Daily Telegraph
Original link: Daily Telegraph Opinion
"Big Lie" behind a reckless and half-witted adventure
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 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, Cambridge
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