Mission Accomplished?

The Crisis of International Intervention

Simon Jenkins

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784531324
• eBook ISBN: 9780857739179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why do politicians send troops to foreign soil, to fight battles they rarely win? Is it old-fashioned imperialism tainted with a crusader complex? Or is the West a partisan for the helpless? The fall of the Soviet Union left the West aimless. With no conflicting dogma to reinforce its sense of justice the West assumed the role of global policeman - aid graduated from charitable to economic and, finally, military. Ideological struggle was replaced by a vague and confused concept of international justice, shrouded in real-politik. Yet scepticism now pervades the interventionist debate. Simon Jenkins traces the rise of 'liberal interventionism' from Kosovo and the 'war on terror' to present day conflicts in Libya, Syria and Ukraine, asking: what can we learn from the miscalculations, mistakes, and mendacity of 'the age of intervention'? As ISIS sweeps through Middle-East, calls for a military solution are increasing. By exposing interventionist rhetoric and highlighting past mistakes, Jenkins gives us an invaluable contribution to the active and essential debate on the West's role in global conflicts.

1

Into Yugoslavia

Over the course of 1998 British ministers had spent weeks deploring the Serb leader, Slobodan Milošević, for constantly agreeing to withdraw his troops from Kosovo, where they were imposing appalling oppression and ethnic cleansing on the local population, and then not doing so. The Racak massacre of January 1999 was the last straw. What could Britain do? What more could the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, say? In the House of Commons he could only denounce Milošević and his actions as “deeply foolish … unacceptable … shocking … murderous … horrific”. [House of Commons, 18/19.01.1999]

29.01.1999

MR COOK recites all this with sombre mien. He then looks down at his word list and finds the armoury is bare. His mouth opens and shuts in silence. There is just a ghost whispering in his ear, “Real men drop bombs.” We are back to our old friend, the bomb. British foreign policy is now a four-letter word. So bankrupt is this neo-Palmerstonian stance, so counter-productive to its goals, so devoid of success, that it can only respond to 45 dead Albanians by threatening 45 dead Serbs. Policy is dumbed-down to a bomb for a bomb and a corpse for a corpse. Dictators who sneer at Mr Cook's heat-seeking adjectives must feel the blast of his heat-seeking bombs.

The reason for bombing Yugoslavia is to alter the balance of power on the ground in Kosovo. That is achieved only by sending in troops. Such invasion is what the KLA have been encouraged by Mr Cook's policy to expect. Is it meant? If not, the threat cruelly invites KLA resurgence and ruthless Serbian suppression. But invasion cannot police an active civil war. It must either assist the KLA in the military dismembering of a European state. Or it must help the Serbs to restore Yugoslav sovereignty against KLA rebellion. Which of these dreadful goals is now British policy?

Former Yugoslavia has seen every phase of “new world order” mission creep. First it welcomed humanitarian aid to civil war victims. Then it saw foreign governments drawn into protecting that aid with troops. The protection became partisan. Heavy weapons arrived. The troops became militarily active, then players in local politics.

The British people were categorically promised that Britain would not become embroiled in the war of Yugoslavia's succession. The promise has not been kept. The logic of intervention was inescapable from the arrival of the first humble soldier to the present computerised bomb-targeting of the whole of Yugoslavia. This is what historians call the madness of war.

Britain is currently also conducting a bombing campaign against Iraq in support of the War of Clinton's Frustration. It is mere bombing. Toppling Saddam Hussein would plainly require a ground assault and Britain has neither the will nor the guts for that. If Anglo-American forces invaded, against the opposition of half the world, they would have to fight and stay. As in Bosnia and presumably in Kosovo, they would have to take responsibility for the aftermath. They would need to be proper policemen, rather than the present hit-and-run vendetta squad.

The impasse over Kosovo continued into February amid mounting violence on the ground. This precipitated a conference at Rambouillet outside Paris and an “Accord” of March 1999. This collapsed on the refusal of Serbia to allow the stationing of NATO monitors on its soil. Milošević duly intensified his ethnic cleansing, until almost a million Albanians had been driven from Kosovo into Macedonia.

