Open letter to Tony Blair

HUGH MACDONALD ASSOCIATES
RESEARCH CONSULTANTS
IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
19 NORTON CLOSE
OXFORD 
OX3 7BQ

Rt. Hon. Tony Blair 2 May 1999
Prime Minister
10 Downing St.
London SW1

Dear Tony,

This is an open letter to you.

As a long-standing member of the Labour Party, and an expert in international 
security with direct experience of Milosevic's Serbia, I write about the 
unsustainable claims you have been making for a moral foreign policy; and the 
clear, measurable, damage to our national interests and to international 
security which are resulting.

The inept military strategy NATO has adopted in the Kosovo crisis stems 
importantly if not exclusively from moral confusion and holy foolhardiness. 
This has hopelessly derailed the strategic and moral ends which the allies 
ought to have been seeking, namely a practical and effective political 
settlement.

Irrespective of whether the alliance goes on to extort an absolute victory,
or settles for a limited outcome, the attached paper estimates the
consequences so far of the policy constructed by you.

I am appalled by ethnic cleansing wherever it occurs. The UN Charter and 
Security Council should be reformed so as to make abuses under the Universal 
Declaration matters prima facie requiring the exercise of Chapter VII powers.

Yet in twelve years since the effective end of the Cold War, no serious
reform of the UN has occurred. The Permanent Members, including Britain, are
locked in a protracted struggle over their national interests. And the most
powerful Permanent Member, the US, absolutely refuses to subject any of its
capabilities or interests to stronger forms of international law.

'New internationalism' therefore seeks to operate through an institution,
NATO, that depends largely on the US and Britain. Such new internationalism
is not 
deserving of the name, and it is profoundly silly of a British Prime Minister 
to propagate such a doctrine.

In the first place it cannot hope to represent, and will therefore rightly be 
rejected by, the vast populations and societies that will never belong to
NATO.

Attaching a moral mission to NATO opens the world's most powerful military 
alliance to the leadership of fanatics, whether Generals, Foreign Ministers, 
Prime Ministers or Presidents. The rest of the world is bound to say 'Thanks, 
but no thanks'. And many NATO governments will quietly say the same.

The conduct of this war has violently demonstrated what many of us have been 
saying for years if not decades: that NATO is a shambolic institution
covering over important differences that naturally occur among sovereign
states. As presently structured it is incapable of conducting a meaningful 
diplomatic-military strategy through the use of force, or of setting and 
pursuing military aims that are beyond the limits of consensus in advanced 
liberal-democratic societies.

Your attempt to hijack that consensus through claims of 'genocide' is both a 
flop in the context, and a dangerous misappropriation of the most extremely 
sensitive word in the twentieth century lexicon. Genocide means, 'the 
systematic extermination of an entire people whether on grounds of its
ethnic, religious or social characteristics'. You are well aware that this
word acquired a special significance for the civilised world because of the
Shoa; 
because of what Hitler's Reich sought to do to the Jewish people.

What is happening to the Kosovo Albanians is terrible; but it is not genocide.

NATO fulfilled a profoundly important purpose when it is focussed on a threat 
to all member states. But NATO acting as "Globocop" without UN Security
Council endorsement is extremely dangerous.

NATO might have been able to play a crucial role on behalf of the United 
Nations in many local and regional conflicts. The chances of that happening
now have been heavily damaged.

Historically, it was one of Britain's most useful if unheralded roles during 
the Cold War to counter ideological excesses by 'mad bombers' of whatever 
national stripe. It is particularly distressing, therefore, to witness a 
British Prime Minister pleading for war, for the continuation of war, for the 
widening of war, for NATO to go on pursuing its original, inappropriate, 
unsustainable war aims.

And how far do you want to go on fighting? To the last American Marine 
Division?

This is a war eagerly foisted on a reluctant and distracted American
Presidentby irresponsible European leaders who convinced the White House
that a victory would be rapidly delivered. Forty days later we hear NATO
leaders
telling us that, on the one hand, the military campaign is having greater
success every 
day; and on the other that, unfortunately, the constraints placed on NATO 
military actions are reducing the efficiency of air power; by which we all
know is meant, 'we cannot hit civilian targets'.

