Sir Richard Hull sucked his teeth for a moment.
“Fellows on my staff served in that part of the World during the Second War and just afterwards, Prime Minister. If anything goes wrong there is nowhere to anchor a secure defensive line between Kirkuk in the north and Basra in the South.”
The Foreign Secretary coughed.
“Iraq is not a cohesive entity in the sense that we in Europe would understand a nation state, Margaret,” he observed. “There are the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the middle surrounding Shia Baghdad, and the Shias in the south. Each religious and ethnic group detests and mistrusts all the others and these divisions run through the Iraqi Army like the cracks in a broken pane of glass, ready to shatter without warning. If the Soviets wanted to hold the north it would be hard, but not impossible to winkle them out, assuming we weren’t bothered about the blood and treasure we’d expend in outrageously copious quantities in the process. If the Soviets drive south they must reach the Persian Gulf, or sooner or later they will be embroiled in, and probably destroyed by the internecine civil war they will have unwittingly brokered by destroying the illusion of Iraqi statehood.”
“That’s assuming the Iranians don’t get their act together first,” the Chief of the Defence Staff added. “The Soviets are sitting pretty at the moment because all the best Iranian armour is deployed in the south threatening Basra and surrounding Abadan.”
Tom Harding-Grayson shook his head.
“On the wrong side of the Shat-al-Arab,” he bemoaned.
“And probably not under the command of somebody who actually knows how to use it!” Sir Richard Hull complained.
Margaret Thatcher wearied of this digression.
“Will the Red Army drive to the south like your man says, Airey?” She demanded, turning to her old friend.
“Ah, my man,” her friend sighed.
Airey Neave honestly and truly did not know what to make of the man who claimed to be, and seemed to be the former deputy of the former Rumanian leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, Nicolae Ceaușescu. If the man was who he claimed to be he was a potential intelligence gold mine.
“He’s adamant,” her Minister for National Security assured her. “But then he admits he didn’t know about the attack on Malta until the ship he was onboard started bombarding Valletta!” He paused, glanced to the Foreign Secretary. “Tom’s offered to have a chat with Ceaușescu this afternoon, Margaret,” he went on. “The fellow is due to be flying into Brize Norton about now. As you know, I’ve got my doubts about the fellow despite what Dick White’s lady friend says. I’ll feel a lot happier when Tom’s given this Ceaușescu and Miss Piotrowska his seal of approval.”
Margaret Thatcher moved onto the next item on her agenda.
“What’s actually going on in Philadelphia, Tom?”
“Contrary to what we were given to understand on Friday,” he began, running a hand through his thinning hair, “Congress did not vote to immediately suspend all overseas military assistance and co-operation. That vote will actually happen later today. Regrettably, it looks like the motion will pass both Houses of Representatives. A lot of ‘representatives’ seem to think the whole thing in Iran is just a ‘limey plot’ to draw them into ‘another foreign war’. Likewise, there is no foreseeable prospect of the Senate ratifying the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. This is important because it was the legal basis of the Kennedy Administration’s policy, vis-à-vis military, economic and diplomatic co-operation with us; and in less than a week’s time the period of grace of ninety days after the signing and formal exchange of initialled copies of the treaty, expires. After that date no American officer or official can operate under its terms without committing a criminally indictable offence within the jurisdiction of the United States Government.”
President Kennedy had flown to England last week not to forestall this disaster but to dress it up as something it was not, and to publicly distance himself and his Administration from the latest colonial adventurism of perfidious Albion. Although the exercise had been frustrated by a new catastrophe, there had been indications that the Kennedy Administration had been back-sliding on the commitments made in January for several weeks. The Battle of Malta and the timely intervention of the US Sixth Fleet had created an impenetrable smokescreen of mutually congratulatory rhetoric which had shrouded the real picture for a few more days. It was now clear that the Administration, in league with the House of Representatives was opportunistically using the UAUK’s retaliatory and essentially defensive sanctions against the Irish Republic as a convenient excuse to ditch the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty, and thus appease the deafening clamour of the America First movement. It now seemed as if this had probably been the Kennedy Administration’s plan from the outset; if there had been no atrocities at Brize Norton or Cheltenham the President would have had to have manufactured another provocation to justify storming out of the ‘Anglo-American Summit’. In the event the IRA had made it easy for him; he had hunkered down overnight and flown home the morning after he arrived in Britain. There had been no window for a meeting of minds; Margaret Thatcher had not been released from hospital until two hours after the President’s aircraft had taken off bound for Philadelphia. By the time SAM 26000 touched down in New York the UAUK’s ‘Irish Sanctions’ were already headline news on the East Coast.
Margaret Thatcher had always known that placing her trust in Jack Kennedy was a huge risk, literally a leap in the dark. Back in January the gamble had been worth the candle, if for no better reason than that anything was better than the outbreak of a shooting war with the United States. Nevertheless, having hoped for the best and prepared for the worst, it did not mean that she was anything but appalled by the downward trend of recent Anglo-American relations. She did not so much feel as if she had been let down; as if she had been betrayed.
Margaret Thatcher understood that Jack Kennedy was confronting apparently insuperable problems at home. In retrospect the failed assassination attempt on the life of Dr Martin Luther King in February — an event which had gone practically unremarked outside the United States — had lit the fuse on renewed widespread and bloody civil unrest across the South. At the same time the President’s reversal of the ‘peace dividend’ defence cuts having reinvigorated the American military, had enraged and alienated powerful vested interest lobbies which had been counting on spending the proceeds of that ‘dividend’ to feather their own nests. And all the while a great American city, Chicago, was cut in half by the battle lines of what was with the coming of spring likely to be a war zone. All in all, Jack Kennedy’s decision to run again for the Presidency had only served to unite his enemies. Worse, at the same time the Southern Civil Rights Movement was planning to ‘March on Philadelphia’ the first court hearings of the cases against the leading figures of December’s failed coup d’état — the so-called Battle of Washington — were shortly scheduled to commence. It was hardly surprising that the Kennedy Administration was so fixated with crises at home that it was turning a Nelsonian blind eye to the terrifying developments in the Middle East.
“I will be speaking to Secretary of State Fulbright this evening,” Tom Harding-Grayson announced. “Always assuming he actually takes my call this time!”
Margaret Thatcher blanched at this.
One school of thought maintained that J. William Fulbright was the one remaining voice of reason in the Philadelphia White House. The Secretary of State’s avowedly internationalist stance was, the Administration’s apologists claimed, the last bulwark against a return to isolationism.