Although Britain clearly has much less power, its policies are often worse than those of the US. British policy towards Iraq is not an aberration: violating international law and the UN, supporting repressive regimes and promoting a neo-liberal economic order are all permanent features of British foreign policy.

My view is that the left needs to expose this more, to mobilise larger numbers of people to demand radical change. The chronology below highlights some of the key events in British foreign policy over the last 10 years. We have to ensure that what is done in our name over the next decade is nowhere near as horrific.

1994: Britain increases arms exports to Turkey just at a time when the latter is undertaking major operations against its Kurdish population, destroying 3,500 villages and killing thousands.

April 1994: A million Tutsis die in Rwanda. Instrumental in reducing the size of a UN peacekeeping force in the country, and in making sure the UN does not use the word “genocide’ to describe the atrocities (which would obligate international intervention in the country), Britain is effectively complicit in the slaughter.

1992-1995: British policy contributes to the destruction of Bosnia, and tens of thousands of deaths, by preventing both the lifting of an arms embargo against Bosnia and international military action in its defence.

1996: A British military training team is sent to Saudi Arabia to help Riyadh with “internal security’.

February 1996: An MI6-backed bomb attack on Colonel Gaddafi of Libya kills six innocent bystanders.

September 1996: Britain supports US cruise missile attacks against Iraq.

August 1998: Britain supports US attacks against al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan.

December 1998: Britain and the US launch an aerial bombing campaign in Iraq.

March 1999: Britain and Nato bomb Kosovo, thus precipitating a humanitarian catastrophe that the bombing was supposed to prevent.

August/September 1999: Five thousand are killed in East Timor and 500,000 flee Indonesian-backed terror in the run-up to an independence referendum. Britain continues arms sales to Jakarta before agreeing only to delay and not stop them. Downing Street tries to take credit for stopping the violence in East Timor by helping to establish a UN peace-enforcement mission there.

October 1999: Chinese premier Jiang Zemin visits Britain. The government refuses to raise Chinese human rights abuses with him, while police deny protesters the right to peaceful assembly.

1999: The UN estimates that more than half a million people have died from sanctions against Iraq maintained largely by Britain and the US.

January 2000: Chinese defence minister general Chi Haotian, who commanded the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, visits Britain to explore EU-prohibited “military cooperation’ between the two countries.

February 2000: As Russian forces flatten the Chechen capital Grozny, foreign secretary Robin Cook says he “understands’ Russia’s problems.

May 2000: A unilateral British intervention helps stabilise security in Sierra Leone. Britain had previously rejected proposals to beef up a UN force in the country.

July 2000: Briton Ian Henderson resigns after a career as head of repressive security services in Bahrain.

November 2000: The High Court rules against the government and decides that Chagos islanders be allowed to return to some of their Indian Ocean homelands. They were evicted by Britain between 1967 and 1973 to allow the US to build an air base on Diego Garcia, from which the islanders continue to be barred.

2001: British arms exports reach £5 billion.

February 2001: Major US and British bombing in Iraqi no-fly zones.

August 2001: Further increase in bombing Iraqi no-fly zones.

October 2001: US and British bombing of Afghanistan. Civilian deaths greater than those killed in the US on 11 September.

2001: British arms exports to Israel are twice those for the year before, reaching £22.5m as Israel steps up aggression in the occupied territories.

2002: Britain gives £3m military aid to Nepal, whose forces are responsible for the majority of deaths in a vicious civil war with Maoist rebels.

August 2002: The US and Britain secretly increase their bombing of Iraqi no-fly zones.

March 2003: The US and Britain invade Iraq.

May 2003: Indonesia intervenes in Aceh province, using British aircraft and tanks.

June 2003: Amid mounting violence, rigged elections in Chechnya are welcomed by Britain as Russia widens its war in the Caucasus to the neighbouring Russian republic Ingushetia.

June 2003: With human rights atrocities by government and allied forces proliferating in Colombia, Britain organises international donors to increase support to the government of Colombian president Alvaro Uribe Velez, and steps up covert military aid to Bogota.

2004: Occupation and corporate invasion of Iraq deepen, with increasing human rights violations committed by British and US forces.