Even this is a half-truth to cover a blatant strategic blunder. What
prevented NATO from striking Yugoslav military forces in the field in
Kosovo at the outset? It was the knowledge that there would be heavier
military
casualties on the NATO side. The wrong military strategy was adopted on
wrong-headed military reasoning.

Experimenting with the use of force in the Yugoslav crisis, with the
underlying purpose of establishing a new intra-western balance between the
US and EU, is irresponsible almost beyond belief. Yet that is the thrust of
the Report 
carried by the IHT on Friday 30 April.

NATO, unable to bargain its way through a crisis of the use of force, is 
consequently unable to adjust its objectives to changing possibilities. This 
directly causes escalation and irrationality.

We all watched American leaders struggling with the same phenomenon in
Vietnam.

Run by what one (Israeli) commentator terms 'dime-a-dozen generals, diplomats 
and politicians' (or what you call 'the mature generation of 1968'), NATO is 
capable of bankrupting even the greatest economic boom the world has known. 
Requiring $30-40 billion to destroy and then necessarily rebuild a renegade 
state of 12 million people, as Serbia is deemed to be, and with as many as 50 
such situations arising now or in the foreseeable future, it will not take
long for the new internationalism to need a very big overdraft.

Two other of the many problems with your moral stance are as follows.

Firstly, it is open-eyed to some outrages, and blind to others.

NATO's figure of 2,000 casualties on all sides in Kosovo during 1998 
demonstrates that the civil war was not larger and worse than, for example,
the ongoing civil wars in eastern Anatolia or Colombia. And it was far less
bad than the situation in Algeria, or many others further south in the
African 
continent. Is it then purely coincidental that you choose to focus on a 
relatively weak nearby regime you happen to oppose for entirely different, 
highly political, reasons?

Let us recollect that various of your Ministers, including notably the
Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Overseas Development,
agitated persistently to 'bomb the Serbs' during the civil war in Bosnia.

I have today gone through all of the main documents published by the OSCE-KVM 
during the period October 1998-March 1999. These suggest that the violence 
against civilians in Kosovo did not increase and actuallydiminished as the 
verification Mission increased is size and scope.

Official figures, put out by the OSCE-KVM and cited by the State Department, 
show that there were virtually no deaths of civilians not directly implicated 
in military actions in Kosovo during the early months of 1999. The average 
daily number of deaths may have been 15-20. This is unacceptable, and
deserves the attention and involvement of international agencies. But it is
not by any means an unparalleled situation, even in post-war Europe.

What did increase during this period was the scope and power of the Yugoslav 
Army's operations against the Kosovo Liberation Army.

As you know, and history will not hide this, the KLA's military actions grew 
not because it was the most representative voice of the Albanian people; nor 
because Milosevic's repressive regime became more violent in Kosovo. They
grew because Albania collapsed in 1997, becoming more and more dependent on
the US; and because Croatia, sustained and financed by sources in various
western 
countries, became an ever larger and more flagrantly open conduit of arms and 
advice to the KLA.

Hence actual conditions in Kosovo, however tense and with whatever potential 
for exploding, cannot in any way morally or legally justify putting down an 
ultimatum to a sovereign government; cannot justify resorting to bombing 
without warning or declaration of war; cannot justify taking military action 
against areas and installations completely unconnected to the province 
experiencing the civil and military emergency; and, to repeat, cannot justify 
action by a military alliance with no juridical locus standi in the conflict, 
and without reference to the UN Security Council.

The second main moral issue can be stated in this question; how do you
propose translating 'fighting for a new internationalism' beyond European
parochial bounds?

Most NATO countries, especially America which believes that it invented and
has a natural monopoly on the concept, are not interested in this. Britain
has no capacity to do it alone. The EU lacks a constitution for 'moral foreign
policy' in CFSP. After the present debacle it is less rather than more
likely it will be able to agree such an ambitious framework.

So, when, for example, Indonesia shortly falls into a far worse orgy of 
killings than anything seen in Kosovo before NATO began its campaign, what 
action will you insist the international community takes?

This is a terribly serious question. Even in the Kosovo war Britain's 
operational military capabilities have been shown to have decisive 
shortcomings. The strategic understanding may be there. The experience of 
history and the willingness to take greater risks and losses may be there.
The desire to see a radically reformed world may be there (at least in the
heads of a handful of temporarily powerful social democrats). But where is the
military delivery capability? Where are the bombs and the planes and the
divisions? Where is there evidence that if the Americans were not paying
ninety per-cent 
of the cost, and digging deep into their stockpiles of the most advanced 
weapons, Britain and the other European NATO members would be able to 
successfully challenge, let alone defeat, lowly, backward Yugoslavia?

