>
> Subject:       Open letter to Tony Blair
>
> HUGH MACDONALD ASSOCIATES
> RESEARCH CONSULTANTS IN INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
> 19 NORTON CLOSE
> OXFORD
> OX3 7BQ
>
> 2 May 1999
>
> Rt. Hon. Tony Blair
> 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
> President by 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 actually diminished 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