Blair’s Monstrous Consistency <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/>
Posted on January 30th, 2010 by Daniel Larison But the failure to achieve a second, explicit, U.N. resolution was a political problem, not a legal obstacle. Few of the anti-war movement care to recall that the Kosovan War was, if anything, predicated upon a flimsier legal case than the Iraqi intervention. ~Alex Massie <http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-29/blair-under-fire/full/> One of the reasons why I keep revisiting the illegality and immorality of the intervention in Kosovo long after most people have forgotten about it is precisely because so many opponents of the Iraq war don’t want to acknowledge that Kosovo was every bit as unjustifiable and wrong as Iraq was. By endorsing the war in Kosovo even now, as Obama did again in Oslo, many opponents of the Iraq war have opened themselves up to the attack that Iraq hawks were using from the beginning. If someone pointed out that invading Iraq would violate international law and not have U.N. sanction, the hawks would throw the precedent of Kosovo in his face. Unless he was a principled progressive or antiwar conservative, the opponent of the invasion was always at a loss to respond. If invading Iraq was based on phony or exaggerated intelligence about WMDs, Kosovo was based on lies about preventing genocide and protecting human rights. Unless you are among the fairly small percentage that opposed both, the odds are that you are outraged over invading Iraq in inverse proportion to how outraged you were over bombing Serbia. Inexplicably, Kosovo is remembered across much of the spectrum, especially the center-left, as a great success, despite having been disastrous for the very people it was supposed to help and despite being based on lies every bit as blatant and outrageous as the invasion of Iraq. As it hapened, Blair was Prime Minister during Britain’s participation in both wars of aggression. As far back as 1999, he has been the chief proponent of liberal interventionism aimed at subverting the normal protections of international law afforded to sovereign states, and he continues to be an outspoken advocate for killing foreigners for their own benefit. What is disheartening about all this is not just that Blair will never be held to account for his responsibility for the war in Iraq, but that he has never had to answer for or defend his decision to support an unprovoked, unnecessary war of aggression against Serbia. Even though the air war led to the expulsions of Albanians from Kosovo it was meant to prevent, and even though the “negotiations” at Rambouillet involved delivering an intolerable ultimatum designed to start a war, this criminal operation continues to enjoy support or indifference from most Westerners. There were no allied casualties, and the war was brief, so there was little time for the publics in NATO nations to grow weary and disgusted with their criminal leaders. The war was over relatively quickly, so the media lost interest in the false atrocity stories that the Clinton administration used in its war propaganda, and the previous decade of constant anti-Serb coverage made the public receptive to whatever lies the administration wanted to tell. What I can say about Blair is that he has been quite consistent. State sovereignty and international did not matter to him in 1999, and they didn’t matter to him later in 2002-03. Given his remarks at the Chilcot inquiry about Iran, I am quite sure that he would have no difficulty supporting and even joining in an illegal attack on Iran were he still a minister in the British government. This makes him one of the most unabashed, unapologetic advocates of aggressive war alive today, and I’m not sure that this requires much courage when there have been and continue to be absolutely no consequences, legal or otherwise, for his actions. Filed under: foreign policy <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/category/foreign-policy/> , politics <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/category/politics/> 7 Responses to “Blair’s Monstrous Consistency” 1. NauticalMongoose, on January 30th, 2010 at 10:52 pm <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/#comment-35112> Said: I am finding it unusually difficult to find a good source discussing the Kosovo War (I am woefully ignorant about this event). Does anyone have any suggestions? I would prefer a ‘just the facts’ account from which I can draw my own conclusions. 2. David Tomlin, on January 31st, 2010 at 1:34 am <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/#comment-35114> Said: [The Kosovo intervention was] disastrous for the very people it was supposed to help . . . I was always opposed to the Balkan interventions, but I am at a loss as to what this is about. Do you mean the ethnic cleansing of the non-Albanians? For the Kosovo Albanians, we might speculate on whether they would have fared better absent the intervention. I don’t know of any facts that would remotely justify describing their present situation as ‘disastrous’. 