THE GUARDIAN: The story of possible corruption between BAE and the Saudi government, and how the British government ignored it, is shocking. But we should not regard this episode as an aberration. Instead, it should force us to question the way foreign policy is thought about and practised in government today.
For decades British policy towards Saudi Arabia has been dominated by al-Yamamah, the massive BAE deal to provide aircraft and supplies. When I worked on the Middle East at the Foreign Office in the mid-90s, it was widely assumed that, along with uninterrupted oil supplies, this was what Britain's Saudi policy was "about". Any other concern, whether of human rights or the export of radical Wahhabi Islam, was by and large secondary.
This assumption was never questioned by officials or ministers. It was just the way things were. To think otherwise, that British policy - "our" policy as we called it (though it was never democratically debated, of course) - should be about human rights or Saudi Arabia's contribution to global security, would have been dismissed as naive or fanciful. We were just being realistic. To the blog - We could pay a grave price for our addiction to arms deals: Working at the Foreign Office I saw how exports took precedence over human rights. With the Saudis, this could backfire
* Carne Ross, a former diplomat, runs Independent Diplomat, a non-profit advisory group. He is the author of Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite Independentdiplomat.org
Mark Alexander