NATO now lost patience. On the night of 24 March it began bombing selective Serb targets. The attack was not authorised by the UN due to Russian opposition, and was technically illegal in international law. At the same time both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair specifically ruled out a ground invasion of Kosovo, confining themselves to moving troops to neighbouring Macedonia, supposedly to protect future ceasefire monitors. Intervention was to be left to the bombers.

24.03.1999

WHY KOSOVO? Why, of all the current civil wars and humanitarian horrors, is it Kosovo that now summons British troops to the colours? Or put it another way, why does a bloodstained shroud only have to wave over a Balkan village for otherwise intelligent people to take leave of their senses?

Yesterday the West tossed another gauntlet before the Yugoslav leader, Slobodan Milošević. All previous ultimatums have been bluffs, and he has called them. In response to a month of NATO sabre-rattling, he has unleashed on Kosovo a pre-emptive scorched-earth campaign of medieval brutality. Now squadrons of bombers are waiting to pulverise his country, and 10,000 NATO troops stand ready to invade from Macedonia. Yet a BBC interviewer yesterday could gasp “How can Milošević be so stupid?” A wise general never asks that question of his enemy, only of his friends.

In the early l960s, Americans considered it unthinkable that a modern President such as John Kennedy could entangle the United States in a third land war in the Far East within 20 years. It was simply beyond imagining that, in a nuclear age, American boys would ever again die fighting in distant jungles. The world was too safe and Kennedy too shrewd and too liberal to make such a mistake. Besides, America was omnipotent. The orientals would be no match for the rolling thunder of the world's mightiest air force.

The historian Barbara Tuchman famously addressed the puzzle of Vietnam and concluded that, in the matter of war, little had changed since the fall of Troy. In The March of Folly, she related how each crisis was confounded by vain and hesitant leaders, by fears of retreat, by deafness to unpalatable advice and by a constant belief “that there was no choice”. Kennedy had to take America into Vietnam to prove he was tough on communism, and Lyndon Johnson to prove that “I am not going to lose it”. After half a million dead, it was lost. Nothing was gained, and it appears nothing was learnt.

I cannot find a single strategist to give me a level-headed outline of Britain's war aims in Yugoslavia. The objective set out by Mr Blair appears to be to bomb the Serbs into granting partial autonomy to Kosovo. It is scarcely credible that a serious person can believe this will be done by bombs – least of all after the Iraqi experience – and Mr Blair was unable to say how. The action seems certain both to kill more civilians and to provoke bloody retaliation against the Kosovans, which NATO is powerless to prevent. What kind of humanitarianism is that?

Last year the British government sent 3,000 troops as part of the 10,000 NATO force in Macedonia. They were to help get Western monitors out of Kosovo in the event of danger. Then they were to go in and “keep the peace” at the invitation of both sides. Now, according to one of their commanders, they are to “separate the combatants and disarm them”, a feat that for 30 years defied the British Army in Northern Ireland. Next week, if Mr Blair is not cruelly deceiving the Kosovans, the objective may have to be to confront 40,000 Serb troops in open battle.

This is not so much mission creep as mission stampede. But if it happens, it does give point to the Opposition leader [William Hague's] question yesterday: why did NATO not act sooner before it allowed Mr Milošević to deploy his full army on its southern front facing NATO? If British troops are to die in the cause of Kosovan autonomy, this delay will seem criminally negligent.

The March bombing of military targets failed to induce Milošević to climb down in Kosovo. The targets were duly widened to include government buildings and infrastructure such as power lines, electricity generators and even the bridges over the Danube. This halted river traffic into the heart of Europe. The next targets were television stations and the Chinese embassy, allegedly because of a radio transmitter in its attic. After six weeks, Milošević's position hardened and his brutality in Kosovo increased.

In April 1999 Tony Blair, deeply frustrated by American indecision, travelled to America and gave a speech in Chicago in which he advocated a new humanitarian interventionism under a “doctrine of international community”. This community would intervene militarily not in self-defence or self-interest but to save peoples from repressive governments. It was an echo of the ideology of the Edwardian imperialist, Alfred Milner, of a Britain with a manifest destiny to a moral or “constructive” empire. Blair laid down five preconditions for intervention: that “you” (unspecified) be sure of your case; you exhaust all other options; you ask if military operations can be “sensibly” undertaken; you be prepared for the long term; and you have identified your interests involved. I wondered which other countries and conflicts across the globe might be suitable targets.