Britain's standing in the NATO alliance, and the worldwide interests ofthis 
country, are being profoundly damaged by your administration.

The cause is clear: it lies in hyperbole of language; persistent lobbying for 
things that we are unable to perform on our own; unwillingness to recognise 
that failure to attain goals effectively means there is something wrong with 
the way such goals are being pursued; and arrogant insensitivity to the way 
that 'ethical foreign policy', as practised in India, Israel, Africa or 
Yugoslavia, rides roughshod into cultural and political sensitivities,
creating appalling messes that officials need months (or years) to rectify.

At the recent NATO Summit you came close to suffering, and may yet suffer,
the worst humiliation a Prime Minister has suffered at the hands of an
American President since Suez.

You should be distressed by this, but hardly surprised: every situation your 
know-all Foreign Minister and visionary amateur advisors engage with will 
crumble in their hands.

If you truly believe the policy you are following in Yugoslavia has a moral 
foundation, then you ought to state clearly and consistently that the aim of 
Britain's moral foreign policy is to employ coercive means against ALL
obdurate governments in the Balkan region of Europe, so as to reverse ALL
of the ethnic cleansing that has occurred since 1990; and explicitly
include in your 
strictures notice to Croatia that it must fully reverse the ethnic
cleansing of all Serbs from Croatia (600,000-800,000 people); and to
Bosnia-Herzegovina that it must fully reverse the ethnic cleansing of
Serbs, Croats and
Slav-muslims from Sarajevo, districts around Sarajevo, and other
territories controlled by 
the Croat-Muslim Federation, as well as reversing the ethnic cleansing 
undertaken in the territories of Republika Srpska (1.5-2.0 million people in 
total).

This would be very popular with vast numbers of Serbs. It would more 
effectively diminish support for the Milosevic regime than all the bombs in 
NATO's arsenal.

On the issues of its prudence and attainability, I trust you will seek and
take advice on from your most experienced professional foreign policy
advisors.

In this dreadful moral and strategic shambles I recognise that power and 
leadership are not easily exercised; and far prefer an honest and open
society to any alternative. Hence if I might be able to assist in
elaborating a constructive and peaceful way through this situation, to
something better for 
all of us on the other side, I trust you will feel able to approach me.

Yours sincerely,

Hugh Macdonald
=======================================================

ATTACHED PAPER FOLLOWS

The Kosovo crisis: law, morality and strategy

NATO has found itself without a sound and prudent interpretation of 
international law. This makes it inter alia inordinately difficult to operate 
effective sanctions against Milosevic in the context of ethnic cleansing in 
Kosovo.

It strengthens the argument that states can resort to the use of force
outside the constraints of the UN Charter.

It raises the question whether NATO would have played so fast and loose
with a country in possession of stronger defences, and, most importantly,
medium-range or intermediate-range SSM. In the security perspective of the
prosperous societies in Europe the most dangerous arms proliferation trend
is via these 
technologies.

The UN Security Council has been bypassed, which establishes a precedent
other great powers will use in future, conceivably to the great detriment of
western security. China vis-a-vis Taiwan is one likely instance.

The Secretary General has been insulted, whilst his muted remonstrances and 
diffident actions make him appear as a catspaw of NATO's will.

The sense in which the NATO allies can speak on behalf of the international 
community, politically or morally, has been vitiated. It is clear they do not 
speak for Russia or China or India or Indonesia, which, leaving aside the
rest, constitute well over half of humanity.

This runs a coach and horses through repeated assertions that, "In this 
conflict we are fighting for a new internationalism where the brutal
repression of whole ethnic groups will not be tolerated".

The Russians have been deeply alienated. This will affect their domestic 
politics and their international conduct in Europe and in other regions. 
Yeltsin's capacity to influence his own succession is reduced. Nationalism 
increases. Military influences in foreign relations grow. Collaboration with 
the west is cramped. There will be a renewed search for distinctive interests 
in the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia and other regions.
Collaboration with China, Iran, Iraq and other states actively opposed to the 
western-dominated international order will become less accessible to
influence. Loans from the IMF will not affect that significantly.

