<nettime> Blair's Humanitarian Jihad (Fwd)

[Chris Byrne <chris@cryptic.demon.co.uk>]

WHY BLAIR'S 'HUMANITARIAN' WAR IS EVEN WORSE

Mick Hume, LM editor

For the first time, a Labour prime minister leads Britain into a major
international war. What's more, Tony Blair is being cheered on loudest by
the 'peacenik' Guardian and 'Red' Ken Livingstone, while Tory MPs and the
Daily Mail worry about the war. If anybody still doubts that the era of
traditional right v left politics has ended, let them inspect the evidence
in the craters Bomber Blair and his NATO allies have left behind in Serbia.

Some on the old left see this as a case of New Labour taking over the
mantle of Thatcher-style militarism. But it is worse than that. The grim
truth is that those who now wage war in the name of humanitarianism are
even more dangerous than the old war parties.

Blair himself has made clear that the war against Milosevic's Serbia 'is no
longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between Good and Evil;
between civilisation and barbarity'.

In such a fundamental battle, the righteous do not feel themselves
constrained in the way one might do during a mere 'military conflict'.

Traditional right-wing militarists might have tailored their battle
strategy to take account of the needs of realpolitik and diplomacy; after
all, their wars were only supposed to uphold their national interests.
Blair's war, on the other hand, is a grand mission to save humanity. And
when you are running such a high-minded crusade, you need recognise no
restraints on the ground. Those who proclaim that they have right on their
side can do no wrong.

That is why, as they drop their cluster bombs and fire their Cruise
missiles from the vantage point of the moral high ground, Blair and his
ministers and generals refuse even to consider that NATO's missions are
killing people and destroying a country. They are simply 'degrading' the
'killing machine' of the evil Milosevic. Confronted with the fact that
their war has caused a catastrophe in Kosovo, they insist that NATO air
strikes are actually preventing a humanitarian disaster. Faced with the
hard evidence of how NATO bombing raids have reduced areas of the Kosovan
capital, Pristina, to rubble, they say that the Serbs must have inflicted
the damage themselves.

If NATO's Good Humanitarians believe that they are necessarily innocent of
any offence, then they are equally certain that the Evil Serbs must be
guilty of everything of which they have been accused. So foreign secretary
Robin Cook, defence secretary George Robertson and their media mouthpieces
report as fact every horror story coming out of the war zone.

And when these are proved to be untrue (as when 'executed' ethnic Albanian
leaders turn up alive; a Pristina football stadium housing a 'concentration
camp' of 10 000 is found to be empty; or the school where '20 teachers were
murdered in front of their pupils' turns out to be in a village of only 200
people), they refuse to admit it. Why worry about the facts when there is
always another unsubstantiated atrocity tale that can justify sending in
helicopter gunships for the cause of Good?

If there is no restraint on the conduct of Blair's humanitarian war, there
can be no questioning of it either. Uncooperative BBC journalists are
accused of aiding the evil Milosevic, while Serb TV is threatened with
bombing unless it starts broadcasting NATO propaganda. Norman Tebbit was a
champion of free speech by comparison to this.

This war is not about Kosovo. It is an out-of-control moral crusade, which
Blair went into without any clear war aims; a war launched on the premise
that Something Must Be Done to demonstrate how his ethical New Britain
bestrides the world as a force for Good. It is a crusade which has taken on
a dynamic of its own, jacking up the military stakes along with the
righteous rhetoric, as the KLA is transformed from a proscribed terrorist
organisation into an unofficial member of the NATO alliance, and more NATO
ground troops are sent to the region - purely for humanitarian purposes, of
course.

Through all this, the loudest criticism which Bomber Blair has had to cope
with from most of the erstwhile peace lobby is that NATO should make more
war against Serbia, not less. The crusading journalists, actors and others
of the liberal left are now getting what they have demanded for much of the
past decade - a humanitarian Jihad against the Serbs. In their certainty
that NATO is on the side of the angels, they insist that still more
ruthless intervention is the only solution for Kosovo.

Yet a rational look back at the trouble that has afflicted the former
Yugoslavia through the 1990s would surely draw the opposite conclusion.
Since 1991, outside intervention has done nothing but exacerbate, inflame
and perpetuate the conflicts across all of the former Yugoslav republics.
Kosovo is the last act of a Yugoslav tragedy made in the West.

Those who want to ignore that lesson, and insist instead that they have a
moral responsibility to do 'something' over Kosovo, might like to note Noam
Chomsky's recent evocation of the Hippocratic principle: 'First, do no harm.'

But then, humanitarian NATO air strikes don't do any harm, do they?

-----------------

There will be a demonstration against the NATO bombings on Sunday 11 April,
meeting at 12 noon at Victoria Embankment in London; and also on Saturday
17 April, meeting at 1pm at Speakers' Corner, Marble Arch, London



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