Who would have believed that with British soldiers dying in Afghanistan on account of Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, American feelings toward Britain could turn so sour?
Yet thanks to the release of the “Lockerbie bomber,” Abdel Basset Ali Al-Megrahi, the unstinting efforts of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his predecessor Tony Blair to consolidate Britain’s credentials as America’s closest ally suddenly seem in danger of coming to nothing. Instead of being extolled for its exemplary loyalty, Britain finds itself the object of boundless American contempt.
President Barack Obama’s description of the decision to release Al-Megrahi as a “mistake” is merely the least offensive of the American criticisms that have been directed at the British government; others have not hesitated to accuse the British in general of “cowardice” and “duplicity.” It is an extraordinary turn of events, though they are unlikely to bother the growing numbers of Britons who are sickened by the cringingly sycophantic attitude toward Washington of successive British governments.
It must be said that Gordon Brown’s conduct throughout all of this has been breathtakingly inept. The prime minister’s protracted silence about Al-Megrahi’s release from prison in Scotland — ostensibly because Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill was uniquely empowered to decide that the terminally ill Al-Megrahi deserved to die in Libya — would have been puzzling in any circumstances. For despite enjoying a devolved Parliament, Scotland is still wholly subordinate to the British government in respect of foreign policy, and for the British prime minister to have kept his own counsel about such a hugely emotive national issue as the premature release of a convicted mass murderer was nothing if not bizarre.
Brown’s silence was all the more compromising because the British government is known to have been negotiating arms and oil deals with Libya. Few doubt that the primary motive behind Al-Megrahi’s release was to propitiate Muammar Qaddafi and thus avoid the “catastrophic consequences” with which the Libyan leader threatened Britain were Al-Megrahi not to be sent home. Few doubt, either, that the British government pressured the Scottish executive to arrange Al-Megrahi’s release.
It is especially unfortunate for the standing of the British government that Foreign Secretary David Miliband should have announced that the British government conveyed to Qaddafi that, while it could not influence a decision that was the exclusive prerogative of the Scottish government, it was not “actively seeking Al-Megrahi’s death” in Scottish captivity. Seldom has a British minister made a more crass choice of words. Such grotesque circumlocution has given Americans good cause to revile British “duplicity.”
It is hardly surprising that the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, has sought to reap party political advantage from the government’s botched handling of Al-Megrahi’s release. Cameron has made much of the damage that it has done to Britain’s relationship with the US. Yet Cameron may be unwise to suppose that there is much political mileage in denigrating Brown on this score. Revulsion at Britain’s abjectly one-sided relationship with the US is becoming ever more widespread, and it seems doubtful if Cameron can advance his party’s cause by stressing how Brown has alienated American opinion. If and when Brown loses the next general election, it will not be because the Al-Megrahi affair has poisoned Anglo-American relations. Indeed, the controversy over Al-Megrahi may strengthen the mounting sense that Britain has invested far too heavily in the “special relationship,” to the detriment of British relations with the wider world, not to mention national self-respect. Some may even feel that the venomous US denunciations of Britain are to be welcomed.
For they underline that the intimidatory stance of US President George W. Bush when, following 9/11, he warned people everywhere that they were either “with us or against us” was not peculiar to his gangster regime. It is true that the most strident demonizing of Britain has come from right-wing Americans with Zionist affiliations who imply that Britain has sold out to the Arab world and placed itself on the wrong side in the “clash of civilizations,” but at present their implacable Anglophobia seems to be a common American sentiment.
The former British ambassador to Libya, Sir Oliver Miles, detects a coarsening of moral fiber in the American reaction to Al-Megrahi’s release. Certainly, there has been a sharp contrast between the reactions of Americans who lost loved ones at Lockerbie and their British counterparts, with the latter generally far more respectful of the Scottish justice minister’s decision to end Al-Megrahi’s sentence on grounds of compassion. There is a hyped-up quality about the US vilification of Britain, a hint that on the subject of Lockerbie, American consciences may not be entirely untroubled. Not a few believe that Libya was framed as part of a US-inspired effort to cover up intelligence that the Lockerbie bomb was planted by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran; in the aftermath of Lockerbie in 1991, when the US was seeking to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and needed Iranian support, such a disclosure would scarcely have been helpful. Accidentally or not, the American vilification of Britain over Al-Megrahi’s release has distracted attention from the widely held suspicion that the US was only too eager to see him convicted. What is especially striking is how little American interest there has been in pressing for a proper inquiry into Lockerbie.
The Daily Mail columnist, Quentin Letts, has speculated that Brown may share the belief that Al-Megrahi is innocent, not least because he has been extensively briefed about Lockerbie by his fellow Scot, the former Labour MP, Tam Dalyell, who has taken a close interest in the matter. Brown has become notorious for his shilly-shallying and lack of candor. Yet for once the motives behind his dogged evasiveness may not be entirely discreditable.
