by Blair, Tony
Finally, in March, military action was taken, in the form of NATO strikes against Milosevic’s forces. This continued up until June 1999 when, faced with the prospect of ground troops – at least from the US and the UK – Milosevic retreated in disarray, a defeat that led to the erosion of his authority and, in time, his removal from power. Some 750,000 refugees returned.
The Kosovo conflict taught me many things, about government, about leadership, about myself. When I reread the material now and contemplate the situation as it evolved, I marvel at it. It also completely changed my own attitude to foreign policy.
So many things stand out. The first is that without doubt the primary instinct of the international community was to act, but within very tight limits, and if at all possible to put together a deal, virtually any deal, that removed the issue from the headlines. There was a desire to pacify, but not to resolve.
Second, from the outset I was extraordinarily forward in advocating a military solution. I look back and can see that throughout, to the irritation of many of our allies and the consternation of a large part of our system, I was totally and unyieldingly for resolution, not pacification.
Third, the strengths and weaknesses of Europe in this type of situation were laid painfully bare: brilliant at ringing statements of intent, which then evaporated into thin air when the consequences of seeing them through became apparent. This whole episode convinced me of the need for strong European leadership and for a proper European defence strategy.
In addition, I put the most colossal strain on my personal relationship with Bill Clinton. It says a huge amount about him and is to his unalloyed credit that he allowed the pressure to be put on him in the way that I did so. It also says a great deal about America and its preparedness, in the ultimate moment, to recognise the necessity of the moment and act.
Kosovo was a very tough issue for US opinion. Unlike later conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was quite hard to describe the direct American interest. There was no real appetite in the public or among the politicians for any action, let alone major military action involving ground forces. The US view was more or less that it was Europe’s problem on Europe’s frontier, thousands of miles from America, and the Europeans should summon the will to deal with it.
In discussions with officials and our military, I realised very fast that there was no way this was going to be resolved by diplomacy alone, and that military force would be necessary. Following our failure to intervene in Bosnia and the disaster of Sarajevo, Milosevic did not feel – unsurprisingly – that there was the will in the West for strong action, believing instead that he could do more or less as he wished. As a result, the advice I was getting was that without at least the threat of military action – and one that was credible – there was little prospect of stopping what were appalling scenes of brutality and oppression. Even then, the advice was that he was going to test our resolve and see whether we would put our forces where our mouths were.
From early January, I set about trying to build a consensus for action. My strategy was basically to engineer a set of strong declarations and keep diplomatic negotiations going, but make it plain that in the event of those failing, we were bound to act.
Why was I so keen to act? I saw it essentially as a moral issue. And that, in a sense, came to define my view on foreign and military intervention. I also saw it as an act of enlightened national self-interest, for I believed that if we left the issue to fester or allowed ethnic cleansing to occur unchecked, it would eventually spill over into other parts of Europe.
However, my primary motivation was outrage at what was happening. Here were ordinary civilians being driven from their homes and turned into refugees, killed, raped, beaten up with savagery and often sadism, whole families humiliated or eliminated. God, had we learned nothing from Europe’s history? It was shocking. And in one way, even more outrageous was the sense in some quarters that, yes, well, it was shocking but did we really want to be involved?
Later, when I visited refugee camps in Macedonia and heard the stories of heartbreak and misery, I felt proud of what we had done, since these refugees would return home, but very uncomfortable at how close we had come to abandoning them.
Now we look back and most people would say: well, of course we couldn’t have abandoned them; although we very nearly did – not because the political leaders who hesitated were bad people or poor leaders, or because they didn’t feel as much as I did about the suffering and cruelty, but as we figured out what could be done in early 1999, it wasn’t simple. Kosovo was part of Serbia. Serbia had an army that was powerful by reputation. Beginning wars is relatively easy; it’s ending them that’s hard. Innocent people die; unintended consequences develop; bad situations can be made worse. It is the uncertainty, the absence of clarity until hindsight delivers it – too late – that makes leadership difficult.
Through Kosovo I came to the view – rightly or, some may think in the light of Iraq, wrongly – that in such an uncertain landscape, the only way of finding direction was first to ask some moral questions: should this be allowed to happen or not? Should this regime remain in power? Should these people continue to suffer injustice?
If the answers were no, then that didn’t mean you reach for the military solution. You need to try all other alternatives. You need to ask if such action is feasible and practical. People often used to say to me: If you got rid of the gangsters in Sierra Leone, Milosevic, the Taliban and Saddam, why can’t you get rid of Mugabe? The answer is: I would have loved to; but it wasn’t practical (since in his case, and for reasons I never quite understood, the surrounding African nations maintained a lingering support for him and would have opposed any action strenuously).
Posing and answering a moral question doesn’t inexorably lead to a military solution, but it establishes a framework that can do so. And it is a structure with a plainly different starting point from that of traditional foreign policy, which is: is this in our country’s interests?
