Mark Curtis - Web Of Deceit: Britains Real Foreign Policy

Mark Higson was the Iraq Desk Officer at the British Foreign Office in 1989. In a setting the great satirist Dennis Potter might have conjured, Higson sat behind a little Iraqi flag and directly opposite the Iran Desk man, who sat behind the Ayatollah's flag. When I met him several years later, Higson described to me how ministers and officials systematically lied to parliament about illegal shipments of arms to Iraq. 'The draft letters I wrote for various ministers,' he said, 'were saying that nothing had changed, the embargo on the sale of British arms to Iraq was the same.'

'Was that true?' I asked.

'No, it wasn't true.'

'And your superiors knew it wasn't true?'

'Yes. If I was writing a draft reply to a letter from an MP for Mr Mellor or Mr Waldegrave (then Foreign Office ministers) I wrote the agreed line. But they knew things had changed. I also wrote replies to go to members of the public who were concerned about the gassing of the Kurds at Halabja by Saddam Hussein and wanted to know what the government was doing about it. A lot of MPs and members of the public thought the 340 million trade credits we gave to Iraq [following the Halabja atrocity] was absolutely disgusting.'

I said, 'You and your colleagues at the Foreign Office knew that British weapons were going illegally to Iraq. Is that correct?'

'Oh yes, yes. We were quite well aware that Jordan was being used [as the way into Iraq]... you see, Iraq was regarded as the big prize.'

'So how much truth did the public get?'

'The public got as much truth as we could squeeze out, given that we told downright lies.'1

At the 1994 public inquiry into the scandal of illegal arms sales to Iraq, Higson's honesty was commended by Lord Justice Scott, the chairman, a rare accolade. Britain's foreign policy establishment, Higson told the tribunal, 'is a culture of lying'.

Tim Laxton, an auditor assisting the Scott Inquiry and one of the few to hear almost all the evidence, believes that had Scott's terms of reference allowed him to conduct a truly open and wide-ranging investigation, 'hundreds' would have faced criminal investigation. 'They would include', he said, 'top political figures, very senior civil servants from the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Department of Trade and Industry ... the top echelon of the British government.'

The glimpse that Scott and Higson gave us of the ruthless and mendacious nature of great power was unprecedented. British imperialism has been second to none in projecting itself as benign, wise and essentially truthful, even a gift to humanity. With every generation, it seems, come new mythologists. That the opposite is true may shock some people. 'A truth's initial commotion', wrote the American sage Dresden James, 'is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed. It wasn't the world being round that agitated people, but that the world wasn't flat. When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.'

Mark Curtis' brilliant, exciting and deeply disturbing book unwraps the whole package, layer by layer, piece by piece. Not since Noam Chomsky's Deterring Democracy has there been such a disclosure, whose publication could not be more timely. In the aftermath of September nth, 2001, the truths told in the following pages will seem far from preposterous to a great many people, now made aware of the rapaciousness and cynicism of power politics by current events. They see clearly the exploitation of September nth by George W. Bush's gang and by Tony Blair and the unprovoked aggression against Iraq. At the time of writing these words, the claim of Blair and Bush of links between Iraq and Al Qaida, as justification for an attack on Iraq, is openly derided, having been contradicted by their own intelligence agencies. This was superceded by Blair's 'moral argument' for the attack, which is scorned by a significant section of the public, aware of the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the Anglo-American driven embargo of Iraq. Moreover, Blair's messianic promise to 'reorder the world' is increasingly referred to as imperialism: until recently, a word virtually struck from the dictionary and declared unspeakable by conservatives and liberals alike.