3. David Tomlin, on January 31st, 2010 at 1:51 am <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/#comment-35115> Said: Sorry, I wrote the previous comment before finishing the post. My curiosity was piqued by the quoted sentence, and I was assuming it referred to the outcome of the intervention rather than events during the intervention itself. 4. Brett, on January 31st, 2010 at 2:36 am <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/#comment-35116> Said: I always figured the intervention was basically the US and European way of trying to avoid letting “humanitarian intervention” completely die on the vine. It had already taken body blows from the 1994 Rwandan genocide that they’d ignored, as well as the Bosnian civil war that they ignored until multiple massacres later – hardly signs of people supposedly dedicated to intervening to stop such things. One more blow, or perceived blow (since that was what it was) might have irrevocably damaged it, and that was unacceptable to that crowd. 5. herb, on January 31st, 2010 at 1:44 pm <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/#comment-35124> Said: Please expand on the “lies” NATO used to illegally fight an air war against Serbia. I know a lot about this subject, and it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve heard any of this “Kosovo was illegal” stuff, mostly from you. You mentioned “false atrocity stories that the Clinton administration used in its war propaganda.” Do you have any examples? I know for a fact that “false atrocity stories” were used by all sides in the Yugoslav conflict, but I also know that there are many very true atrocity stories that came out of Vukovar, Srebrenica, Osijek, and Sarajevo. 6. Daniel Larison <http://larison.org> , on January 31st, 2010 at 2:08 pm <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/#comment-35127> Said: The “massacre” at Racak was a key part of Clinton’s justification for intervening. The massacre was staged by the KLA. It never happened. There is no evidence that there was a systematic or extensive policy of ethnic cleansing in the works. The Serbs had been fighting a low-level counterinsurgency against a rather nasty gang of criminals for a year, and that was it. The administration had even labeled the KLA a terrorist group the year before it took their side, because this is what it was. Clinton portrayed intervention as something he did grudgingly to halt genocide, but there was no genocide to halt. He had given the Serbs an ultimatum to let NATO have the run of their country, and like any self-respecting state they refused. Then the bombing began shortly afterwards. If you have never heard arguments that bombing Serbia was illegal until the last year, I submit that you haven’t followed the discussion about it very closely. As for the remark about being a disaster for the people it was supposed to help, I was referring to massive refugee crisis that the war created as hundreds of thousands of Albanians were driven out of Kosovo by a combination of the air campaign and Serbian military units. The mass expulsions that the campaign was designed to prevent were the very things that the campaign hastened and facilitated. Soon thereafter, the Albanians returned to Kosovo, but I would call the effort a pretty dramatic failure if the goal was to prevent the mass expulsion of Albanians. What bombing Serbia achieved was to detach part of its own territory by force and establish a de facto partition that Western powers then formalized with their recognition of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in early 2008. That in turn contributed to the escalating conflict between Russia and Georgia, as Russia aimed to exact some revenge on one of our satellites for what we had done to one of theirs. All in all, Western policy on Kosovo has been appalling, and it has created a horrible precedent for the future. Of course, it was precisely that precedent that Russia exploited in the 2008 war with Georgia. Serbia was penalized for attempting to suppress a separatist rebellion inside its own borders. It was a purely internal affair, and no state or alliance of states had any right, legal or otherwise, to launch military strikes against Serbia. It was never sanctioned by the Security Council in any way, and the war violated both the U.N. Charter and had no authorization under the North Atlantic Treaty. In addition, the President had no constitutional authority to wage war against Serbia, but why get hung up on technicalities like that? 7. David Tomlin, on January 31st, 2010 at 3:45 pm <http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/#comment-35128> Said: Forensic teams from various countries went in right after the NATO forces, counting bodies and exhuming mass graves (defined as any grave with more than one body). Within months it was clear that the death toll was a fraction of that claimed by the KLA, and repeated uncritically by the Clinton administration and the media. In one case a disused mine allegedly used to dispose of bodies was examined, and no bodies nor any trace of decomposition fluids was found. The Kosovo ‘genocide’ was as thoroughly debunked as the Iraqi WMD, but, as Larison noted, by then media interest had moved on. If anyone wants sourcing, Google is your friend. http://www.amconmag.com/larison/2010/01/30/blairs-monstrous-consistency/
