HAWKS SAVE LIVES; DOVES DON'T

The political ghosts of Bosnia were exorcised in Kosovo and are

being laid to rest in Afghanistan: Brendan Simms on how the

Tory appeasers of the Nineties were proved calamitously wrong

FOR some time after their election victory in 1997 it was fashionable to sneer at Labour's ethical foreign policy'. No longer. Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo was speedily reversed without the loss of a single British life, The Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic — once disastrously courted by London — is now facing trial before the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Sierra Leone, though far from perfect, is a much better place than it was before the British went in. Civil war in Macedonia has been contained for the time being. So far, these two operations have between them claimed the lives of two servicemen. There is still, of course, a lot that can go wrong in Afghanistan, but it seems clear that the Taleban have been smashed, and Osama bin Laden is on the verge of capture or death. Relations with the United States of George W. Bush, once confidently predicted to be on the verge of collapse, are at an all-time high.

The contrast with the peculiar, hapless awfulness of the Major administration could not be greater. It is only some six years ago that the Conservative mishandling of the Bosnian crisis of 1992-95 brought this country to the brink of a calamitous transatlantic split that almost wrecked the Nato alliance. During that period the internationally recognised multiethnic state of Bosnia-Herzegovina was abandoned to partition and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Serb separatists sponsored by Belgrade. Tens of thousands were murdered; more than a million were expelled, deported or fled in fear of their lives. An unknown number were raped, humiliated and traumatised. The number of victims attributable to British policy is unknowable, but certainly substantial.

Britain played a particularly disastrous role throughout the war, more so even than France, Her political leaders became afflicted by an especially disabling form of conservative pessimism, which disposed them not only to reject military intervention for themselves, but also to prevent anybody else, particularly the Americans, from intervening either. A one-sided arms embargo, which severely disadvantaged the Bosnian government, was

maintained to the hitter end; the use of sustained Nato air power was resisted for three long years at the United Nations Security Council in New York and the North Atlantic Council in Brussels. British mediators deferred to the Serbs, bullied the Bosnians and did all they could to sabotage US plans for military intervention. To that extent, the recent claim by Milosevic's lawyers that Lords Hurd, Carrington and Owen gave him a 'green light' comes as no surprise.

And yet the chief instigators of this dire policy were neither fools nor knaves. The foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, was a decent man of liberal and humane instincts whose inner torment at the violence in Bosnia was palpable; the defence secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, was a figure of undoubted intellectual brilliance and forensic skill. Neither man was an Islamophobe or a racist, and there is no reason to believe that their stance on Bosnia was seriously influenced by any base pecuniary considerations. In short, Hurd and Rifkind's Bosnian policy reflected a failure not of morality but of judgment.

Nor is it sufficient merely to dismiss them as 'appeasers', though that is what they became. Underpinning British policy was not an ethical void or generic spine lessness, but a profoundly conservative pessimistic 'realism' in international affairs. James Rubin, who dealt with many British diplomats and statesmen throughout the Bosnian crisis, saw them as 'hyper-realists' of 'the traditional British kind'. Hurd and RifIcind were as sceptical of American 'Wilsonian' internationalism as they were of Margaret Thatcher's Gladstonian universalism. They rejected talk of a 'new world order' and even — in Douglas Hurd's case — the very idea of an 'international community'. As members of a generation that had retreated from empire and become embroiled in Northern Ireland, Hurd and Rifkind were profoundly limited not only in their view of what Britain could do, but also of what she should do. 'We have no right, power or appetite,' Hurd told the European Parliament in July 1992, 'to establish protectorates in Eastern Europe in the name of a European Order.'

The Major government made one fundamental mistake over Bosnia, from which all other errors and absurdities followed. It insisted on viewing the project of a Greater Serbia and the concomitant ethnic cleansing as primarily a humanitarian problem, rather than as a colossal politico-strategic challenge to European collective security. Indeed, the troops sent to protect the aid operation in the autumn of 1992 were dispatched as a substitute for effective political and military support for the beleaguered Sarajevo government, Instead of confronting Milosevic and Serb nationalists in Bosnia, London tried to co-opt them into a negotiated peace. For this reason. British diplomats tried to delay the setting up of a UN War Crimes Tribunal which might complicate the 'peace process'. The obverse of this strategy of 'engagement' was a calculated campaign to marginalise the Bosnian government, to deny their multi-ethnic status by systematic references to 'the Muslims', and to depress their territorial and constitutional expectations to a 'realistic' level.

