Blood, Class and Empire

The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship

Christopher Hitchens

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857899392
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Since the end of the Cold War so-called experts have been predicting the eclipse of America's "special relationship" with Britain. But as events have shown, especially in the wake of 9/11, the political and cultural ties between America and Britain have grown stronger. Blood, Class and Empire examines the dynamics of this relationship, its many cultural manifestations-the James Bond series, PBS "Brit Kitsch," Rudyard Kipling-and explains why it still persists.

Contrarian, essayist and polemicist, Christopher Hitchens notes that while the relationship is usually presented as a matter of tradition, manners, and common culture, sanctified by wartime alliance, the special ingredient is empire; transmitted from an ancien regime that has tried to preserve and renew itself thereby. England has attempted to play Greece to the American Rome, but ironically having encouraged the United States to become an equal partner in the business of empire, Britain found itself supplanted.

Contents

	Acknowledgments
	Preface (2003)
	Introduction
1.	Greece to Their Rome
2.	Brit Kitsch
3.	The Bard of Empires
4.	Blood Relations
5.	Vox Americana
6.	From Love to Hate and Back Again
7.	The Churchill Cult
8.	FDR’s Victory; Churchill’s Defeat
9.	Churchill’s Revenge
10.	Imperial Receivership
11.	Discordant Intimacy
12.	The Bond of Intelligence
13.	Nuclear Jealousies
	Conclusion
	Bibliographic Note
	Index

Preface

To open a paper at the overseas news pages during the year of grace 2003 was to be confronted by a fairly predictable menu of crisis, if not an exactly measurable standard of crisis management. An American foreign-policy “expert,” whether headquartered in Langley, Virginia or Foggy Bottom, Washington, or at one of the nations proliferating diink-tanks and institutes, could be expected to have something to say about many or all of the following:

•Along the so-called “green line” that has divided Israelis from Palestinians in an informal manner for many years, a physical wall was being constructed, partly for “security” reasons and partly for annexationist ones.

•The frontiers of Iraq were becoming heavily porous, with the postinvasion nation-state open to unlicensed entry from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Turkey.

•The expansion of NATO and the European Union was being jeopardized by a petrified intransigence on the part of the Turkish occupiers of Cyprus. Realpolitik appeared to demand an accommodation with Turkey, while law and precept and the resolutions of the United Nations all told against the grabbing and settling of Cypriot soil by Turkish forces.

•In Northern Ireland, repeated attempts to square the circle of Republican and Unionist attrition were foundering on embedded reefs of distrust, as the demography of the Six Counties moved slowly towards a Catholic demographic majority and as Sinn Fein emerged as the largest Republican party.

•Along the borders of India and Pakistan, and the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and within the disputed state of Kashmir, a toxic combination of Hindu-Muslim rivalry, “holy war” infiltration, and thermonuclear weapons offered the most appalling likelihood of what is no less appallingly euphemized as a nuclear “exchange.”

•In Zimbabwe, the prosperity so urgently needed for a respite in the woes of Southern Africa was being squandered by the kleptocratic autocracy of Robert Mugabe.

On most days, the news was fairly sporadic as between Tamils and Sinhala in Sri Lanka, or as between the United Kingdom and Argentina on the Falklands/Malvinas question. But the plain fact remains that the main duty of an American foreign-service officer was to master the legacy of partition and postcolonialism that has been bequeathed to the United States by the United Kingdom. Every one of the frontiers cited above, from the Durand Line in Afghanistan to the Iraq-Kuwait demarcation made by Sir Percy Cox in 1921, was drawn by British diplomats. Sometimes the spirit of their activity could be summarized in the title of Sir Penderel Moon’s celebrated memoir of the scuttle from India: “Divide and Quit.” America has inherited, not to say assumed and annexed, responsibilities from other European powers as well: It is the superpower arbiter in formerly Dutch Indonesia as well as the formerly Belgian Congo (as it had been, also, so memorably and calamitously, in French Indochina). But it is the relationship with Britain above all that conditions its present posture, and furnishes the ethnopohtical boundaries that it patrols. Even in the case of former Yugoslavia, which was not previously part of the British imperial dominion, American policy in the 1990s was to a near-fatal extent determined by a historic British friendship with Serbia, and by the partitionist tradition—one could almost say fanaticism—of the British Foreign Office, as exemplified by Lords Carrington and Owen.

I completed this book just as the long Cold War was drawing to a close, and I am grateful now that its main intention was retrospective. I had not imagined—in my chapter on Kipling, say—that within a decade or so there would again be British soldiers, let alone American ones, on the North West Frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nor would I have thought that an Anglo-American expedition to occupy Mesopotamia was a very strong probability. If it comes to that, I had not expected that the ominous place-name Sarajevo would become vivid and actual for an entire new generation. Yet I have since spent, or had to spend, a good bit of time in these locations, as the unraveling of a pseudo-stable superpower standoff has released or encouraged primeval forces, and perforce reconstituted one of the most durable alliances of the twentieth century in an improvised attempt at confronting a new set of antagonists.

