Hawk or Turkey?
Reid, Stuart
Hawk or STUART REID London ever in the field of human conflict has so much credit been taken by one man for so little. The way Tony Blair tells it—and the way the newspapers here are...
...STUART REID is an editorial page editor for the Independent on Sunday...
...This is not to say that any such philosophy has been articulated in Washington or London...
...And then what...
...The French know this in their water, so do the Italians, and the Greeks, and so probably do the Germans...
...Are sentimentalists like you aware how unpleasant it is to shop in Knightsbridge, with this constant importuning by greedy foreign gypsies with their brats...
...Soon after the bombing began, however, he changed his mind, urging that NATO soldiers be used against a "degraded" enemy in Kosovo: in other words, one gathers, against a handful of terrified, ill-equipped, and undernourished conscripts...
...Kilgore says in Apocalypse Now, this war will be over...
...Not so long ago Blair himself was against using the poor bloody infantry...
...It is no business ofAmerica's...
...That's what makes him so dangerous...
...There speaks a hawk in denial...
...In February he gave a speech in Milan saying that a united Europe would have to adopt an Anglo-American economic model if it was to succeed...
...The French, who are cleverer than the English, and the Italians, who have more heart, were never keen on sending in ground troops...
...But nobody here is counting...
...When the smoke has lifted and the bodies counted, it may turn out that tens of thousands of Kosovars have died...
...To dwell piously on war hysteria is to be guilty of moral hysteria, the very condition that led us into this mess in the first place...
...Bush didn't go wobbly, and pretty soon Iraq's army was being massacred on the road to Bazra...
...War, though, is a dangerous occupation, especially for journalists...
...Those of us who have had trouble in our own marriages, and who are no strangers to taking a nap on the living room floor, have no right to make stern moral judgments in this case...
...41...
...The newspapers here like nothing more than a good rape factory, of course, being themselves little more than conveyor belts of sex and violence, and the Serbs had done enough evil in KosoThe American Spectator . Jun e 1999 vo the year before NATO struck to supply the tabloids with plenty of ammunition...
...That would be a far greater humanitarian catastrophe than any that faced us before the war began...
...One day, as LL Col...
...Total victory is the only exit strategy he is (or was in April) prepared to consider, and nuts to peace-feelers from wimpy Germans and wimpy Russians and the hell with whining scruples from the loony left about A-10 Warthogs carrying depleted uranium missiles over Kosovo...
...Tony is at one and the same time NATO's leading hawk and the most popular British prime minister in history...
...It's a point that seems to be lost on the U.S...
...In February he declared: "One thing is certain: I will not agree to deploy British troops into Kosovo itself without a clear mission and clear objectives based on a political settlement agreed by both sides...
...network chiefs...
...Nobody knows for sure what is happening in Kosovo, except that, under cover of bombs, civilians are being murdered and hundreds of thousands of people are being driven from their homes...
...Blair really believes in what he describes as the "first progressives' war," a straightforward conflict, as he sees it, between absolute good and absolute evil, and never mind a thousand years of Serb history, let alone the last fifty...
...But not the British...
...The terror inspired by the bombardment—aimed at fighting men, remember, not at television makeup artists —was such that not only the soldiers but the rats in the German dugouts went mad...
...Give me liberty or give me death" has been transformed from a courageous affirmation of personal freedom into a global imperative: Be a liberal democrat or be damned...
...It is hard to come by exact figures —don't you know there is a war going on...
...Nevertheless, a fudge still seems the most likely outcome, and the G-8 deal in Bonn looks just like that...
...On the other hand, we have every right, and every reason, to be skeptical when the foreign secretary stands at the podium and plays the military gentleman or hits the atrocity trail with stories of Serbian "rape factories...
...In some quarters the mood is ugly...
...and "Serbs 'em right...
...He sounded like Churchill in 1939, or Margaret Thatcher in 1990, when she told George Bush (Sr...
...According to Margaret, in a book published earlier this year, her former husband was a drunk and an adulterer who on one occasion was in such a bad way that she found him passed out on the floor clutching a brandy bottle...
...As Pat Buchanan has noted, "It won't be Brits humping it up the road to Belgrade...
...Blair wants to send in ground troops against the "new Hitler...
...Whether this war works as well for him as the Falklands war did for his mentor Margaret Thatcher remains to be seen...
...NATO's resolve is stronger than ever...
...That's what this war is about...
...There is no conspiracy...
...He obviously wants to tell his grandchildren that he did not stand idly by and let Milosevic get away with murder...
...Can it really be, as Bill Kauffman stated in the Independent on Sunday, that a British accent is thought in the United States to add 20 points to the speaker's I.Q...