The Balkans have been seriously destabilised. On one hand the genie of 
great-Albanian nationalism is now out of the bottle. On the other, twelve 
million Serbs and whatever government they live under in future will enter a 
stage of socio-economic and political alienation from which only evil powers 
intent on the further long-term undermining of Europe may benefit. Quite
apart from Milosevic's so-called "Samson option" (which is frightening),
Serbian national opposition to America and NATO will increase. No "puppet
regime"
will endure in Belgrade. This vanquishes the central if unstated goal of US
strategy towards Yugoslavia since the demise of Titoism, which has been to
re-subject Serbia to control by the western powers.

The humanitarian disasters of ethnic cleansing which have scarred the region 
since 1990 have been further exacerbated, with little realistic prospect that 
the process can be more than minimally reversed. Nor is it clear that NATO 
leaders want to reverse earlier stages of ethnic cleansing, which affected
some 2.5-3.5 million Slav-muslims, Serbs and Croats. That casts doubt on the 
sincerity of the claim that NATO is not directing its power exclusively
against Serbia or the Serbian nation.

The operational military strategy followed by NATO is setting a series of 
examples from which both terrorist-backed independence movements and
repressive dictatorships can draw  inspiration (pace the mounting civil
strife in Indonesia).

Estimated military costs of the war so far range upwards from $10 billion. 
Economic damage and loss of trade may amount to as much again. Long-term 
reconstruction in the region, if the EU carries through on its recently
stated aim, is thought to require $30 billion. These costs will be measured
in the foregoing of other more productive economic and social goals in NATO
countries in the near future.

Having destroyed Serbia, if it comes to that, the western powers will be 
obliged to promptly rebuild it; otherwise, there will be a further twist to
the development gulf that has turned low levels of living in so many
countries Romania, Macedonia, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia (and now also
Serbia?) into 
proximate causes of ethnic nationalist hatred and war.

An alienated, destroyed and impoverished Serbia, having lost Kosovo, may be a 
far more serious "renegade state" than it supposedly is today under Milosevic.

In those conditions what is to stop Hungarians from pressing for independence 
for Vojvodina? What is to discourage Croatia from renewing its never-lost 
historic mission of dominating Bosnia? Even if all the Balkan states are 
brought into the EU and NATO, how are their conflicts going to be less severe 
than, say, those between Greece and Turkey?

If the western powers build up Serbia again, as a necessary foundation of 
regional balance, will Serbian nationalism be diminished rather than 
strengthened? Nobody who understands the Serbs would predict so. And
anyway, it will be asked, what did we go to war for in the first place? To
replace Milosevic with a stronger nationalist? To give Kosovo independence
to become 
the core of an unstable new Albania?

Despite effective temporary alliance solidarity it is clear that NATO has 
absolutely no idea what its objectives are or ought to be. Beyond blindly 
insisting that its initial unrealistic political conditions for a
"settlement" (which would have settled nothing) are met, what is the
alliance hoping to achieve by this war? This question has no clear answer,
let alone one
agreed by all countries. Alliance solidarity is therefore unreal and
figmentary. Moral hectoring of public opinion in alliance societies,
particularly on the
issue of widening the war to involve large-scale ground forces, has failed
to gain sustainable support.

While bearing the brunt of snatching Europe's folie de grandeur from the
brink of defeat, the United States will not sacrifice its military men and
women in large numbers for a cause that has no electoral significance.

At the core of what NATO tried doing on 24 March were two incredibly flawed 
strategic assessments, namely that air power alone could stop Yugoslavia from 
subjugating Kosovo's territory and people to its military will; and that 
Milosevic's political control and social support inside Serbia would be 
decisively weakened by bombing Belgrade.

Whatever rhetoric accompanies this assessment, by way of justifying a
surprise attack on a sovereign state and the absence of any recourse to a
mandate from the UN, the use of force itself must be justified by a
probability of success 
in achieving its aims. Indeed that is one of the stipulative conditions for a 
war to be a just war (ius ad bellum).

The history of air power gives no example of air power alone overwhelming a 
sovereign power, other than when it is used deliberately against a civilian 
population as an instrument of imposing final defeat.

The history of warfare in conditions of industrial society shows that
surprise attack together with limited aims strengthens support for a national 
leadership.