The best I can claim for this work is that anybody reading it for the first time might still be able to trace the filiating threads that make that same alliance so intelligible historically. It was no great shock to me, either, to witness British and American forces acting in concert in Kurdistan in 1991, in Bosnia and in Kosovo later in the decade, and in Basra in 2003. They both had a self-conscious sense of a tradition: one that could be readily resumed both rhetorically and politically. Of the chapters of this book, I could most easily update the one on the cult of Winston Churchill. American official speech after September 11, 2001 was more rife than ever with Churchlllian tropes, whether uttered by Rudolph Giuliani or Donald Rumsfeld, and once again a British ambassador to Washington was able to donate a bust of “The Last Lion” to a war-minded administration. (During later hostilities in Iraq, however, no further use was made of Churchill’s famous recommendation that truth in wartime must be protected by “a bodyguard of lies.” One wonders why this remark was not deployed on the one occasion where it might have done some good.)

Most Americans and a large but probably diminishing number of British people tend to take it for granted that an Anglo-American partnership is in the natural order of things, and another conceivable merit of this book is to have argued that such an assumption is historically unsound.

There have been notable fluctuations in the level of amity and mutuality that supposedly bind London to Washington and, surprisingly to some, these fluctuations are more apt to occur under a Conservative government than a Labour one. I vividly remember standing on an American diplomat’s private lawn in Aspen, Colorado in early August of 1990, watching Margaret Thatcher and George Bush respond to the news that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. (The period of post-Berlin Wall “peace dividend,” now so hard to remember but then so eagerly anticipated, had thus lasted for perhaps nine whole months.) President Bush gave off an impression, which I have never been able to dispel in my mind, that the news had not come as a complete surprise to him. He spoke with complacency and understatement. When it came time for Mrs. Thatcher to seize the microphone, however, the entire tone of things underwent a dramatic change. She spoke of aggression and invoked defiance. I always believed the story that has since been confirmed officially—that she instructed Bush in private that “ this is no time to go wobbly.” Be that as it may, on the following day the President himself was reaching for Churchillian language and saying that the Iraqi occupation “would not stand.” (This in itself is consistent, by the way, with the suspicion that a partial Iraqi intervention in Kuwait would not have been a casus belli, whereas the full-scale annexation that soon disclosed itself was more than had been foreseen. The then American ambassador to Baghdad, Ms. April Glaspie, had on the occasion of her last meeting with Saddam informed him that the United States took no view of the border dispute between Iraq and Kuwait: a border drawn by the abovementioned Sir Percy Cox some seven decades previously. She had even gone so far as to tell him that Americans were prepared to be understanding about this, having had their own problems “with British colonialism.”)

At the time of the Aspen summit, it was an open secret in Washington that the Bush administration now looked to Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s freshly reunited Germany as America’s best friend-to-be in Europe. As Sir Robin Renwick, a distinguished British envoy to Washington, phrases it in his book Fighting with Allies:

Margaret Thatcher breathed a sigh of relief when George Bush defeated the Democratic contender in the 1988 presidential election. But with the new team’s arrival in the White House she found herself dealing with an administration that saw Germany as its leading European partner, that proclaimed its support for European integration, and also disagreed with her about nuclear defense. “I felt I could not always rely as before on American cooperation.”

Bereft of her once-mighty admirer Ronald Reagan and almost pathologically hostile to Herr Kohl, Prime Minister Thatcher saw an advantage at once. Did Germany have any traditional friends among the emirs and sheikhs of the Gulf? Any useful bases and intelligence connections? Any experience of fighting in the region? No. But Britain did, and could make itself highly serviceable to any American effort. The first “coalition of the willing” was forged that very day, though of course—and given the fact that Saddam had abolished the very existence of a UN member state—it was very much easier for this coalition to secure the assent of the Security Council and General Assembly.

Mrs. Thatcher did not remain Prime Minister for long enough to hail the eventual triumph of allied arms in Kuwait, having been deposed by her own party while attending a summit in Paris and having been replaced by John Major. And President Bush’s victory in the Gulf was not enough to insulate him against the Clintonian challenge in the summer and fall of 1992. The accession of Clinton was, in some superficial ways, the advent of the most Anglophile administration imaginable. The new President and a whole clutch of his inner circle—Strobe Talbot, Robert Reich, Ira Magaziner, George Stephanopoulos—had been Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. Yet, by a most odd and ironic chance, Bill Clinton had himself previously been a student at Georgetown of Professor Carroll Quigley, author of The Anglo-American Establishment. This book, which was not able to find a publisher in the good professor’s lifetime, is an exposé of a secret plan, formulated by Cecil Rhodes and his successors, for a covert Anglo-Saxon “New World Order.” It is still to be found by way of certain conspiracy-minded book clubs, and contains some absorbing information about the role played by the empire-minded Milner group or “Round Table,” and by successor cliques such as the pro-appeasement Cliveden set. One cannot know the precise effect of this teaching upon the impressionable young Clinton—who did cite Quigley as a formative teacher during his presidential campaign—but one can be certain that for other reasons the “special relationship” went into a decline during the Clinton-Major years.