A year ago Blair told Parliament that the US “should recognise the fundamental overriding importance of restarting the Middle East peace process, which we will hold [it] to’. The last phrase was the critical bit. But this required accepting not only that Blair could influence Bush but that Britain was at least even-handed in the conflict; some people even believed the UK was pro-Palestinian.

Yet before the invasion of Iraq, Britain was a strong defender of Israel. London has always blamed “both sides’ for violence as though both are equally guilty, ignoring the facts that one is illegally occupying the territory of the other and that Israel is responsible for far more deaths. Blair never condemns Israel, and he always toes the Israeli line that Palestinian suicide bombings need to cease before Israeli “reprisals’ can stop.

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), meanwhile, has identified Israel for preferential trade treatment. And arms exports to Jerusalem doubled from 2000 to 2001, reaching £22.5m as Israel stepped up aggression in the occupied territories. Supplies included small arms, grenade-making kits and components for equipment such as armoured fighting vehicles, tanks and combat aircraft. In 2002 Britain began to block some items destined for Israel, and was reportedly considering them on a case-by-case basis. But Whitehall still approved the export of spare parts for US aircraft used to target Palestinians.

Over the past year the occupied territories have descended into greater violence, while the much-fêted Middle East “road map’ has effectively died. Some 50 per cent of Palestinians are unemployed, two thirds live below the poverty line, while a quarter of Palestinian children endure acute or chronic malnutrition.

Yet British policy continues as before. Britain has recently supplied Israel with machine guns, rifles, ammunition and components for tanks and helicopters, leg irons, electric shock belts and tear gas. A DTI official recently said there was “no question of treating applications for Israel more harshly or rigorously than [other countries]‘.

When Israel bombed Syria in October last year, targeting an alleged “terrorist training camp’, the illegal action was condemned by France and Germany. The Foreign Office simply called on “all sides to exercise restraint’, and said that Israeli actions to “protect itself from terrorist attack& should be within international law’.

Although the government accepts that Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal and calls for a “viable’ Palestinian state, it has done nothing serious to pressurise Israel. Currently, Britain is refusing to accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in reviewing the legality of Israel’s “security barrier’, even though it says it opposes the latter.

And Britain is resisting calls for the EU’s special trade and aid agreement with Israel to be cut off. By contrast, it has been very active in persuading the EU to agree to ban the political wing of Hamas and to place the organisation’s leaders on a terrorist blacklist. The UK has also reportedly taken the lead in calling for strict European curbs on charities raising funds for Hamas.

What explains British policy? The answers might be found in formerly secret files I recently discovered. A Foreign Office report from 1970 entitled Future British Policy Toward the Arab/Israel Dispute rejected both an openly pro-Israel and a pro-Arab policy. The latter was rejected “because of the pressure the US government undoubtedly exerts on HMG to keep us in line in any public pronouncements or negotiations on the dispute’.

The paper also rejected a strategy of “active neutrality’ that would have meant being more pro-Arab than the US: that would damage Britain’s “worldwide relationship with the US’. The Foreign Office argued, instead, for a “low-risk policy’ that would involve putting “private pressure upon the US to bring about a settlement’.

I believe that Britain is publicly trying to position itself as being “neutral’ (in line with the 1970 report) but has, in fact, tilted itself strongly towards Israel. Why is this? Another declassified file can help explain.

In 1969 the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) noted that “rapid industrialisation’ was occurring in Israel “in fields where British industry can readily supply the necessary capital goods’. It said: “Israel is already a valuable trading partner with a considerable future potential in the industrial areas where we want to develop Britain as a major worldwide manufacturer and supplier.’ But in the Arab world, the JIC said, “recent developments appear to confirm that the prospects for profitable economic dealings& are at best static and could, over the long term, decline’.

It seems that the economic opportunities Israel offers, together with the desire to maintain the special relationship with Washington, is more important to Whitehall than a few million mere Palestinians. This shows how basic British foreign policy priorities are and how little human rights feature in those priorities.

Next month is the tenth anniversary of the genocide that killed a million people in Rwanda. There has been astounding silence on one aspect of the genocide: the culpability of British policy-makers.

A planned campaign of slaughter was launched by extremist Hutus in April 1994 to eliminate members of the Tutsi ethnic group and political opponents. Instead of beefing up its peace mission in Rwanda and giving it a stronger mandate to intervene, the UN Security Council decided to reduce the presence of UN troops from 2,500 to 270. This decision was a green light to the killers that indicated the UN would not intervene to stop them.