David Owen, appointed at British instigation to the role of EU mediator, came to personify the policy of non-intervention. His own pronouncements became increasingly characterised by sonorous sub-Hur than gravitas. 'As physicians and surgeons,' he observed at the height of the war in November 1993, 'we have long been aware of the dangers of simply responding to the cry "do something". All too often we know that an illness has to work its way through the system . . . the skill is to appear calm without being complacent, to act unhurriedly but to be decisive even if the decision is to do nothing. Sometimes to do more than one is in fact doing. . . . Governments similarly face demands for action,' and therefore 'politicians need some of the skills of masterly inactivity as doctors.' The answer,' Owen suggested, 'is for politicians to be more open in explaining the limits of any action and the downsides of any intervention . . . politicians will have to show more restraint in calling on the UN to debate and pass resolutions as their equivalent of the pink medicine to delay action.'

All the while, the Major administration steadfastly denied that anything short of a massive ground intervention could check Serb attacks. A phalanx of military experts in the media and in government dismissed the American idea of 'lift and strike' — that is lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnian government and evening the odds through Nato air strikes — as impractical. British officers 'on the ground' with Unprofor became mired in a debilitating stagfight' with Nato hawks determined to engage the Serbs. These same British experts and soldiers routinely and systematically inflated the fighting power of the Bosnian Serbs and underestimated that of the Bosnians and Croats.

Relations with the United States in the Security Council, at Nato headquarters and bilaterally plummeted to a level not seen since the Suez crisis of 1956. Nato lurched into crisis. The US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, was famously sent away from Chevening with his tail between his legs in 1993; transatlantic slanging matches between Malcolm Rifkind and conservative Congressmen outraged at British 'appeasement' of Serbia became routine. To this day the US representative at Nato, Dr Robert Hunter, is puzzled: 'It took me a while to realise that the real stumbling block to the use of air power was Britain, and they were doing it from motives I didn't clearly understand.' One US State Department official put it even more strongly: 'I learned to treat Britain as a hostile power. Britain was prepared to go to the wall against us on Bosnia — out to block anything, everything. I came to think of the British like having the Russians around the State Department.' The terrible irony was that all this was visited not on a rabble of student radicals but on a Conservative administration that prided itself on its Atlanticist credentials.

By 1995 British policy in Bosnia was collapsing under its own absurdity. London continued to argue that Bosnians should not be allowed to protect themselves because that would endanger the troops who had been sent to protect them, but had failed to do so. The Major administra tion insisted that Britain should not only abandon the legitimate Bosnian government to its fate, but also that it should do all in its power to prevent the Americans from coming to its aid, even at the price of a catastrophic transatlantic rift. Bizarrely, while there was apparently no British national interest in saving the Bosnians from aggression and ethnic cleansing, there seemed to be great reserves of political will and invective to prevent the Americans from doing so. Britain, as the Nato spokesman Jamie Shea observed, had become gripped by a 'Bridge Over the River Kw-ai syndrome', determined to defend an edifice which had long since ceased to serve any useful purpose.

In the end, the Americans simply bulldozed British objections aside and launched a sustained air campaign which, in conjunction with the Bosnians and Croats on the ground, soon put the Serbs to flight. They were helped by the arrival of General Sir Rupert Smith as commander of Unprofor. He was determined to 'break the machine': to escape the vicious circle of appeasement, vulnerability and inaction that had dogged the operation from the start. And whereas the humanitarian effort had cost the lives of some 20 British servicemen in 1993-95, the enforcement operation — effectively a war — against the Bosnian Serbs led to no military fatalities at all.

British policy on Bosnia was clearly an intellectual failure, but it was also a failure of will, unthinkable in the Thatcher decade. As Richard Perle, an American conservative now much in the news and a strong supporter of the Sarajevo government, observed apropos of Bosnia: 'It was nothing like the Thatcher administration. The Major government was a very weak govern

ment.' Likewise Lord Renwick, ambassador to Washington throughout the war, recalls that 'our own government constantly tried to do what it saw as honourable things, but . . it didn't seem to me to have the full Thatcherite sense of purpose in the sense that she understood the sort of people we were dealing with and that you could only deal with those people one way.' Lady Thatcher herself was a doughty but sadly marginalised critic of the appeasement policy whose dramatic interventions in the summer of 1992, and especially around Faster 1993, generated a media furore but no change in policy.

The political ghosts of Bosnia were exorcised during Kosovo, and finally laid to rest in Kabul. But many of the British attitudes that led to the Bosnian fiasco persist, and were briefly reinvigorated over the past six weeks. Then, as now, the punditocracy vastly overestimated the enemy and underestimated the effectiveness of US air power. Then, as now, sneering at American 'cowboy' tactics was comme II foot. Then, as now, there has been a tendency to thumanitarianise" a politico-strategic problem. For, unlike the US, Britain has still not learnt to wage an effective proxy war through the judicious use of overwhelming air power, arms deliveries and special forces. The dispatch of British troops — uninvited — to Bagram air base shows that the old obsession with 'troops on the ground' dies hard. As in Bosnia, a humanitarian operation may prove more costly and less effective than waging war.

Brendan Simms is the author of Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, and Tutor for Admissions and Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge.