Utter, Bloody, Folly
The London Times
March 30, 1999 Libby Purves
You always need a strong stomach in times of war. It was difficult to imagine anything more nauseating than Clinton's war rhetoric, but we got it, with our own Prime Minister's speech last week about his personal "longest hours" (oh, poor diddums) waiting for the planes to get back safely.
Even then William Hague trumped both of them with his party political broadcast telling the tale of the "little girl" who wrote "I am scared and I want my Daddy to come soon". He is not quite as good at the tremor in the voice as Tony Blair, but he is learning fast.
National and local newspapers try - by God they try - to be even more flesh-creepingly maudlin about our brave heroes, but the headlines (especially in the honest local press) tend to be almost comically belied by what the Service families actually say when invited by journalists to let their feelings rip. Under trembling banners saying "Pray for them" and "Wives who weep in fear", you will generally find the actual quotes are more like "He's trained and prepared for this, and we just hope for the best", or "We know what we signed up for. It's his job".
Never is the stoical resolve, the dutiful understatement, of the Armed Service ethos more admirable than when contrasted with the wobbling lips of politicians - two of whom are desperately trying to justify a blunder, and the third wishing he had had the sense to speak against the said blunder while he still had the chance.
I may be misinterpreting Mr Clinton and Mr Blair. It may be that they have not yet accepted the disastrousness of what they did. They sneered at caution and waved the battle-flag, posing in regimental-stripe ties and talking of "toughness", while more mature voices of generals, veterans and historians warned them precisely what would happen if we bombed.
It could be that in their purblind hearts the Free World's leaders are waving that flag still. Even if doubts creep in, they may think they can hide their misjudgment behind the many vignettes of heroism which the pilots, sailors and eventually soldiers will undoubtedly provide for them as this war escalates. If so, God forgive them.
They would have done better to take some lessons from the Service tradition beforehand: to learn that before you start an action you survey your terrain carefully, weigh up probabilities, save your breath for action not bragging, take the path which leads to the quickest ending, and be prepared to clean up the mess afterwards. (This instinct to clean up, by the way, genuinely is a military one: I learnt the other day the piquant story of how the rebuilding of the Bosnian railway system, by sappers from half-a-dozen nations, including Hungary and Romania, was not any politician's initiative. It was the result of months of lobbying and ingenious planning by a mulishly determined Royal Engineers officer who didn't like to leave a country in such a mess.)
But modern politicians hate detail and patience and prefer big, showy stage-sets. Zap Milosevic! Clobba Slobba! Teach him a lesson! Send thunderbolts from on high, like God! Meanwhile, keep your own electorate away from the intimate, horrible detail of war: no bodybags, please. So, inevitably, they opt for bombing.
But bombing does not work in such circumstances; it never has. We ought to know from Iraq - if not from our own Blitz experience - that bombs are more likely to stiffen a disaffected civilian population into a loyal one. Such an affront from the air gives even the liberal Serb (or Iraqi) an instinct to stand by his leader, however vile.
And how could bombing prevent the kind of intimate, village-street butchery going on in Kosovo? Bombs are made to destroy airfields and docks full of big war machines. They are not - whatever the propaganda - fine-tuned precision weapons which can avoid civilians. We now learn that the bombers' laser sights are inhibited by European cloud and fog: "Gee," think Clinton and Blair, "that never happened in the Gulf. Wonder why?" And even if the bombs were precise, the Serbs have only to park their tanks in the middle of Kosovo villages to mock the attackers' scruples.
The real duty which politicians have towards their professional Armed Forces is not to pose with tanks or gulp emotionally about their little daughters' tears. It is to use them properly: to commit them only to wars which are necessary, just, and winnable. In this duty the leaders of the Nato allies have failed, in a breathtaking display of immaturity , arrogance, disrespect for international law and impatience with the crawling processes of carrot-and-stick diplomacy which might, just, have saved lives in Kosovo. They are not even consistent in their folly - why bomb the Serbs for their atrocities and leave other pariah states unscathed? Did we sent bombers into Chile during Pinochet's reign of terror?
Governments have let their Forces down, and no amount of crocodile tears can disguise it. These poor bloody pilots are now committed to plastering invisible Serb enemies with destruction from thousands of feet up, in the knowledge that the main results have been to aggravate the butchery of Kosovan Albanians and provoke Russia into reopening the Cold War.
The humanitarian disaster is the worst. Slobodan Milosevic has done exactly what serious experts on Serb history and mentality predicted all along. He has harnessed the ancient traditions of tribal patriotism and xenophobia to step up the murder in response to the bombing. Men are being rounded up and killed (refugees report that the staff of two schools died at the weekend) and women and children driven across mined borders to arrive injured, exhausted and starving in countries with little capacity to help them. Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, unstable themselves, are under pressure: UNHCR estimates more than two thousand refugees every day. The bombs did not prevent human disaster. They made it worse.
So now we really are involved. Before these terrible missions began, our duty towards the misery of Kosovo was, at least, questionable. Now it is inescapable. There are a lot of fatherless and broken families out there (including innocent Serbs). We Nato nations have done our bit to put them in this pitiable position, and now we have a solemn duty to them. When the bombing ends - and it has to end eventually, whoever loses face - the countries which did it or sanctioned it have got to look after these people whatever it costs.
If a self-supporting peace deal can be arrived at (unlikely, given the fact that Nato still runs Bosnia several years after the war) it will mean a lot of money to rebuild the villages and agriculture of Kosovo and to deal with the aftermath of injury, bereavement and trauma.
If peace does not come to the region, then it means even more inescapable duties for Nato nations: protection, support, refugee status, resettlement. There are a lot of empty acres in America and in Europe; and there is wealth, too, in comparison with the fragility of the countries where these refugees now huddle. If we want to emerge from this fiasco with any honour left at all, there will be sacrifices to be made so the "international community" can rebuild these lives. We have no option now.
Before the bombing, Milosevic's persecution was bad enough, something for other nations to dissuade with every peaceful means. To oppose it was a good deed, but not an inescapable duty. Since the bombing the persecution has become far worse, and that is our fault, and we must pay for it as unhesitatingly as we now pay for multimillion-dollar explosions.
Remember that, in months to come. Remember it when America loses interest and Britain and Germany sniff that mere "economic migrants" do not deserve refugee status because the killing has stopped. These are our people now. We owe them. |