It was the British ambassador to the UN Sir David Hannay who proposed that the UN reduce its force; the US agreed. Both were concerned about a possible repetition of the events in Somalia seven months previously, when the UN peace mission had spiralled out of control. The Nigerian ambassador pointed out that tens of thousands of civilians were dying in Rwanda, and pleaded for UN reinforcements. But the US and Britain would not be swayed.

The Rwandan government was sitting on the security council at the time, as one of 10 non-permanent members. So, British and US policy was reported back to those directing the genocide.

General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the UN force in Rwanda, also pleaded for reinforcements. He later spoke of “inexcusable apathy by the sovereign states that made up the UN that [was] completely beyond comprehension and moral acceptability”. Dallaire said: “My force was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies.”

The following month, with perhaps hundreds of thousands already dead, there was another UN proposal: to dispatch 5,500 troops to help stop the massacres. Once again, US and British pressure meant this deployment was delayed and given no mandate to use force to end the massacres. Furthermore, Downing Street and Washington also argued that before these troops could be deployed, there needed to be a ceasefire – even though one side was massacring innocent civilians. The Czech Republic’s ambassador to the UN compared the demand to “wanting Hitler to reach a ceasefire with the Jews”. He later said that British and US diplomats told him not to use such inflammatory language outside the security council. Dallaire believes that if these troops had been speedily deployed, tens of thousands more lives could have been saved.

Britain also went out of its way to prevent the UN using the word “genocide” to describe the slaughter in Rwanda. Otherwise, states would have been obliged to “prevent and punish” those responsible under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. A year after the slaughter, the Foreign Office sent a letter to an international inquiry saying that it still did not accept the term genocide, describing discussion of the issue as “sterile”.

All this information is in the public domain and has been brilliantly pieced together by journalist Linda Melvern in her book A People Betrayed: the role of the West in Rwanda’s genocide. With Paul Williams of the University Birmingham, Melvern has just published the only academic analysis of Britain’s role in the slaughter in the journal African Affairs. The rest of the media and academia have been almost completely silent on the subject.

Parliament has never been too bothered, either. A House of Commons debate on the slaughter only took place two months after it had begun, and there have been no Parliamentary reports or even serious questions posed to the ministers involved (prime minister John Major, foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, defence secretary Malcolm Rifkind and overseas development minister Lynda Chalker).

Britain did more than turn a blind eye; Whitehall went out of its way to ensure the international community did not act sufficiently to prevent the genocide, and thousands more people died than would have done otherwise.

As with Hutton, Britain’s secretive and elitist political system continues to protect the policy-makers responsible. The public is not allowed even to have sufficient scrutiny over decision-making, let alone influence. Without fundamentally democratising policy-making, and discarding its totalitarian features, what future horrors lie in store?

First, let us briefly consider direct British involvement in acts of terrorism. One of the major terrorist acts of the 1980s was the Beirut car bombing in March 1985. The bomb was placed outside a mosque and timed to explode when worshippers left. The aim was to kill Hezbollah leader Mohammed Hussein Sheikh Fadlallah, who was accused of complicity in terrorism. Around 80 people were killed, and over 200 wounded. Fadlallah escaped. The bombing was organised by the CIA and Saudi agents with the assistance of Britain’s MI6.

Previously, Britain had set up pseudo-terrorist ‘counter gangs’ in Palestine in the 1940s and Aden in the 1960s. The gangs consisted of former terrorists and, in Aden, loyal tribesmen, and were led by British officers disguised as locals. They were sent out in twos and threes to target those suspected of terrorism against British targets. In Palestine the squads were given a free hand to kill Jewish terrorists seeking an end to British rule.

In the mid-1960s an MI6 officer noted that his organisation was helping local security services in the Middle East neutralise threats to their regimes. ‘Killer squads’ were also used in the colonial war in Malaya. In the 1980s a British private security firm conducted (with a probable nod and wink from Whitehall) sabotage operations in Nicaragua and took part in Oliver North’s gun-running operations.

