Brendan Simms’ “Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia” was the definitive book on Bosnia, outlining the shabby policies of the Major government in particular and the EU in general as they sat back and watched the ethnic cleansing of Milosevic’s thugs, refusing even to allow the Bosnian Muslims to defend themselves. Here he looks at the unhappy situation in Kosovo, but insists intervention was necessary – as it was in Iraq:
It may well be that, as the former British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd has argued, Kosovo represented the high-water mark of international intervention. However, the recent elections in Afghanistan, for all their faults, confounded the sceptics; they would not have been possible without the removal of the Taleban. But the template of robust humanitarian intervention and regime change has not transferred easily to Iraq. Clearly, having gone to war on a genuinely-held but false premise about Saddam Hussein’s WMD does not help. The invasion should have been more explicitly couched as an overdue humanitarian intervention to remove a murderous tyrant, whose crimes far exceeded those of Milosevic.
One thing, however, is clear. Intervention in the Balkans disproves the notion that American foreign policy, or the variant espoused by neoconservatives, is somehow intrinsically anti-Muslim. If it were not for the United States, those who voted on Saturday would now be refugees or dead. Anybody who knows this will not be surprised that the most Muslim area in Europe, Kosovo, should also be the most pro-American and the most supportive of the War on Terror; there were certainly no “stop the war” protests in Kosovo. Bosnia and Kosovo remain examples of what Western intervention can and should do.
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