11 April 1999<\/p>\n
WHY BLAIR’S ‘HUMANITARIAN’ WAR IS EVEN WORSE<\/p>\n
Mick Hume, LM editor<\/p>\n
For the first time, a Labour prime minister leads Britain into a major\u00a0international war. What’s more, Tony Blair is being cheered on loudest\u00a0by the ‘peacenik’ Guardian and ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, while Tory MPs and\u00a0the Daily Mail worry about the war. If anybody still doubts that the era of\u00a0traditional right v left politics has ended, let them inspect the evidence\u00a0in the craters Bomber Blair and his NATO allies have left behind in\u00a0Serbia.<\/p>\n
Some on the old left see this as a case of New Labour taking over the\u00a0mantle of Thatcher-style militarism. But it is worse than that. The grim\u00a0truth is that those who now wage war in the name of humanitarianism are\u00a0even more dangerous than the old war parties.<\/p>\n
Blair himself has made clear that the war against Milosevic’s Serbia\u00a0‘is no longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between Good and Evil;\u00a0between civilisation and barbarity’.<\/p>\n
In such a fundamental battle, the righteous do not feel themselves\u00a0constrained in the way one might do during a mere ‘military conflict’.<\/p>\n
Traditional right-wing militarists might have tailored their battle\u00a0strategy to take account of the needs of realpolitik and diplomacy;\u00a0after all, their wars were only supposed to uphold their national interests.<\/p>\n
Blair’s war, on the other hand, is a grand mission to save humanity. And\u00a0when you are running such a high-minded crusade, you need recognise no\u00a0restraints on the ground. Those who proclaim that they have right on\u00a0their side can do no wrong.<\/p>\n
That is why, as they drop their cluster bombs and fire their Cruise\u00a0missiles from the vantage point of the moral high ground, Blair and his\u00a0ministers and generals refuse even to consider that NATO’s missions are\u00a0killing people and destroying a country. They are simply ‘degrading’ the\u00a0‘killing machine’ of the evil Milosevic. Confronted with the fact that\u00a0their war has caused a catastrophe in Kosovo, they insist that NATO air\u00a0strikes are actually preventing a humanitarian disaster. Faced with the\u00a0hard evidence of how NATO bombing raids have reduced areas of the\u00a0Kosovan capital, Pristina, to rubble, they say that the Serbs must have\u00a0inflicted the damage themselves.<\/p>\n
If NATO’s Good Humanitarians believe that they are necessarily innocent\u00a0of any offence, then they are equally certain that the Evil Serbs must be\u00a0guilty of everything of which they have been accused. So foreign\u00a0secretary Robin Cook, defence secretary George Robertson and their media\u00a0mouthpieces report as fact every horror story coming out of the war zone.<\/p>\n
And when these are proved to be untrue (as when ‘executed’ ethnic\u00a0Albanian leaders turn up alive; a Pristina football stadium housing a\u00a0‘concentration camp’ of 10 000 is found to be empty; or the school where ’20 teachers\u00a0were murdered in front of their pupils’ turns out to be in a village of only\u00a0200 people), they refuse to admit it. Why worry about the facts when there\u00a0is always another unsubstantiated atrocity tale that can justify sending in\u00a0helicopter gunships for the cause of Good?<\/p>\n
If there is no restraint on the conduct of Blair’s humanitarian war,\u00a0there can be no questioning of it either. Uncooperative BBC journalists are\u00a0accused of aiding the evil Milosevic, while Serb TV is threatened with\u00a0bombing unless it starts broadcasting NATO propaganda. Norman Tebbit\u00a0was a champion of free speech by comparison to this.<\/p>\n
This war is not about Kosovo. It is an out-of-control moral crusade,\u00a0which Blair went into without any clear war aims; a war launched on thepremise that Something Must Be Done to demonstrate how his ethical New Britain\u00a0bestrides the world as a force for Good. It is a crusade which has\u00a0taken on a dynamic of its own, jacking up the military stakes along with the\u00a0righteous rhetoric, as the KLA is transformed from a proscribed\u00a0terrorist organisation into an unofficial member of the NATO alliance, and more\u00a0NATO ground troops are sent to the region – purely for humanitarian\u00a0purposes, of course.<\/p>\n
Through all this, the loudest criticism which Bomber Blair has had to\u00a0cope with from most of the erstwhile peace lobby is that NATO should make\u00a0more war against Serbia, not less. The crusading journalists, actors and\u00a0others of the liberal left are now getting what they have demanded for much of\u00a0the past decade – a humanitarian Jihad against the Serbs. In their certainty\u00a0that NATO is on the side of the angels, they insist that still more\u00a0ruthless intervention is the only solution for Kosovo.<\/p>\n
Yet a rational look back at the trouble that has afflicted the former\u00a0Yugoslavia through the 1990s would surely draw the opposite conclusion.<\/p>\n
Since 1991, outside intervention has done nothing but exacerbate,\u00a0inflame and perpetuate the conflicts across all of the former Yugoslav\u00a0republics. Kosovo is the last act of a Yugoslav tragedy made in the West.<\/p>\n
Those who want to ignore that lesson, and insist instead that they have\u00a0a moral responsibility to do ‘something’ over Kosovo, might like to note\u00a0Noam Chomsky’s recent evocation of the Hippocratic principle: ‘First, do noharm.’<\/p>\n
But then, humanitarian NATO air strikes don’t do any harm, do they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
11 April 1999 WHY BLAIR’S ‘HUMANITARIAN’ WAR IS EVEN WORSE Mick Hume, LM editor For the first time, a Labour prime minister leads Britain into a major\u00a0international war. What’s more, Tony Blair is being cheered on loudest\u00a0by the ‘peacenik’ Guardian and ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, while Tory MPs and\u00a0the Daily Mail worry about the war. If … <\/p>\n