In the run-up to the Iraq War, the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was asked if Britain was prepared to pay a “blood price” in order to demonstrate the depth of his country’s loyalty to the United States. Though hardly renowned for straight talking, on this occasion Blair was unequivocal. “Yes”, he said.
With ever more British soldiers losing their lives in Afghanistan, many British people want to know what they are losing them for. Blair’s successor Gordon Brown insists that they are fighting to make Britain safe, while also helping turn Afghanistan into a functioning democracy. But few are persuaded by his explanation. According to the latest poll conducted for the Mail on Sunday newspaper, 69 percent of British people want Britain to pull out of Afghanistan, with a mere 1.5 percent respecting Brown’s handling of the conflict.
In truth, it is Blair’s “blood price” that explains Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan. The real but unmentionable reason why British soldiers are dying there is because the British political class will go to any length to ensure that Britain remains an integral part of the United States’ geopolitical designs. For 50 years Britain’s “special relationship” with the US has been the vicarious means by which British politicians have sustained the make-believe that the British Empire does not belong irretrievably to the past.
It is inconceivable that British soldiers would ever have gone near Iraq or Afghanistan but for Britain’s compulsion to play the role of US lapdog. What is extraordinary is the way Britain blindly clings to this submissive posture even though it has made it an object of worldwide scorn. The signs are that the “special relationship” has eroded the capacity of the British politicians to think realistically about Britain’s place in the world and the true welfare of its people.
Yet it may be that it is not just British troops who are dying in Afghanistan but, at long last, the fantasy of Britain as a player on the world stage. The Newsweek magazine columnist, Stryker McGuire, recently wrote that in the wake of last year’s financial meltdown and the massive government rescue of British banks, Britain faces the necessity of re-defining itself as “Little Britain”, or at any rate as a lesser Britain. It is a necessity that is becoming all the more pressing given the emergent giant economies of China and India and the natural tendency of the US to adjust its foreign relations in accordance with new world political realities.
Britain is contending with possibly the worst public finances of any major nation and is now so heavily indebted that some believe the country could follow Iceland into national bankruptcy. Much of this stems from profligate public spending undertaken by British governments in the hubristic belief that the City of London had become the center of international finance, the hub of a deregulated globalized economy, with the capacity to generate untold national wealth. But Britain’s economic woes are also bound up with reckless expenditure on US-led foreign adventures.
It is testimony to the sheer tenacity of Britain’s imperial illusions that they have survived thus far. Even now it takes an American correspondent to point out that, with Britain’s sense of itself as a top nation no longer sustainable, it is time to reassess the “special relationship”. Least of all are British politicians likely to address the issue of Britain’s fealty to the US and the distorted sense of reality, not to mention the humiliation that it has entailed. Yet nor, for all their pretensions to plain speaking, are British media commentators much given addressing it either. Consider the muted response to the extradition of the British computer hacker and Asperger sufferer, Gary McKinnon, the result of an extradition treaty between the US and Britain which means that the US can demand for trial any Briton it likes, or rather does not like.
Nevertheless, there is a growing perception among British people that the “special relationship” is a curse, and that perception has been greatly strengthened by the mounting evidence that after being involved in a military debacle in Iraq, the British Army is now caught up in a fresh debacle in Afghanistan. A BBC television Newsnight report showed a US armored vehicle that had been disabled by a roadside bomb yet whose personnel emerged unscathed. There have been numerous incidents where vehicles used by the British Army have afforded no such protection, with fatal consequences for their occupants. The fact is that the equipment at the disposal of the American military is vastly superior to that used by the British. Moreover, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US military has ended up having to remedy the inability of under-resourced British forces to achieve their strategic objectives.
It is one thing to nurse imperial illusions but another altogether to pursue them on the cheap and at the expense of soldiers’ lives. What is deepening the moral mess into which Britain has blundered thanks to its subservience to the US is the need to prove that British servicemen have not died in vain. To justify their sacrifice means committing still more soldiers to finish the job”. The whole process becomes gruesomely self-perpetuating. The US may soon strengthen its military presence in Afghanistan, with the expectation that Britain will follow suit. That the expectation is well founded seems certain. Yet there must be a limit to which a country that is fighting off national bankruptcy can go in sustaining costly overseas military commitments, and that would be so even if its foreign policy enjoyed full public support.
If there was ever a time when British people took pride in Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States, that time has gone. The “blood price” that it is exacting in Afghanistan is enforcing the realization that it has been a grotesquely unequal affair, a recipe not for making the world a better place but for turning Britain into an invalid among nations.
