Page 55 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

50 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

British protection - Dubai, Abu Dhabi. Bahrain and Qatar - would be per­
fectly willing, Rashid said, to meet, in proportion to their respective means,
the annual cost of retaining the British forces in the Gulf.
Roberts’s report on his travels was conveyed to the Cabinet on 12 January.
By this time George Brown had returned from the United States where, he
informed his colleagues, the news of the British decision had been received (so
Crossman noted sardonically) with ‘horror and consternation’. It was not so
much the effect that the withdrawal might have in the Far East, where
American power was so much greater than that of Britain, that made the
Americans apprehensive, as the possible repercussions in the Gulf. Although
Brown had told the Americans that to remain in the Gulf after withdrawing
from Singapore and Malaysia would involve Britain in ‘colossal expense’,
nevertheless he strongly advised the Cabinet to put back the withdrawal from
the Gulf by at least a year. That same week Lee Kuan Yew, the prime minister
of Singapore, alarmed by the news George Thomson had brought, flew to
London to urge the Cabinet to reconsider the whole decision. On 15 January
some members of the Cabinet made an effort to have the decision reversed, but
all they achieved was a concession, tossed out by the prime minister, to extend
the terminal date for the withdrawal to December 1971. The next day Wilson
broke the news of his government’s intention to Parliament.
The trivial considerations and shabby horse-trading that went into the
making of the decision, so far-reaching in its foreseeable consequences, to
withdraw from east of Suez are still a cause for wonder, even in an age which
has afforded so many examples of wretched incapacity on the part of British
governments. It was given out at the time that financial necessity, occasioned
by the flight from sterling and the widening balance-of-payments deficit, was
the overriding reason for the decision. But the financial crisis that arose in the
final months of 1967 had been brought on in no small measure by the partial
reduction in oil supplies from the Gulf during the Arab—Israeli war in June.
Instead of heeding the warning, the Wilson government, with that peculiar
logic it was so often to display in its conduct of domestic and foreign affairs,
now proposed to make it easier for oil supplies to be cut off in the future at the
whim of Arab governments by relinquishing whatever control Britain might
have exerted over them through her presence in the Gulf. Moreover, whatever
dubious merits the argument for withdrawal on the grounds of financial
stringency might possess, they were nullified by the offers made by the shaikhs
of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Yet the Labour government not only brushed these
offers aside but it also managed to be boorish in the manner of its refusal.
Asked in a television interview in late January why the offers had not been
taken up, Denis Healey retorted that he was not ‘a sort of white slaver for Arab
shaikhs’. ‘It would be a very great mistake’, he went on, ‘if we allowed
ourselves to become mercenaries for people who like to have British troops
around.’ Strangely enough a like sensitivity was not evinced in the case of