Trying to assassinate foreign leaders is a British tradition. Various attempts were made to kill Egyptian president Nasser in the mid-1950s. In one attempt MI6 injected poison into chocolates. Nerve gas, an SAS hit squad and firing a poisoned dart from a cigarette packet were also considered. Evidence suggests that MI6 planned the assassinations of Albanian president Enver Hoxha in 1948, Cypriot guerrilla leader Colonel Grivas in the late 1950s, Indonesian president Sukarno in the 1950s and Ugandan president Milton Obote in 1969.

In 1998 archbishop Desmond Tutu revealed possible British involvement in the death of UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold in 1961. Hammarskjold’s plane exploded when it was about to land in Rhodesia; he was on his way to mediate a peace agreement between Congo and the breakaway province of Katanga. Documents described meetings between MI5, the CIA and a South African military front company, and plans to place TNT in the wheel bay of the aircraft.

In addition, former MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson revealed that MI6 put forward a paper entitled ‘the need to assassinate president Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia’ in 1992. Subsequently, Nato aircraft specifically targeted Milosevic for assassination during the war against Yugoslavia in 1999.

And in 1998 MI5 whistleblower David Shayler alleged British funding and support for an assassination attempt against Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi. A leaked MI6 cable later stated that “one officer and 20 men were being trained especially for this attack” in February 1996. The coup plotters had obtained 250 British pistols; their leader was Abdal Muhaymeen, a former member of the Afghan mujahideen who was possibly trained by MI6 or the CIA. Gaddafi survived the coup attempt, but six innocent bystanders did not.

Let us now consider two examples of terrorism committed by favoured British allies, and the importance of the London connection.

During its war against Kurds in the southeast of Turkey, the Turkish government destroyed 3,500 Kurdish villages, made 1.5 million people homeless and killed thousands more. During the peak period of the atrocities, between 1994 and 1996, John Major’s government actually increased arms exports to Turkey – delivering £68m worth in 1994 (the year Ankara began major offensive operations). Export credits for arms and military equipment reached £265m in 1995.

Atrocities decreased by the late 1990s as the scorched earth policy succeeded in terrorising the population and pacifying the region. However, abuses against Kurds continue. Hundreds of thousands of people forced out of their homes are unable to return; government-appointed “village guards” occupy much of their land. Several displaced villagers were recently shot dead for attempting to return to their homes. Human Rights Watch (HRW) says: “Most abandoned settlements remain no-go areas.”

Since 2002 there have been major improvements in human rights elsewhere in Turkey. The Turkish parliament has lifted many restrictions on the use of the Kurdish language in broadcasting and education. Yet numerous human rights abuses continue: Turkish law continues to heavily constrain free expression; former Kurdish parliamentarians remain in jail after unfair trials; police torture is systematic.

Meanwhile, British arms exports to Turkey were worth £179m in 2001, and Turkish military officers and police (the latter being responsible for many of the worst human rights abuses) receive training in Britain. London also aids Ankara by labelling the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) a “terrorist organisation”. While the PKK has certainly committed atrocities, the Turkish government has a much worse record. Britain also closed down the Kurdish TV station Med-TV in 1999.

The Labour government is also bending over backwards to support Turkey’s bid to join the EU. Former foreign secretary Robin Cook has said that “the question of rejection does not arise” – it being inconceivable that Britain would invoke human-rights atrocities to block Turkish entry. While its EU ambitions have forced Turkey to improve its human rights performance, London is more concerned with bringing a strategic ally into the Western orbit.

Another of Tony Blair’s greatest current allies is Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Blair-Putin relationship is one of the most extraordinary in recent British foreign policy, and is hailed by the Foreign Office as a great success. Ever since Moscow’s intervention in Chechnya in September 1999, Britain has been complicit in some of the worst horrors of our time.

Between November 1999 and February 2000 the Russians submitted the Chechnyan city of Grozny to a ferocious bombing campaign. Grozny was turned into a wasteland, and thousands of people died. The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane wrote: “Usually in war there are some rules. But in Chechnya no one is saying sorry or even pretending that they are not dropping 1,000-pound bombs on houses, hospitals and schools.” While Grozny was being flattened, British defence minister Geoff Hoon said: “Engaging Russia in a constructive bilateral defence relationship is a high priority for the government… We wish to continue to develop an effective defence relationship with Russia.”

