INT RELS: Our friends in the West
So what did we get out of the war?
With our American ally planning to put two of our fellow countrymen in front of a kangaroo court in occupied Cuba, it may be instructive to see where the obsessive following of every twist and turn of US policy has led Britain. Nowhere. That didn't take long, but even the most hopeful Anglospherists surely didn’t expect anything better?
The morality of the case is fairly clear. These men enlisted in a foreign army, or something damn close — they certainly weren’t press-ganged into being foreign terrorists, committing crimes abroad. So one would have thought it’s time for a spot of stiff-upper-lipness: not much cause for mewling appeals to infidel “human rights” here? Neither of course should their families (who are either remarkably liberal for Muslim families, or they are simply fibbing about not knowing what their children are up to) blubber. As the late Sir John Stokes put it, it wasn’t desperately British when all those ‘human shield’ relatives whined nightly on television in the run-up to the first Gulf war, and it’s no more impressive in this case. More to the point, the fundamental issue at stake here as regards application of the British national interest is this: in the way in which they left British shores, these private individuals intentionally put themselves beyond British protection. Her Majesty's Government therefore doesn't owe these Don Pacificos a thing.
However there is also something inescapably symbolic in all of this. When an American national was picked up in Afghanistan, he was carefully taken out of American-occupied Cuba, so that he could be tried in an American civilian court. With defence lawyers, proper rules of evidence, judges who didn't have to answer to superior officers — stuff like that. Some people would claim that application of those values was exactly the sort of reason why we went to war with Saddam’s lawless regime, but fortunately I am above such romantic tosh. Now obviously one can understand drumroll courts for Saudis or Frenchmen, but do they have to do this with us? They could treat our people like they treat themselves, by either sending them home to be dealt with by our system, or by putting them in an American civilian court. Yet when it comes to it: Britons are treated just the same as those coves hailing from countries so foolish that they don’t slavishly follow American foreign policy. Go figure.
The whole point about getting into these stupid adventures in Mussulman lands was not that it was in our narrowly defined national interest, it plainly was not, but that either (1) America was so culturally close to us (their chums in the “Anglosphere", a geopolitical concept unique in being acknowledged by neither the putative supplicants, nor the hoped for hegemon) that we should always help each other out, or, (2) that the world's only superpower would gratefully remember Britain in the future. Hence, in other words, whenever an opportunity presented itself, there would be some tangible deliverable to us from our Great Ally. Now we find our citizens treated like the rest of the world's rabble. On a practical basis I don't really mind, keeping a few potential terrorists out of these Isles is no loss, but it is horribly telling.
When the chips are down America forgets us. It happened on steel tariffs and it's still happening on the continued existence of, for example, NORAID. If the Americans won't give us special treatment on the small things then they sure as hell won't go out of their way with anything that actually matters. Worse of all, from their own point of view, they are both right and realistic to behave towards Britain in this manner. After all, they've done this sort of thing to us countless times in the past, and still each time we've come back for more. We deserve what we’re getting.
This one sided special relationship needs to be ditched, if only so that we can start rebuilding our self-respect.
Emmanuel Goldstein counter-reacts against British clientelage at Airstrip One
Emmanuel Goldstein, July 7, 2003 12:08 AM