The lame and vacuous claims that in the case of Serbia these things could not 
be known in advance, or that intelligence sources suggested otherwise, merely 
show that post-modern globalising leaders no longer read or understand
history.

While concentrating on the inscrutable depths of Milosevic's political
machine, nobody took account of what the millions of Serbs who live in open
societies in the west were telling anyone who spoke to them, which was that
use of force against Serbia over Kosovo would be tantamount to an attack on
the entire 
nation.

The claim that the initiation of this war can be morally justified is negated 
by these facts. It was known beforehand that the risk of failure of Nato's 
strategic plan was very great. It was known beforehand that in the event of 
failure there would be a huge humanitarian catastrophe inside Kosovo. To the 
extent that such risks were discounted by political leaders the basis of NATO 
strategy is not only illegal and ineffectual; it is morally unacceptable as 
well.

Widening the war against Serbia, as NATO feels compelled to do (with no 
additional moral reasoning), means an exponential growth of ethnic hatred 
between the Orthodox and Muslim worlds, in the Balkans and beyond. This risks 
spreading to Russia and Central Asia as well.

Not to have a morally acceptable alternative strategy, other than to continue 
escalating the war in search of an absolute victory, is a second great 
violation of just war principles (ius in bello).

Specifically, such just war rules as proportionality of harm and double
effect mean that if the means adopted do not realise the envisaged ends it
is not morally acceptable to continue inflicting unjustifiable harm on an
enemy,
still less on innocent civilians who are caught up in the struggle.

Hence even if was genuinely but mistakenly thought NATO had a good moral 
position at the outset, it no longer has one. Moral reasoning requires NATO
to change its strategy.

Rejecting offers of mediation while continuing to exercise force against a 
wider set of targets shows that maintaining Nato's cohesion is a more
important goal than any humanitarian consideration. Yet by this NATO also
demonstrates that its military planning lacked any credible diplomatic
accompaniment to a 
strategy of coercion.

Blind insistence on unconditional fulfilment of five war aims through weeks
of bombing, while hundreds of thousands of civilians have been driven from
Kosovo or out of their homes, cannot be justified as a moral strategy. It
is the antithesis of strategy; an elephantine return to the machtpolitik
that the 
great powers employed in their colonial wars during previous centuries.

To pretend that the use of force for political ends is motivated only or 
largely by moral aims only fools and confuses the western leaders who
demand of their military servants a plan, without alternatives, for doing
something that military force has never done in history before - to
forcibly restore
people to their homes, rather than forcibly evicting them from their homes.

Despite NATO military intervention in Bosnia in 1995, the creation of today's 
SFOR, and the expenditure of several billion dollars, very few of those 
ethnically cleansed in previous years have returned to their homes. Nor will 
they: violence changes people, and things, whether it is intended for good or 
for evil.

The self-confusion which this situation has created in the minds of the holy 
fools who direct NATO strategy is nowhere more vividly shown than in the 
oft-repeated assertion that in this "just war" NATO is not actually at war at 
all.

A moral foreign policy cannot simply cut into a moral quagmire like this, 
determining what is "acceptable" and what is "unacceptable" ethnic cleansing. 
The argument that "you have to start somewhere" is NOT a moral argument.

A moral argument has to start with a moral principle. If, "You have to start 
somewhere" is made into a moral argument (e.g. in moral pragmatism) then you 
must show that it is going to take you somewhere else that is morally 
preferable.

The only sensible conjunction between force, politics and ethics is that of
the great German military thinker, Clausewitz, whose formulation is that
"nobody starts a war, or at least nobody in their right mind ought to start
a war, 
without first knowing what he intends to achieve by it, and how he proposes
to fight it".

Knowing that the strategy NATO was adopting had a low probability of rapid 
success, and carried a high risk of catastrophic side-effects, where was the 
morally acceptable, pre-planned, alternative? Plan "B"? The "exit strategy"? 
The only answer given is that the alternative plan is the existing plan. The 
last time we heard that from a western government at war was when the
people of Vietnam and Cambodia were being bombed into the stone age.

Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.

    Dr. Hugh Macdonald
    Senior Research Associate
    School of Economic and Social Studies
    University of East Anglia, UK

    Visiting Scholar
    BESA Centre for Strategic Studies
    Bar Ilan University, Israel

    30 April, 1999