Of course, my broader argument, based on the theory of global interdependence, is that this moral question is part of the national interest; but historically, such a broad view was distrusted. With some justification, it was thought of as leading to zealotry, to subjective and not objective criteria of judgement, to the heart leading the head rather than being in alignment with it. I have some sympathy with this view. The opposite view to mine is not the product of a moral disability; it is born from a perfectly natural reservation about the unforeseeable ramifications of morally motivated intervention. My point is not to denigrate or deplore the moral limitations of such a view, but rather to say that non-intervention also has unforeseeable ramifications. Non-intervention in Bosnia in the early 1990s might have seemed sensible at the time, but not in retrospect. And, of course, it led directly to Milosevic believing that he could get away with the operation in Kosovo.
During 1991 and 1992, ethnic cleansing had been pursued as a policy, organised by Milosevic and carried out with extreme brutality by the Yugoslav National Army. Out of a population of just over 4 million, 200,000 Bosnians were killed, and a similar number were injured. Rape and pillage took place on a scale unbelievable in a relatively developed country in the late twentieth century. The UN was helpless. As the fighting started, its force in Sarajevo pulled out and left the civilians of that city to their fate, where 12,000 died. Thousands also died in Croatia and many hundreds of thousands were displaced across the region. Even after peace came, it left Milosevic intact, i.e. the peace pacified, but it did not resolve. As I sat in early 1999 trying to work out a way through, I was conscious that the same reluctance which had characterised our attitude in the early 1990s remained.
I worked on two groups: the Americans and the Europeans. For the latter – meaning essentially Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, with the Italian prime minister Massimo D’Alema also intimately involved, given the proximity of the fighting to Italy – I tried to stoke up concern and also push the line that not resolvin
g this was only going to lead to further trouble. Very early on, they were prepared to commit to the necessary expressions of disgust at what was happening and demand that it stop, but were insistent that any military threat should explicitly rule out the use of ground forces.
This, naturally, was an utterly hopeless negotiating tactic with Milosevic. It signalled from the outset that there was a limit to our seriousness of intent, and that provided he could withstand an air campaign, he could survive. It is amazing that people constantly miss the importance of the fact that any threat made in international affairs must be credible. The absence of credibility actually increases the likelihood of confrontation. The recipient of the threat doesn’t believe it, so he carries on; then the very choice you are trying to avoid – go to war or not – is the one you are forced to make. I saw this time after time after time. We are about to witness the same wretched business over Iran. Back up a demand with a credible threat, and the demand has a good prospect of being satisfied. If you seem unsure about how far you will go to enforce a demand, a confrontation becomes almost inevitable.
So, from the off, I was somewhat isolated on the European side. To be fair, Gerhard had real internal and specifically German worries about participation in military action – for obvious reasons. Germany had become constrained by its constitution and its politics in signing up to any use of German forces. But, as time went on, he became more and more emphatic that ground troops should not in any circumstances be used, not only German forces but any country’s. It was the first real rift in my relationship with him. I understood his problem, but he was a smart guy and he could surely see our problem: if it became clear that only ground forces could do the job, then either we committed them or we didn’t do the job. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had then gone back to Kosovo in the summer and autumn of 1998 on our assurance that we would not permit a renewal of ethnic cleansing.
As we began the preparatory discussions for a NATO offensive, one other thing became crystal clear: even if we took action only by air, 85 per cent of the assets used would be American. In truth, without the US, forget it; nothing would happen. That was the full extent of Europe’s impotence.
I began to engage with Bill Clinton over the possibility of military action, not just by air, but if necessary through the use of ground forces. By this time, my relationship with him had become close. We were political soulmates. We shared pretty much the same analysis of the weakness of progressive politics. We were both quintessential modernisers. We were both informal in style and young in outlook for our age. And both of us were at one level easy-going; but when you reached right down, there was a lot of granite providing the foundation.
He was the most formidable politician I had ever encountered. And yet his very expertise and extraordinary capacity at the business of politics obscured the fact that he was also a brilliant thinker, with a clear and thought-through political philosophy and programme. The myth he suffered from was the myth of his electability. In this respect, again, there were similarities with the predicament of New Labour.
The third-way philosophy that we both espoused was not a clever splitting of difference between right and left. Neither was it lowest-common-denominator populism. It was a genuine, coherent and actually successful attempt to redefine progressive politics: to liberate it from outdated ideology; to apply its values anew in a new world; to reform the role of government and the state; and to create a modern relationship between the responsibilities of the citizen and those of society – a hand up not a handout on welfare, opportunity and responsibility as the basis of a strong society. It was a way of moving beyond the small-state, ‘no role for society’ ideology of the Republicans; and the big-state, anti-enterprise ideology of much of the traditional Democratic base. It was we who should be the good economic managers; the people who understood crime; the ones that got aspiration and empathised with it.
