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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (9755)	5/25/1999 3:05:00 AM
From: JBL	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

The Guardian 5/24/99 Martin Walker Inside Europe Keeping the peace within Nato Alliance leaders are losing patience with "know-all" Britain Martin Walker Monday May 24, 1999 Austrian chancellor Viktor Klima has just sent a message to his fellow Social Democrat, Swedish prime minister Goran Persson, through a mutual friend: "We now have an election-winning formula: keep our neutrality and stay out of Nato." Eight weeks of war have had their effect. Back in March, before the bombing began, senior Austrian officials were privately predicting that Austria would soon amend its constitution to join Nato, just as the centre-right party of Austrian foreign minister Wolfgang Sch¸ssel wanted. At the time, there was a narrow majority in Austrian opinion polls for the neutral status they have maintained since 1954, when it was the price of the withdrawal of Soviet troops from half the country. This week, the poll majorities for staying neutral are close to 80 per cent. In Stockholm, Persson had his own polls to consider. In January, Swedes were just over 40 per cent against joining Nato. By the first week of May, the anti-Nato camp had 52 per cent and rising. The prospects of joining Nato have moved right to the back burner in Sweden and Finland, not helped by the accidental collateral damage to the Swedish ambassador's residence in Belgrade in the same air strike that killed three people in a hospital last week. As Robin Cook told Labour MPs: "There are going to be dark days in any war, which is when your friends really count." But the friends of Tony Blair are looking a bit rocky just now. Armando Cossutta, the Italian Communist leader who sits in the centre-left coalition (and is thus locked into his government's policy of facilitating the bombing with its crucial air bases), mocks Mr Blair as "Europe's new god of war". German chancellor Gerhard Schrˆder did not bother to hide his irritation with "this British theoretical argument" over ground troops when he visited Nato HQ last week. "The British prime minister is playing a dangerous solitary role as the know-all of the Kosovo war", ran a headline in the Frankfurter Allgemeine, while the Stuttgarter Zeitung said: "The hawk of London is becoming ever more isolated in the alliance." And it was a very senior French diplomat who pulled British journalists aside after last week's meeting of EU foreign ministers to ask if they had any idea why Robin Cook was playing such a bellicose and isolated game. There are three facts to bear in mind here. The first is that few other Nato leaders enjoy the quasi-dictatorial position of Blair, with his overwhelming majority and no touchy coalition members to consider. Even Bill Clinton has to deal with an opposi tion Congress. It is not that the other leaders are jealous, rather that they doubt whether Blair quite understands the political constraints upon them. Given those constraints, Clinton, Schrˆder, D'Alema and Jospin (and most Nato ambassadors) all feel rather pleased with themselves at having achieved a consensus around "more bombing and more diplomacy". The degree of Nato solidarity and continued backing of EU neutrals after seven bad bombing blunders has surprised and gratified them. They do not want warlike British soundbites rocking their boats. Second, Blair has not actually said on record that ground troops should invade. As so often from a spin-conscious Downing Street, Blair's hawkishness has been a subtle branding exercise of rhetoric, gesture and symbolism rather than substance. Third, politicians in the soundbite age are trapped in the semantic conundrum of defining when ground troops are not quite ground troops. All Nato and EU countries agree that there will have to be ground troops to occupy Kosovo as an international security force after Milosevic caves in or collapses. The Nato powers now also agree that the force of 28,000 troops, thought sufficient during the Rambouillet talks, will probably now need to be doubled to handle the mine-clearing and infrastructure repair tasks which have accumulated in the eight weeks of war. The point that Blair, Cook and George Robertson are making quite well in private, but not very well in public, is that those troops had better be in place soon. Otherwise, Nato will look very silly if a deal suddenly comes, and Nato then dithers on the border complaining that its forces are not ready yet, while refugees feel the first chill winds of winter blowing through their tents. But a force of more than 40,000 troops poised on the borders to move in as peacekeepers will look to Belgrade (and to Moscow) like a credible threat of armed invasion. That is where the semantics turn really tricky, since the first job of those peacekeepers will be to disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army, just as the G8 agreement says. Nato troops could yet find themselves in confrontation with the very guerillas their air strikes have been supporting.