05.05.1999

MR BLAIR addresses Albanian refugees with the cry, “This is not a battle for territory, this is a battle for humanity”. We duly turn to the website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and its chilling checklist of man's inhumanity to man. An estimated 30 million people are currently clamouring to be the objects of Mr Blair's crusade. Sixteen million are in Africa, seven million in Asia, five million in Europe and three million in the Americas. The overwhelming majority have been driven from their homes, often at the point of a gun, by civil upheaval inside their own countries. At the top of this league table are two million Sudanese, followed by Angolans, Burmese, Bosnians, Rwandans, Iraqis, Armenians, Azeris, Chechens, Colombians and Eritreans.

Even in the ruthlessness of their eviction, Kosovans are well down the list. In each case, the cause of misery is political collapse. It is the failure of a nation state to maintain internal discipline while tolerating minority races, tribes or religious groups. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, said Eliot. But nor can it bear very much geography.

The now-defunct United Nations principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states was not self-interested or cynical. It was merely clear. It permitted, indeed obliged, wars to restore the integrity of states, as in the Falklands and Kuwait. To Margaret Thatcher in 1983, it made America's invasion of Grenada wrong.

The conflicts that are currently involving outside powers in the civil rights of subordinate groups within states embrace Palestinians, Irish nationalists, Kurds and Kosovans. Such intervention cannot avoid altering the balance of power in these conflicts, but to what end? American support for the IRA over the years materially affected the Ulster conflict, yet gave Mr Clinton no leverage over weapons decommissioning. Last winter's NATO saber-rattling against Belgrade emboldened the KLA to step up its terror campaign in Kosovo and the Serbs to promote ethnic cleansing. Were such opportunistic interventions successful as a means to peace, they might be applauded. They were not.

By June 1999 NATO (that is primarily America) faced international opposition to the apparently useless bombing of civilian targets, which included dropping free-fall explosives on civic buildings, and even market places in the cities, such as Novi Sad and Nis. Bombing was clearly not going to drive Serbia out of Kosovo, let alone topple Milošević.

Preparations were duly made for a ground invasion by NATO troops stationed in Macedonia. An ultimatum told Milošević to withdraw from Kosovo or face invasion. Serbia's hitherto ally, Russia, decided enough was enough and declined to back Milošević with fuel supplies. Moscow would not be taking sides against NATO in a ground war in Europe. The ultimatum worked.

04.06.1999

SLOBODAN MILOŠEVIĆ yesterday pulled his country back from a certain sort of brink. He also hauled NATO back from the ghastliness of embarking on a ground war in landlocked Europe. According to information from Belgrade, the catalyst was a specific threat delivered by Martti Ahtisaari from Bill Clinton. It was the one threat that NATO had so far declined to offer, not a continuation of bombing but an invasion of Kosovo in which America would be a full participant.

Winning support for that invasion had become a central objective of the British government and was thus a tactical triumph for Tony Blair. Had the same threat from NATO been made last March – rather than specifically denied by both Clinton and Blair – how much horror might have been avoided? Yesterday's events should not be regarded as a triumph for the “bombing alone” lobby. Quite the opposite.

History will see the Kosovan crisis as embracing two punitive expeditions, together leaving Kosovo an empty and wasted land. The first saw a reckless state, Serbia, its army dehumanised by years of civil war, reacting to separatist violence by driving a million people from their land by terror and the sword. The second saw Britain and America seeking to express their disapproval, but without pain to themselves.

The bombers left those on the ground thoroughly bombed, and those in the air feeling much better. Eventually push came to shove, but only when the means denied at the start were conceded at the end. War is still about fighting, not bombing.

The withdrawal of Serb forces led to the return of some 800,000 Albanian refugees and the establishment of a Western protectorate in Pristina, similar to that established under the 1995 Dayton Accords in Bosnia. As such, the Kosovo intervention was hailed a success for the new interventionism – and for Blair, its most ardent prophet. The previously “terrorist” KLA was installed in power. Yet in neither Bosnia nor Kosovo was a free-standing political regime established. Both remain under international protection and supervision to this day.