He completely recoiled from the rainbow coalition politics so favoured by parts of the left at the time. His famous speech against the black activists who preached hostility to whites, in which he told them bluntly he wouldn’t countenance it, transformed in a moment the image of the Democrats as people in hock to minority radicalism.
Over time, the right wing brilliantly created the legend that people voted for him because he was just a really clever political operator; and of course a large part of the left joined in with the same chorus. In fact, people voted for him because they were smart. They didn’t buy a slick politician; they bought a sensible, modern, worked-out programme, based on a philosophy that seemed far more relevant to the late twentieth century than what they had been offered so far.
Even as personalities, we were less dissimilar than people often thought, but as a political class act I deferred to the master. He had it all. His superb intellect was often hidden by his manner, but he had incredible analytical ability, was genuinely interested in policy debate – possibly, occasionally, too much so – and constantly on the lookout for new ideas.
He was quick-witted. He would have shone at PMQs. When I visited him in the Oval Office in 1996, just before my election campaign and his re-election, we sat there, me feeling very awed, hoping as you do that the meeting isn’t too short (‘Blair snubbed’), praying it overruns (‘Blair welcomed’), but in either event begging to avoid disaster. Neil Kinnock, who as Labour leader visited Washington during Ronald Reagan’s time, was done enormous damage both by the content of the meeting (Reagan bluntly said Labour’s unilateral nuclear disarmament policy was crazy) and by the fact that Reagan mistook Denis Healey, travelling with Neil as the Shadow Foreign Secretary, for the British ambassador. For me, it was both a thrill to be there and a relief when it ended. But Bill couldn’t have been kinder or more welcoming – and it did overrun.
If the president isn’t going to do a full press conference – and it would be inappropriate to do that with an Opposition leader – he often does an impromptu few words in the Oval Office, as the press file through to take pictures. As we sat there and the cameras rolled, someone (Peter Riddell of The Times, I think) asked Clinton if he thought he was sitting with the next British prime minister. Tricky. Saying ‘Not a question for me’ looks a bit cold; saying ‘Yes’ would be diplomatically unthinkable. Quick as a flash, Bill says: ‘Well, I just hope he’s sitting with the next president of the United States.’
He also had inimitable resilience. When you reflect on what Bill went through during the impeachment saga, you have to sit down. It’s too much. How could he, how did he, survive it? But he did, and left office with an approval rating over 60 per cent.
He did it first and foremost by refusing to let it dominate his view of his presidency, even if it did indeed dominate the media’s. This is where the resilience was so fundamental to his success and survival. He used to tell me that every day he got up, determined to carry on governing. They would be talking about Monica Lewinsky; he would be launching a health-care plan. They would be dilating on the impossibility of him still being there; he would still be there, putting forward a new welfare programme. Whatever they did to him, he would carry on doing what he could for the people. He just got up and got on with it.
The second reason is that, as I suggested earlier, the public have always taken a more measured and human view of the sex lives of politicians than the media hysteria surrounding them would indicate. They understand; they empathise; and, to some extent, they indulge. It’s not that they approve, but their disapproval is tempered. Their disappointment is qualified in its intensity by their knowledge that they too fall from grace, they too err and they too need forgiveness. While some take the view that their political leaders should be above reproach in this regard, others think that there are more important measures by which to judge them, such as: are they doing a good job for the nation?
So even Bill’s ‘not telling the truth’ they understood as him not wanting to embarrass his family. And then of course his persecutors overplayed their hand, and by the end were
as much in the dock as he was. I was also convinced that his behaviour arose in part from his inordinate interest in and curiosity about people. In respect of men, it was expressed in friendship; in respect of women, there was potentially a sexual element. And in that, I doubt he is much different from most of the male population.
He was preternaturally cool under fire. By sheer happenstance, I was with him when major parts of the saga broke. The first time, in February 1998, the main revelation from Monica Lewinsky appeared, and I was in the White House. We had to do a press conference. As we stood in the ballroom, waiting behind the curtain to go through, we chatted away. I was more than a little nervous. I didn’t for an instant think of doing anything other than being completely supportive. He was a great guy, a good president, and above all he was a friend. I am very, even excessively, loyal to friends.
It was one of those surreal moments in politics. At the press conferences there is a stated topic – actually, believe it or not, in this case it was Saddam and the WMD. He was obstructing the inspectors yet again and the international community was gearing up. We thought a military strike a real possibility. Here was an issue of pressing life-and-death importance. But then there is the issue the media wanted to get their teeth into: Monica. So it was obvious which one would provide more interest.
Just before we walked out to the stage, Rahm Emanuel, at that time one of Bill’s senior advisers, said to us, ‘Don’t f*** it up.’ We didn’t. Bill was dignified. I was supportive. Given the circumstances, all in all it was a triumph.