...It is a delicious irony, anyway, that the Rt...
...Personally, I find it hard to believe the story about the brandy bottle: Cook's not that nice a guy...
...The second thing he did was to leave his wife of 28 years, Margaret, and marry his mistress, the mousy Gaynor...
...Atrocities have been, and are being, committed by the Serbs in Kosovo, but to characterize ethnic cleansing as "genocide," as NATO spokesmen do daily, is to trivialize the suffering of the Jews (and, for that matter, of the Armenians...
...You'd never guess that as a young Labour MP Blair was a supporter of the (explicitly anti-NATO) Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...
...What Blair wants (and what Clinton too may want, but it is difficult to be sure what, if anything, is going on in your president's head) is a Europe in which American values can prosper...
...In spite of the overwhelming editorial support for the war in the British press, however, some very powerful columnar voices have been raised against it: among them, those of Simon Jenkins and Matthew Parris in the Times, Correlli Barnett in the Daily Mail, Auberon Waugh in the Daily Telegraph, and A.N...
...By the time this issue appears, anything may have happened...
...It is hard to give peace a chance in a war being supported with such righteousTony Blair fights for Hollywood values with American firepower...
...Wilson, Alan Watkins, and Felipe Fernandez Armesto in the Independent on Sunday...
...In 1914 they used to say it would all be over by Christmas...
...ut if NATO troops ever did go in, the likelihood is that few B of them would be British...
...The first thing Cook did on taking office was to promise that he would henceforth conduct an "ethical" foreign policy (unlike those Tory bastards...
...The public backs the war, according to the polls, but is reluctant to countenance casualties...
...But no...
...but of the estimated boo aircraft serving in the Balkans theater, some Soo are American and only 45 British...
...They clearly believe that only Brits have the gravitas to front this show, which is nothing less than the first world war to be fought in Europe since the one against Hitler—the real Hitler, the mass murderer with the mustache...
...But even after the G-8 deal had been struck in Bonn, Blair was still declaring that "we will follow this through and we will win...
...My guess is that it won't and that Milosevic, like Saddam, will end up giving us the finger...
...Clobba Slobba," they yelled, and yell...
...Robin Cook should now be an international mouthpiece for a war of aggression being waged by a nominally defensive alliance, dominated by the most powerful nation on Earth, against a small sovereign state that poses no threat to any member of that alliance...
...All the same, this conflict cannot be explained satisfactorily in tabloid terms being employed by NATO propagandists, or in the Hollywood moralizing of Blair...
...In fact, the United Kingdom is once again providing the United States with a corporal's brigade: We are powerless to do more...
...Libby Purves, of the Times, received the following e-mail after writing about our responsibility to the refugees driven from their home under cover of the NATO air strikes: "....do we really want more of these women in headscarves, stretching out their begging hands...
...Saddam himself remains in place, of course, taking the occasional hit from a Tomahawk, but grinning and giving us the finger...
...now is not the time to go wobbly...
...Tony Blair is the first prime minister to be unreservedly pro-European and pro-American...
...The way Tony Blair tells it—and the way the newspapers here are spinning it—you'd think that he, not the Stepford warrior Wesley Clark, was the commander in chief of NATO, that he was the man with the throw weight...
...If intervention was necessary in Kosovo "to avert a humanitarian catastrophe," it should have been left to the Europeans...
...That will suit most Europeans...
...two years later 20,000 Britons died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, after the German line had been shelled non-stop for a week...
...At the NATO summit, eyes shining, hair coifed, he urged buddy Bill, who seems a bit uncomfortable about killing white folk, not to be swayed by the isolationist sentiments...
...As I write (in early May), we still face the possibility of an appalling conflagration...
...It amazed me when I was in New York in April that I couldn't turn on the television without being smarmed by Blair or, worse, by his foreign secretary, the pop-eyed Scot Robin Cook (another former CND supporter...
...At any rate, there is unlikely to be much more talk of invading Kosovo...
...40 June 1999 - The American Spectator ness by Vanessa Redgrave, Bianca Jagger, Margaret Thatcher, and Jesse Helms...
...But let's be fair: Minds are for changing, and a politician who doesn't change his mind and seize the moment is lost...
...If he were merely a cynical opportunist, a gesture politician, he would have leant on Bill Clinton at the end of the first futile month of bombing and persuaded him to call off the dogs and cut a deal...
...NATO's leading hawk will turn out to have been NATO's leading turkey...
...Nor was America: After all, you have your own ground war to fight at home...
Vol. 32 • June 1999 • No. 6