Three months after the June end of hostilities, military analysts met in Toronto to assess the outcome, amid conflicting claims for the efficacy of air versus land power. There was no denying the war objective had been achieved in the return of refugees and the eviction of Serb authority from Kosovo. But what really made Milošević capitulate? Was it an estimated 38,000 NATO air sorties, including many against civilian targets, or was it the threat of a land war?

24.09.1999

I DISTRUST strategic bombing and therefore suffer the same handicap as do its advocates. I tend to grasp at any evidence that supports my view, and dismiss what upsets it. But history is a stern tyrant. It orders us to leave prejudice at the gate before we enter.

The bombing of military and civilian targets in Yugoslavia continued throughout the Kosovo conflict, from 24 March to 9 June. The ferocity of the assault masked the fact that air power, first threatened then actual, did not deter Milošević in the slightest. It did not meet its professed goal of “halting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo”, let alone “in a matter of days”. Whether the bombing was catalyst to more atrocity than might have occurred had the foreign observers stayed in place is moot. What is certain is that the bombing did nothing to impede the cleansing, which could hardly have been worse.

By May, Pentagon and CIA officials were contradicting reports emanating from NATO headquarters in Brussels and from British ministers in the House of Commons. The bombing was assessed (in leaks to The New York Times) as having only “a marginal effect” on operations in Kosovo. Nor was there any sign of a change of heart in Belgrade. On 4 May, General Klaus Naumann, the chairman of NATO's military committee, publicly admitted that bombing had failed. The International Institute for Strategic Studies issued a report baffled at the tactical purpose of telling the Serbs that there would be no land invasion.

Recent briefing has revealed furious rows within NATO command at that time, notably between General Wesley Clark and his US Air Force chief, Michael Short. General Clark could not see why bombers were not hitting targets in Kosovo. General Short regarded such “tank-plinking” as a waste of time and money; rightly as it turned out. His ambitions for air power were political, to “bomb the head and not the tail”. At the NATO summit on 21 April, he was granted his wish and the targets were widened to “turn out the lights in Belgrade”, as the White House put it. Bombers could now hit power stations, bridges, trains, the media, factories and public buildings. At one point, the British tried to stop an attack on power lines that ran into Belgrade general hospital, but “were brought round”.

By the start of May, NATO's promise of purely military targeting was a fiction. The ideology of strategic or “political” bombing was ascendant. Intensive bombing was intended to undermine civilian morale and force a change of policy, even of regime. Aerial assassination of Milošević and his family was attempted. An article in the current Foreign Affairs points out that bombing “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population” is a clear breach of the 1949 Geneva Convention. Yet from March onwards, NATO seemed unconcerned by legality. The UN's Mary Robinson was forced to remind the British Cabinet that it risked committing the same war crimes as Milošević.

As so often in history, the “logic of war” was more potent than its morality. Victory, it was hoped, would ask no questions. Britain's Defence Secretary, George Robertson, a bombing enthusiast, argued recently that bombing must have worked since Milošević capitulated. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. NATO commanders on the ground will have none of this. What influenced Milošević, as [NATO's British commander on the ground] Lieutenant-General Sir Michael Jackson has often said, was proof that NATO finally had its act together for a land invasion. American concurrence was indicated to Milošević on 2 June, the day before he capitulated. At the same time, Milošević was told by Viktor Chernomyrdin that Moscow would not support him against such an invasion. Milošević now faced a real war, which he would lose. [General Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War; Andrew Gilligan, “Russia, not bombs, brought end to war in Kosovo, says Jackson”, Telegraph, 1 August 1999].

There is no such thing as “immaculate coercion”. Political bombing is a gesture of state viol...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Into Yugoslavia
• 2 Marking Time: Interlude in Sierra Leone
• 3 Eruption: Nine Eleven
• 4 Into Afghanistan
• 5 Back to Iraq
• 6 Iraq: The Big One
• 7 Iraq: Aftermath Part One
• 8 Iraq: Aftermath Goes Steady State
• 9 Return to Afghanistan
• 10 Endgame Eludes Iraq, Again
• 11 Intervention Goes Viral: Tehran, Kabul, Baghdad, Rangoon, Harare
• 12 The Age of Endgames
• 13 Springtime in Libya
• 14 Aftermath: Syria, Yemen, Mali, Ukraine
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Back Cover