Jacobin Magazine: Why They Invaded

I became ambassador to Uzbekistan shortly after the invasion of neighboring Afghanistan. The British government had a policy of collaboration with the Uzbek dictatorship, which provided an airbase for the Americans to operate into Afghanistan.

However, I discovered that this policy of collaboration not only included downplaying the terrible human rights abuses of that dictatorship, but also intelligence collaboration, by which I mean that our government was knowingly getting intelligence from the Uzbek torture chambers, very often from the torture of dissidents who had no connection with terrorism whatsoever. [...]

For example, when I was on the Foreign Office South Africa desk during apartheid, everyone knew that Thatcher was very supportive of the existing regime. The official government line at that time was that Mandela was a terrorist and he should be in prison.

There would have absolutely no point in me drafting minutes saying “he is a good man and we should be campaigning to get him out,” because they wouldn’t get anywhere.

So I drafted minutes explaining that it was in the British “business interest” to secure his release, arguing that it would be best not to annoy the black community in South Africa, because one day they might be in power and we would have to deal with them to make money. That’s the only kind of argument that would get anywhere with the government. [...]

That was part of our attempt to push back against Mi6 and the government. There was a lot of that kind of resistance. And around 120 former ambassadors also signed a letter opposing the Iraq War, which was also the view of the serving ambassadors.

But one of the fascinating things about all of this was the unwillingness of people to push things to the point of losing their job. [...]

Motivation is something we all wondered about at the time. It seemed to me to be primarily a matter of Tony Blair’s huge desire for Britain to be seen as a great power and important in the world, and the way to do that was to be indispensably connected to the United States. I don’t think it was much more detailed than that.

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