Thatcher the pro-apartheid warmonger

The controversial former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was influential in a set of major political upheavals at the time of her premiership in the 1980’s, which openly contradict the image of a reformist neoliberal political leader the current British government is trumpeting.

Thatcher was one of the main supporters of toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam during the Iraqi-imposed war on Iran in the 1980’s.

Despite her government being officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq war, and having voted for a UN Security Council resolution calling on all countries not to further escalate the conflict, she was hungry for selling arms to Saddam’s government.

Secret files made public in December 2011 unveiled an exhaustive list of equipment from Hawk fighter jets to military air and naval bases that London was attempting to sell the Iraqi regime as early as 1981 under the pretext that they were “non-lethal”.

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait almost certainly never would have happened without American and British support for Iraq during the 1980’s.

The 1990 invasion would have not led to the Persian Gulf War against Iraq, either, if Thatcher had not persuaded the then US president George Bush to intervene militarily in their August 2, 1990 meeting in Aspen, Colorado.

Before the meeting Bush had told reporters: “We’re not contemplating intervention” while he came out of the meeting telling reporters that he was considering “the next steps needed to end the invasion”, by which he meant the first Persian Gulf War that started two months after Thatcher left office.

Later in 2002, she directly influenced former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s decision to go to the war in Iraq by her July 17, article in the Wall Street Journal, titled “Don’t Go Wobbly”, in which she said: “It is clear to anyone willing to face reality that the only reason Saddam took the risk of refusing to submit his activities to U.N. inspectors was that he is exerting every muscle to build WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)”.

Blair and George W. Bush used the very pretext of weapons of mass destruction to invade Iraq though such weapons were never found.

Thatcher also had an appetite for supporting blood-thirsty dictators such as Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Indonesia’s General Suharto along with Iraq’s Saddam.

Thatcher called Suharto as “one of our very best and most valuable friends”.

She also worked closely with Pinochet during the Falkland War of the 1982 and praised him for “bringing democracy to Chile” during a visit with him in March 1999 while the former Chilean dictator was under house arrest.

The so-called “Iron Lady” was no less lethal to Britain’s own people in political terms especially in Northern Ireland.

Her government oversaw the hunger strikes of 1981 in Northern Ireland by anti-British republicans, in which as Sinn Fein current President Gerry Adams said, she tried in vain to “to criminalize the republican struggle and the political prisoners”.

“Margaret Thatcher will be especially remembered for her shameful role during the epic hunger strikes of 1980 and 81. Her Irish policy failed miserably,” Adams said.

Adams also pointed to two other darkest aspects of her foreign policy that is her support for the Khmer Rouge, who are accused of killing an estimated 1.7 million people during their rule over Cambodia, and her staunch backing for the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa.

Her position on the South African revolution leader Nelson Mandela serves as a round-up on her political views.

In 1987 she described the African National Congress as “a typical terrorist Organisation” saying it would never be able to run South. She also condemned Nelson Mandela, the then imprisoned ANC leader, as a terrorist.