British people have long worn poppies in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday, the November day when Britain ritually commemorates its war dead. In recent years, however, it has begun to feel like a bounden national duty to do so, with massed ranks of television personalities and politicians proudly displaying their poppies long in advance of the event itself.
The message is that Britons are united in mourning their country’s fallen warriors, all those who, in the distant past, or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, have died in the defense of British civilization. Contrariwise, to eschew wearing a poppy is to risk being seen as insensitive to the sacrifices made by brave British men, someone who might even be branded a traitor. Conspicuously not wearing one and commenting that Britain has fallen prey to “poppy fascism,” the presenter of Channel 4 News, Jon Snow, has run just such a risk. The BBC broadcaster, John Humphries, said that people like Snow should feel ashamed of themselves.
In its new coercive aspect, the cult of the poppy might have been devised by cynical British politicians to stifle public questioning about why British soldiers are dying in Afghanistan. Certainly, poppy-wearing government ministers have a vested interest in fomenting communal emotion about military heroism and self-sacrifice. Yet the official government line — that in the absence of British military involvement in Afghanistan British domestic security will be gravely compromised — is rapidly losing credibility. For in Britain, as in the US, the public perception is growing that men are losing their lives for no better reason than to prop up the regime of President Hamid Karzai, a regime seen as holding power on the basis of electoral fraud and presiding over a country where corruption is endemic. The killing of five British soldiers by a rogue Afghan policeman has massively amplified public misgivings about the whole rationale for staying in Afghanistan.
It is questionable if British ministers themselves always believe what they are saying in defense of the British mission. There is more than a hint of desperation about some of their remarks on the matter. Take the extraordinary justification offered the other day by the minister for immigration, Phil Woolas, when he asserted that for British troops to leave Afghanistan would mean that Britain would face rising numbers of Afghan asylum-seekers. Woolas was taken to be saying that British soldiers were endangering their lives in Afghanistan in order to maintain British immigration controls. Coming in the wake of the killing of the five soldiers, his statement was felt to be as ill judged, as it was offensive.
Given the mounting disquiet about the Afghan deployment, it is hardly surprising that cracks are beginning to appear in the facade of cross-party unity on the issue. The contention of the former Foreign Office minister, Kim Howells, that Britain would do well to get out of Afghanistan and devote its resources to strengthening the security of its own borders is a development of no small significance. Howells is the first Labour Party figure of consequence to break ranks over Afghanistan. Meanwhile, there are signs that the leader of Liberal Democrat Party, Nick Clegg, is close to committing his party to withdrawal. With a British general election in prospect and the situation in Afghanistan steadily deteriorating, debate about the British deployment seems certain to figure as an election issue. Not a few Britons will be voting against Prime Minister Gordon Brown because they believe that he and his policies were arbitrarily imposed on British people and that he is scarcely more of an authentic democratic leader than Afghan President Hamid Karzai. It is true that Brown took over from Tony Blair as British leader without the British electorate having the smallest say about his succession. How, many wonder, can his government plausibly claim to be helping to build free institutions in Afghanistan when the prime minister’s own democratic credentials leave something to be desired? Not that there is any reason to suppose that a Conservative government led by David Cameron is any more likely to pull out of Afghanistan. The fact is that Britain’s political elite long ago surrendered British foreign policy to Washington. In a sharp riposte to Kim Howells, the former British Conservative foreign secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, explicitly wrote that Britain needed to stay in Afghanistan because withdrawal would not only lay Britain open to terrorism but destroy Britain’s “special relationship” with the US.
In the sense that the “special relationship” between the US and Britain is a fantasy nursed by British politicians, it could be said to be beyond destruction. Nevertheless, it is eminently possible to feel that curtailing British subservience to Washington would be no bad thing. Indeed, in view of the recent unhappy consequences of the Anglo-American relationship, it might even help to make the world a less worse place. But so reflexive has Britain’s servile posture become that it is barely conceivable that any leading politician would dare to challenge it; Clegg will say nothing definite about Afghanistan until President Barack Obama spells out current American policy. It will be interesting to see how, in the coming general election campaign, politicians handle public outrage about the deaths of British soldiers without engaging with the issue of Britain’s submissiveness to the US. The trouble now is that even if a consensus emerges in favor of an exit strategy, the process of quitting Afghanistan will be messy and protracted. The prospect that the war will in any event drag on, with ever greater military and civilian fatalities, ever more bitter British and American domestic controversy and no demonstrable reduction in the terrorist threat, is real. The great British 18th century historian, Edward Gibbon, observed that history was little more than a “register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” Confronted by the bloody disarray into which, in the name of freedom, the United States and Britain have plunged Iraq and Afghanistan, Gibbon would have no incentive to revise his verdict.