Those in the United States who wished to prevent the obliteration of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Greater Serbia, this being the ostensible if vacillating policy of the Clinton administration, were met with consistent discouragement from the British Tories. In an especially cynical twist, the Major government denied the right of the Americans even to pronounce on the ongoing atrocity since there were no American “troops on the ground.” (The British ones, it seemed for most of the time, were there only to protect themselves or to guarantee Serbian gains.) The Republican Party in the United States, for its part, held fast to the idea, so tellingly phrased by one of its spokesmen, that America had “no dog in this fight.” This had also been the view of the Bush-Baker-Eagleburger administration.

In the result, the American military rescue of Sarajevo by a brief aerial bombardment was the outcome of another coalition, not so much of the “willing” as of the internationalist left-liberals and the neoconservatives. Barely recalled today but highly significant, this alliance was to be reconstituted for the war in Kosovo, which finally put an end not just to the “Greater Serbia” fantasy but to the regime of Slobodan Milosevic himself. My categories are not precise: Many left-liberal internationalists opposed the intervention and some neoconservative types (Henry Kissinger prominent among them) did so likewise. However, an agreement between elements of both such forces was for the first time thinkable. And by that point, Tony Blair had replaced John Major in Downing Street.

Comment on the Clinton-Blair relationship was at first confined to the production of an immensity of lazy prose concerning the so-called “Third Way” between traditional social democracy and globalized transnational corporate capitalism. As might have been predicted, this relationship turned out to be self-managing. What was not so predictable was the emergence of what one of Tony Blair’s later nemeses was to term “ethical foreign policy.” While Robin Cook was still his loyal Foreign Secretary, in April 1999, Blair made a speech at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in which he declared that coexistence with acquisitive and aggressive dictatorships was both unwise and immoral as well as ultimately impossible. It was Blair who urged a faltering Clinton into a full-scale engagement in Kosovo, and who resolved to send British forces on a rescue mission to defendthegovernment of Sierra Leone against a bloody tribalist aggression supported from neighboring Liberia. And all this while, half-hidden from view and memory, British and American aircraft were taking to the skies every morning and evening, and patrolling over northern and southern Iraq to enforce the “no-fly” zones. This ten-year joint enterprise for the protection of the Kurds and the Shi’ites, which had also involved French planes for the early part of its existence, was the unexpired portion of the first Gulf War and the unacknowledged portent of the war to come.

It is now a commonplace to say that the assault on American civil society of September 11, 2001 “changed everything.” It did not so much change as confirm the preexisting Anglo-American understanding; an understanding which had been somewhat indistinct since the advent of George Bush to the presidency. Bush was by nature a provincial isolationist and had campaigned as a foe of “nation-building” and other internationalist schemes. He was for lifting sanctions where possible and dubious of the role of American forces in the Balkans. No doubt most of Blair’s entourage would have preferred the election of Albert Gore. However, the engulfing flame of the twin towers in lower Manhattan, in which British citizens were the second-largest group of victims, was to rekindle (if the term may be allowed) a much more traditional version of the London-Washington axis. Many Americans were heard to say that they wished it had been Mr. Blair rather than Mr. Bush or even Mr. Giuliani who spoke for them that dreadful week: Moments of emotion and crisis even now seeming to require someone to whom the heritage of Shakespeare and Churchill was somehow in the genes.

Not only that, but there were British special forces, and British cruise-missile submarines, ready, able and willing to go to battle stations in and around Afghanistan. Indeed, and as in the case of former Yugoslavia if diametrically reversed, there were British advisors who counseled the immediate insertion of ground troops as against the American overreliance on high-altitude bombing. Moreover, there was residual British influence in both India and Pakistan, and expertise, too.

Neither was British influence in NATO or the European Union to be despised. The Tories, who had often spoken too glibly about a Britain that could “punch above its weight” (while using their own weight to prolong the reign of Slobodan Milosevic) could only envy this signal example of bravura statecraft. It sometimes seemed that, if Bush would not remove the Taliban from power, Blair was willing to try it on his own.

In his 1999 Chicago speech, Tony Blair had in fact mentioned Saddam Hussein as a once and future threat and as a man with whom a reckoning could not be indefinitely postponed. He can thus be acquitted on the vulgar charge that he only turned his own attention to Iraq when a faction of the Bush administration decided to carry the war into Saddam’s camp. He was also wont to stress the record of Ba’athist genocide and a...