they are committed to battle. He was taking a risk but it was a calculated risk — which he had every reason to anticipate would pay off. After all, only 18 months ago, when Britain participated in attacking Afghanistan, opinion polls shifted markedly in Blair’s favor as soon as the war began.
With the notable exceptions of the Guardian, the Independent and the Daily Mirror, the bulk of the British press is prosecuting the war against Iraq with characteristic nationalistic zeal, banging the patriotic drum and striving to manufacture a climate of opinion in which criticism of the war is liable to be seen not just as callous disregard for “our boys” but as un-British, as more or less tacit support for Saddam Hussein. The few leading politicians who have dared to challenge the war’s morality and rationale have accordingly done so in highly circumspect terms, plainly anxious to forestall accusations that they are betraying their fellow countrymen.
When, two weeks ago, he resigned from the government, the former Cabinet Minister Robin Cook seemed to be signaling his profound and uncompromising disagreement with Tony Blair’s pro-war stance. But before long he began to moderate his language, insisting that, for all his misgivings about military action, he backed British troops wholeheartedly and that he was emphatically not in favor of withdrawing them now that battle had been joined. The sometime Labour Minister Mo Mowlam and the Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy have adopted much the same position. So, too, have those Church leaders — the new Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams prominent among them — who at one stage were ardently identifying themselves with the cause of peace.
The jingoistic atmosphere whipped up by the Sun and other newspapers is certainly a powerful deterrent to frank public discussion of the rights and wrongs of the current conflict. During the past few weeks, the warmongering Sun has abandoned itself to orgiastic emotionalism on the subject of British troops, issuing daily paeans to their extraordinary valor and heroism in the face of their bestial enemies; more measured but no less chauvinistic sections of the British media, meanwhile, have vaunted the chivalry with which British soldiers — in contrast to their ungentlemanly American counterparts — are allegedly conducting themselves vis-a-vis the Iraqi people.
It is perhaps understandable if anti-war politicians, fearful of being hounded and demonized by Britain’s rabid tabloid press, have sought to hedge their bets. Evidently, the likes of Robin Cook are hoping and praying that the regime of Saddam Hussein will soon founder, that the coalition will quickly prevail, and that their studiously ambiguous postures will save them from being answerable for having either supported the war or failed to support it.
The result of such disingenuousness is that the anti-war movement in Britain has yet to enjoy anything resembling credible and persuasive political leadership; the millions of British people who marched for peace have in effect been disenfranchised. No person of stature, no truly commanding figure, has spoken against the war with nearly the same zeal and consistency that Tony Blair has spoken for it, and now that that war is under way and taking its baleful course, a certain public fatalism about the whole business has inevitably set in.
Whether “our boys” are winning the war against the regime of Saddam Hussein may still not be quite clear. But about their success in subduing the war’s British opponents there can be no question.
Arab News Features 7 April 2003