Twenty-five years ago this summer the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rejoiced over British victory in the Falklands War. Fought to rescue the Falkland Islands, one of the last remnants of the British Empire, from invasion by Argentina, the war transformed Mrs. Thatcher’s political fortunes. She emerged as the “Iron Lady”, the warrior politician who restored Britain’s imperial prestige.
The huge political benefit Mrs. Thatcher reaped from war was not lost on the young Tony Blair. Indeed, considering that he has committed Britain to no fewer than five military conflicts during the past ten years, Blair could be said to have learned all too well how waging war can enhance a leader’s standing. It’s ironic to recall that, when he came to power in 1997, Thatcher herself volunteered the opinion that Britain would be safe in Blair’s hands. She could hardly have guessed that the country was electing a prime minister who would put her own bellicosity in the shade, while making Britain much less safe than it had previously been.
Thanks to Blair’s martial excesses, there is now a disposition, even among those who deplored the Falklands War, to acknowledge that the war was a comparatively reasonable enterprise, a justifiable response to Argentinean aggression. The Falkland Islands had after all been invaded by Argentina in clear breach of international law. In conception and execution, the Falklands War was an essentially British undertaking (although Britain received clandestine US logistical support). Admirers of Mrs. Thatcher boasted about how she had demonstrated that Britain was still capable of pursuing its own foreign policy — something that had no longer seemed feasible after the setback of the 1956 Suez crisis when US President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced Britain to abort its attempt to invade Egypt in concert with France and Israel.
By contrast, Britain’s intervention in Iraq lacked any clear legal justification. Nor could any national interest be said to have been at stake. It came about because, under Blair, Britain entered into a relationship with US President George W. Bush so servile as to make Mrs. Thatcher’s protestations of loyalty to the then president, Ronald Reagan, seem eminently dignified.
All the same, it is fair to say that Thatcher prepared the way for Blair’s warmongering career. For Blair is very much a creature of the Thatcher era and the Falklands War gave a fresh lease of life to the illusion that Britain was still a great, not to say invincible, military power, with a God-given right to intervene in foreign lands. As British victory precipitated the downfall of the junta of Gen. Galtieri and stimulated the growth of Argentinean democracy, it also revived conviction that Britain remains a force for good in world affairs.
The extraordinary tenacity of the British imperial mentality had more than a little bearing on the recent standoff between Britain and Iran that could so easily have escalated into a major international crisis. Who could miss the imperial hauteur informing the moral outrage of Blair and Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett as they denounced Iran for presuming to arrest British sailors in what they insisted counted as waters where British writ runs? Soaked in antique assumptions of racial superiority, here was the tone of Olympian indignation that has long been the hallmark of the British establishment. The habit of towering British colonial condescension is particularly ingrained in relation to Iran. Certainly, though the country never belonged to the British Empire, Britain has yet to stop treating Iran as though it is a vassal state, which ought to accept as self-evident the British Navy’s entitlement to police the Gulf. That Britain is nowadays viewed by Iran and the rest of the world as a mere stooge of the United States never seems to occur to Britain’s high-handed political elite.
It is a measure of this institutionalized racist arrogance that, even among educated Britons, knowledge about Britain’s historic relationship with Iran is at best sketchy. No more than a tiny minority has ever troubled to familiarize themselves with the unedifying story of British interference in Iran, and it is doubtful if that minority includes Britain’s current prime minister. It follows that few have the least understanding why, to this day, there is much Iranian suspicion of Britain, a tendency to detect its hand behind Iran’s past and present adversities, and even to believe that it is the endlessly cunning British who are manipulating the foreign policy of the United States. The roots of this profound distrust lie in the long record of ruthless British exploitation of Iran, especially of its oil wealth, which began years before the US became involved in the Middle East. It must be remembered, too, that the coup of 1953 which led to the ousting of the democratically elected Iranian leader, Muhammad Mossadeq, who nationalized Iranian oil, was instigated by British Intelligence, even if it was ultimately carried through by the CIA. The truth is that the tortured evolution of modern Iran owes quite as much to British as it does to US imperialist meddling.
Given this ignorance, it would not be surprising if British people needed little encouragement to participate in the US demonizing of Iran. However, the general reaction in Britain to the recent crisis has been relatively muted. It is true that there have been hotheads calling for the nuking of Tehran but, to judge from radio phone-ins, not a few Britons question why British Marines were operating in Iranian waters in the first place. This mounting unease about British persistence in old imperial habits stems in no small measure from Blair’s duplicity and demeaning behavior toward the US. For his emulation of the strident patriotism of Thatcher has all too patently been inseparable from selling out his own country; by this stage indeed his willful embroiling of Britain in military ventures dreamed up in Washington is seen as anything but patriotic. His sorry legacy is a widespread sense of injured national pride, with American visitors to Britain much subject to crude abuse.
Rumors have circulated that the Bush regime intends to make fresh use of Blair as a champion of US foreign policy, one who can make the case for bombing Iran rather more eloquently than the American president. Blair may yet prove happy to oblige, but the blustering equivocation of his response to the Marines crisis has underscored the collapse of his credibility both at home and abroad.
The 25th anniversary of the Falklands War might have been the occasion for a fresh outpouring of British jingoism. Yet the signs are that increasing numbers of Britons are beginning to appreciate the disastrous cost of sustaining Britain’s imperial pretensions. It is just possible that one day Britain may learn to live with the fact that it is no longer a great empire. The worry is that it will not be before self-aggrandizing British politicians have helped the United States to destabilize the whole world.
