ANOTHER VOICE
It can't be very long before they come to their senses
AUBERON WAUGH
Ihave seen very little publicity indeed given to the fact of Britain's participation in the blockade of Haiti. How many readers were aware that the British frigate HMS Active has been part of the New World Order fleet trying to starve Haitians to death for the past week? Where were the tearful crowds lining the docks at Portsmouth and waving their little Union Jacks as she set sail? I think I read as many newspapers as most people, but I was not aware that Britain supported Bill and Hillary Clinton's efforts to reinstate the fanatical Marxist and mass murderer 'Father' Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 'Doctor' Duvalier's sticky seat in Port-au-Prince. I thought that Mr Hurd had sensibly decided it was none of our business, and the Clin- tons could be left to work off their own enthusiasms in their own way.
Our loyal corps of diplomatic correspon- dents has not had time to start telling us that General Raoul Cedras, the present incumbent, eats babies for breakfast, and that Mrs Cedras is a lesbian sadist and child-torturer. The only treatment I have seen was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's inter- view in this week's Sunday Telegraph. It was Evans-Pritchard, in fact, who drew atten- tion to the British presence in the Clinton fleet, a point he mentioned in passing. Per- haps he was unaware how little we knew about it. I do not know how much it costs to keep a frigate at sea on a war footing in the Caribbean, but I would be most sur- prised if it cost less than half a million pounds a day, probably something more like a million. Are we sure this is money well spent? From Evans-Pritchard's account, I would guess that General Cedras is a better bet than 'Father' Aristide, although if one allows for the somewhat farauche nature of Haitian politics, one might prefer to support neither side, unless one absolutely had to do so.
Haiti has nothing to do with us. We are there solely in response to the politically correct power urges of the dreaded Clinton couple. It makes one wonder whether British forces may not have been secretly committed to help out the Clintons in Mogadishu. The pattern of the future, since the unpleasant and rather shameful episode in the Gulf, would appear to be that Britain's gigantic defence budget is now to be seen as a minor public-relations prop to the Clinton New World Order. The Falklands provided our last real-life adven-
ture — although murderously expensive and a damned close run thing. If the Argentine planes had had a slightly greater range, we would have been humiliated as never since the fall of Singapore. But if the real lesson of the Falklands war was 'never again', the lesson of the Gulf war must have been to rub our noses in it.
At the time of the Gulf war I gloomily suggested that our next military adventure would be to impose a blockade on Christ- mas Island in order to require the islanders to print Government Health Warnings on their cigarette advertisements. That was said facetiously, of course, although I would not be at all surprised to see what is left of our armed forces drawn more' and more into whatever is left of the American war on drugs. That would be more serious. If we have no discernible interest, one way or the other, in spending half a million pounds a day on reinstating (or more likely failing to reinstate) a Marxist fanatic in Haiti, it is unquestionably against our inter- ests to support the American war on drugs which, by keeping drug prices high, puts enormous wealth and power into the hands of criminals, as well as criminalising the greater part of the underclass.
Under present circumstances, it seems to me that traditional loyalties to a heavy defence expenditure are misplaced. Apart from riot control at home, which does not require very expensive equipment, we need only a small, highly mobile, moderately well-equipped defence force for rescue and punitive forays into the Third World, with a semi-credible nuclear strike capacity in reserve. We cannot afford to act as the Clintons' runner for imposing grandiose American ideas of propriety on the interna- tional community, nor do we have anything to gain from such a role.
Reading about last week's fires in Cali- fornia which destroyed 137,000 acres of land and required whole towns of 23,000 people to leave their homes, I could not help wondering how many thousand acres of ancestral English land would have to be sold, and how many English families would have to leave their homes, to pay for it all through the London insurance market. Long before news of the Lloyd's catastro- phe broke, I was urging that nobody with
any sense should do any business with the United States unless he had no choice in the matter. This was partly because Ameri- can civil courts operate on the same princi- ple as the English ones, that the plaintiff nearly always wins, partly because Ameri- cans are by nature more litigious, and legal expenses form an enormous, often over- looked overhead in any commercial arrangement, but chiefly because American juries (and, for all I know, judges too) also operate a peculiar system whereby no for- eigner ever wins in any civil suit, whether as plaintiff or as defendant.
The question arises, after the disintegra- tion of the Soviet Union, of what advantage there is to us in maintaining this unequal partnership with the United States. It is impossible to ignore the world's biggest economy, and impossible to imagine, given the gigantic forces of wealth production inside it, that the seeds of disintegration which are evident will destroy it in fewer than 20 years.
My own guess is that the forces of com- mon sense will have reasserted themselves long before then. The tyranny of the lawyers is easily legislated out of existence and most of the absurdities on the Ameri- can scene — the extremes of feminism and political correctness being permitted to half-witted academics and their running dogs in the media — are the products of white, male, middle-class cowardice. Per- haps nothing will now change the white, male, middle-class American's terror of his womenfolk, but terror of the black and His- panic underclass, as the ever-present threat to his tranquillity and prosperity, may soon be lifted.
Washington has not only lost the war against hard drugs, as it was bound to do, but seems prepared to acknowledge the defeat. While it still spends $13.4 billion a year on its narcotics policy, it has seen the price of pure cocaine reduce from $45,000 a kilo in 1984 to $11,000 now. The govern- ment is now cutting back on operations in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. There is no reason why, in a free market, it should not sell for $250 a kilo. An awareness is dawn- ing that traditional Puritan values will ulti- mately be best served by decriminalising hard drugs and letting those tempted to kill themselves do it cheaply. Then the United States can rejoin the Commonwealth of Civilised Nations and leave Haiti to sort out its own problems like everyone else.
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