‘Big Lie’ behind a reckless and half-witted adventure
The Daily Telegraph, 29 April 1999
John Casey criticises the self-righteous posturing that led to Nato’s
Balkan campaign and could end in a full-scale land war
In an interview with Newsweek three weeks ago, the Prime Minister [Tony Bliar] said: “We are fighting for a world where dictators are no longer able to visit horrific punishments on their own peoples in order to stay in power… where brutal repression of whole ethnic groups will no longer be tolerated.” These were sentiments that he repeated last week in Chicago.
Should we worry that, with that sort of language, Tony Blair proposes to commit this country to an unending series of “humanitarian” wars around the globe? That our tradition of non-intervention, except where our essential interests are at stake (as we decided they were not in Abyssinia and Spain in the 1930s), is to be abandoned?
No: what we should worry about is that we have a prime minister who is on linguistic autopilot. This facile liberal language, this uplift suitable for a sixth-form debating society, means absolutely nothing at all – except that the person who speaks it is on a sanctimonious high. The shame of it is (in the words of Samuel Johnson) “to impose words for ideas upon ourselves or others”.
The falsity of the language is almost embarrassingly obvious. Critics who have pointed out that we never for a moment thought of intervening in Rwanda (which would not have been very difficult), or southern Sudan, or Algeria, are simply bringing these easy words up against a recalcitrant reality.
A chief aim of Nato at the moment is to bamboozle us into believing in a fantasy world. That may explain the Government’s intense hostility to any criticism, or even analysis, of the way the war is going – including the distasteful smearing of the BBC’s John Simpson.
“Precision bombing” is one of the fantasies – as has been brutally demonstrated by Nato attacks on Kosovar refugee convoys and Tuesday’s bombing of civilians in Surdulica. The chief fantasy – which seems to have taken in not a single military expert – was that a bombing campaign alone would force Slobodan Milosevic to surrender. It is becoming clear that this was based on a massive political and psychological miscalculation by politicians who have no sense of history, do not listen to the advice of their military men and who can think only in terms of the quick fix.
The tireless, robotic reiteration by Nato spokesmen and our own leaders that the campaign is working is now the Big Lie. Dissent is to be stilled simply by the nightly, horrifying television pictures of the refugees – the sole argument of the “something must be done” school. The tacit agreement of all the political parties (with the exception of the SNP) to avoid rational argument and to ignore gross inconsistencies is astonishing.
At the beginning of the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians, Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, was pressed to explain why so little provision had been made to receive them. She indignantly insisted that no one could have predicted ethnic cleansing on the scale we have seen.
Yet at virtually the same time the Government began saying that it had known of Milosevic’s plans from the beginning, and that this was a main justification for the air strikes. Is anyone deceived?
When we went to war in 1914 and 1939, we knew that we were following the fundamental aim of British policy since the 18th century – of trying to prevent one land power dominating the continent of Europe.
But Mr Blair and Bill Clinton float in a moral stratosphere above all such painful calculations of realpolitik. The most realistic – and cynical – analysis of the war was made by Henry Kissinger in this newspaper.
He argued, in effect, that the whole enterprise was a catastrophic miscalculation, that the air strategy would fail, that the Kosovan conflict on its own has no serious consequences for Europe, but that independence for Kosovo would risk the expansion of ethnic conflicts in the Balkans. Yet Mr Kissinger concluded that the only possible course for Nato now is to send in ground troops. Why? Because otherwise Nato’s credibility would receive a fatal blow.
His analysis strikes me as extremely plausible, down to its cynical conclusion. It also reveals the dangerous world that our leaders are sleepwalking into. We can bring this war to a conclusion only with ground troops. But it could easily turn into a campaign of attrition, and the Western democracies, led by the frivolous Bill Clinton, are quite likely to abandon the whole enterprise when the quick fix does not materialise. Russia will not let the Serbs lose. Does anyone really think that the Russians will allow Bosnia, Kosovo and perhaps even the rest of Serbia to become Nato protectorates?
The Government – irresponsibly supported by the opposition parties – is determined that these questions shall not even be asked. We have embarked on a course the logic of which points to a full-scale land war. The fight would be in the very region where the intervention of outside powers transformed a local conflict into the First World War. The dangers are immense – and even a five per cent chance of a general conflict counts as an immense danger.
Our leaders, whether or not they are capable of thinking about such things themselves, shrink from serious discussion of what could happen. All we have is self-righteous posturing under the guise of high moral tone, and a refusal to inform the public of the dangers that amounts to a betrayal of democracy. This war, by comparison with which Suez was an operation of Metternichian cunning, is the most culpably reckless, half-witted adventure that this country has embarked on in my lifetime.
The author is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University