now believed, had been seized on by the left to furnish ‘a marvellous excuse for worldwide supra-national socialism’. The environmental movement was just the latest manifestation of fashionable anti-capitalism, containing ‘an ugly streak of anti-Americanism’.43 This U-turn, made for frankly political reasons, marks a sad retreat from her brave pioneering in the late 1980s, when she had in her own way been a good friend of the earth.
Arms and the Gulf
Meanwhile, in her last months in office, the scandal of the covert arming of Iraq began to break. When the Iran – Iraq war finally ended in stalemate in July 1988, Alan Clark (then still in the DTI) and the latest Minister for Defence Procurement in the MoD, Lord Trefgarne, immediately began lobbying the Foreign Office to lift the 1985 guidelines restricting arms sales to both combatants. Geoffrey Howe was sympathetic and in August minuted Mrs Thatcher, spelling out the commercial benefits of ‘a phased approach to borderline cases’. Charles Powell replied that she was ‘in general content with the strategy’, but it would need careful watching: ‘The PM will wish to be kept very closely in touch at every stage and consulted on all relevant decisions.’44 One of the questions that Lord Justice Scott’s subsequent inquiry had to answer was whether this instruction was obeyed. Having studied the exchanges between Clark, Trefgarne and the new Foreign Office minister William Waldegrave, Scott concluded that after December 1988 the relevant correspondence was not copied to the Prime Minister; she was therefore unaware of the subtle semantic revision which allowed the three ministers henceforth to interpret the guidelines more generously.45 In truth, however, whether or not she knew of the new wording, she cannot have failed to notice that exports to Iraq increased rapidly as soon as the war ended. In October she specifically approved new export credits worth ?340 million.46
The following month Saddam Hussein turned his violence against his own population and started murdering and gassing the Iraqi Kurds.Yet the flow of British machine tools to his munitions factories continued unabated. The only effect on British policy was to make those in the know more anxious to keep it secret: ministers, including Mrs Thatcher, continued to hide behind Howe’s 1985 guidelines, insisting to Parliament that nothing had changed. On the ground the British sales effort could scarcely have been more blatant. In April 1989 no fewer than seventeen major British companies attended the Baghdad arms fair. At last some alarm bells began to ring in Downing Street. In May Mrs Thatcher was sufficiently disturbed by the intelligence she was receiving to set up a Cabinet Office working group on Iraqi procurement (WGIP). But what was it that had disturbed her? According to Scott – based on the evidence she gave to his inquiry in December 1993 – she ‘had become concerned about the extent of the Iraqi network for the procurement of materials and equipment for proliferation purposes, as well as of conventional defence-related goods and equipment, from the UK’.47 In other words she only became concerned when she thought the Iraqis were obtaining nuclear materials, not just conventional equipment, which she had been happy to supply for years.[p]
Within the Ministry of Defence at least one officer was becoming alarmed at ‘the scale on which the Iraqis are building up an arms manufacturing capability’. In June Lt-Col. Richard Glazebrook circulated a paper drawing attention to ‘the way in which UK Ltd is helping Iraq often unwittingly to set up a major indigenous arms industry’.49 He managed to block the export of an infra-red surveillance system but still the build-up went on: he failed to stop a consignment of helicopter spares and a Marconi communications system which would enhance the Iraqi forces’ effectiveness in the field. In July his Secretary of State, George Younger, put up to the Cabinet’s OD committee a proposal to grant export licences for a ?3 billion sale by BAe of ‘the “know-how”, equipment and components necessary to enable Iraq to assemble 63 Hawk aircraft’. This, according to Scott, was the first admission to senior ministers, including Mrs Thatcher, that the interpretation of the 1985 guidelines had been changed.50 In their evidence Clark, Trefgarne and Waldegrave argued that the order fell within the revised guidelines, since the Hawk, though capable of being adapted for chemical weapons, was not strictly designed to be lethal. Sharp as ever, Mrs Thatcher wrote in the margin ‘Doubtful’; but she failed to pick up the crucial word ‘revised’.51
A note by the deputy Cabinet Secretary, Leonard Appleyard, set out the humanitarian case against this latest sale and warned of a hostile press if it was approved. Mrs Thatcher underlined several passages, indicating that she shared these concerns. Charles Powell had initially favoured the sale, since ‘the pot of gold is enticingly large’; and Percy Cradock agreed. But after reading Appleyard’s note Powell changed his mind. ‘Iraq is run by a despicable and violent government which has gloried in the use of CW [chemical weapons] and a substantial defence sale to them would be seen as highly cynical and opportunistic.’ Mrs Thatcher told the Scott Inquiry that she agreed – on moral grounds:
‘Even though this is a big order,’ she said, ‘you cannot let [that] influence your judgement against your deep instinct and knowledge that it would be wrong to sell this kind of aircraft, that could be used for ground attack, to a regime that had in fact used chemical weapons on the Kurds.’52
On this occasion the committee refused an export licence. Yet even now – despite her fine words – the Prime Minister was no more willing than her junior colleagues to stop supplying Iraq with the ability to build sophisticated weapons. Right up to the end of July she was seeking to ease rather than tighten restrictions. A meeting chaired by Douglas Hurd on 26 July confirmed the embargo on ‘lethal’ material but recommended relaxing controls on the export of lathes for the manufacture of weapons – and Powell minuted that ‘the Prime Minister found the Foreign Secretary’s presentation convincing’.53 In the event the new policy was never implemented: it was wrecked by Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait a few days later and hastily buried. But by approving it Mrs Thatcher retrospectively endorsed the earlier shift of practice on which the whole Scott Inquiry centred. The fact is that right up to the last moment she had been eager to arm Britain’s new enemy.
‘No time to go wobbly’
Mrs Thatcher had just arrived in the United States on Thursday 2 August 1990 to attend the fortieth anniversary conference of the Aspen Institute in Colorado when the news came in that Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. She immediately took a clear view that the Iraqi action – like Argentina’s in 1982 – must be reversed, by force if necessary. Little as she liked telephone diplomacy, she lost no time in making a series of calls: to European heads of government, starting with Francois Mitterrand, whose prompt support over the Falklands she had never forgotten; to Commonwealth leaders; friendly Arab leaders; and the current members of the Security Council. Most promised support for some form of collective action. The exception, to her disappointment, was King Hussein of Jordan who – as she later told President Bush – was ‘not helpful. He told me the Kuwaitis had it coming.’54
Bush had, of course, been making many of the same calls himself, so by the time he joined Mrs Thatcher in Aspen the next morning they had already assembled the nucleus of an international coalition against Iraq. They talked for two hours, discussing economic sanctions but not at this stage military options, then went outside to speak to the press. ‘Prime Minister Thatcher and I are looking at it on exactly the same wavelength,’ Bush told them. But Mrs Thatcher sounded much the more forceful of the two. While Bush hoped for a peaceful settlement and called for the Iraqis to withdraw in accordance with UN Resolution 660 (carried 14 – 0 by the Security Council overnight), it was she – as he later recognised – who ‘put her finger on the most important point by insisting that Iraq’s aggression was a test of the international community’s willingness to give the Resolution teeth’: ‘What has happened,’ she added, ‘is a total violation of international law. You cannot have a situation where one country marches in and takes over another country which is a member of the United Nations.’55
But, of course, it was not quite as altruistic as that.Though neither leader acknowledged it, their real concern was that – having annexed the Kuwaiti oilfields – Saddam might, if not prevented, go on to seize the even more important Saudi reserves. ‘They won’t stop here,’ Mrs Thatcher told Bush. ‘Losing Saudi oil is a blow we couldn’t take. We cannot give in to dictators.’56