A week before Blair met Putin in March 2000, The Observer revealed the slaughter of 363 Chechens by Russian forces in the village of Katyr Yurt. Vladimir took Tony to the opera, prompting HRW to state: “this is absolutely the wrong signal to be sending… at a time when war crimes are being committed with impunity by Russian forces in Chechnya.” HRW accused the Russians of “mass executions of civilians, arbitrary detention of Chechen males, systematic beatings, torture and, on occasion, rape”.

After 11 September Britain, Nato and the EU abandoned all pretence of concern at continuing Russian atrocities in Chechnya. In Moscow the following month Blair said: “I would like to pay tribute to the strength and leadership of president Putin at this time.” He added that Britain and Russia were “working through problems in the spirit of friends and true partners”. This was Blair’s eighth meeting with Putin in under two years – “a very good indication”, Blair noted, “of the strengthening relationships” between Blair and Putin and Russia and Britain.

Thus Blair proposed creating a “Russia-North Atlantic Council” to bring Moscow closer to Nato. No wonder that in December 2001, Putin could say of Russia’s attempts to deal with terrorism (meaning Chechnya) that “we felt and we saw and we knew that our voice was being heard – that the UK wanted to hear us and to understand us and that, indeed, we were being understood”.

Late last year, Blair said that in view of the “terrorism coming from extremists operating out of Chechnya… I have always taken the view that it is important that we understand the Russian perspective on this”. He added: “I have always been more understanding of the Russian position, perhaps, than many others.” This came a week after a further (futile) attempt by HRW to urge Blair to press Putin on human rights abuses. HRW states that the human rights situation in Chechnya remains “abysmal”, with violations increasing and torture endemic. It recently reported on the highest rate of “disappearances” since the war began, but the hundreds of disappearances documented represent “only a fraction of the actual number”.

Whitehall claims it lacks levers to press the Russians to stop the worst abuses. In fact, Britain gives Moscow £30m in aid a year, as well as military assistance and training. In addition, British exports to Russia are worth £300m; the trade in the other direction is worth £700m. The truth is that Britain is the fifth largest foreign investor in the country; the two nations signed a trade and investment agreement in 1997. So, rather than pressing Moscow, London has been stepping up contacts – especially with the Russian military.

Yet British promotion of state terrorism goes even deeper; it now applies to its own basic military policy. The military attacks involving British forces on Afghanistan and Yugoslavia were justified in terms of Britain’s political objectives overseas. In recent years Britain’s armed forces have changed their ostensibly defensive role for an overtly offensive one. The military now has a “new focus on expeditionary warfare”, the all-party House of Commons Defence Committee comments approvingly.

This change was the major accomplishment of the government’s “strategic defence review” (SDR), which was concluded in 1998 (long before 11 September). The SDR stated: “In the post-cold war world we must be prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us… Long-range air attack [is] an integral part of warfighting and a coercive instrument to support political objectives.” This “coercive instrument” is the modern version of imperial “gunboat diplomacy” – ie, the doctrine that Britain may threaten countries failing to do what “we” (or, more likely, the US) want. It is consistent with any reasonable definition of terrorism.

Britain is now using “the war against terrorism” to put its expeditionary aspirations into practice. The Foreign Office refers to “an effective doctrine of early warning and, where necessary, early intervention”. Foreign secretary Jack Straw has said: “Our aim must be to develop a clear strategy to head off threats to global order and to deal with the consequences within the evolving framework of international law.” (Britain will, in other words, conduct military interventions to preserve Western supremacy, while pressing for “evolution” in international law to make such intervention easier.)

The Defence Committee notes that Britain must “be free to rapidly deploy significant forces overseas”, and calls for “pre-emptive military action”. It says: “Operations in central Asia, East Africa, perhaps the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere will become necessary as part of an integrated political and military strategy to address terrorism.”

The new interventionism is backed by the most terrifying weapons. The Trident nuclear weapons system has a “sub-strategic” role intended for use on the battlefield as well as to deter all-out nuclear war. Like the Thatcher government, Blair’s administration says that “the credibility of deterrence… depends on retaining the option for a limited nuclear strike”. In March 2002 Geoff Hoon said: “I am absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons.”

Current policies are seriously frightening. There is a much simpler way of countering some terrorism at least, and that is by changing policy closer to home. If we were honest, this is where the “war against terrorism” would begin.

This is an adapted extract from Mark Curtis’s new book, Web of Deceit: Britain’s real role in the world, (Vintage, £7.99).