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Over the spring we've been re-running the Kosovo campaign a decade on. This Daily Telegraph column of June 5th 1999 considers the somewhat inconclusive conclusion to the war, but also makes some points about EU defense and social spending that I subsequently expanded on in America Alone:
This is the way the war ends, not with a bang but a whimper - the whimper of congressional Republicans watching their planned election-winning middle-class tax cut go up in smoke. Bill Clinton has spent the last two months dropping this year's Republican tax cut on Yugoslavia night after night. He may well be spending next year's Republican tax cut on post-war reconstruction: that's to say, rebuilding all the Serb bridges, railway lines, utility plants, children's wards (oops, sorry) and KLA-held villages (ditto) destroyed by this year's Republican tax cut, although the West insists that the money will only come if Milosevic goes.
Over the decades we seem to have precisely inverted the conventional theory of war reparations. The rest of the world now treats the Yanks like the Ritz-Carlton treats Sixties rock bands: we don't mind you coming in and trashing the place as long as you mail us a cheque afterwards. Of course, the European Union has also offered to chip in but, indirectly, that tab will also be picked up by US taxpayers, since the only reason Europe has any largesse to dispense in Serbia is because, a decade after the end of the Cold War, the continent is still refusing to take responsibility for its own defence, preferring to pass the bill to the Americans. Better yet, an EU-funded Yugoslavia won't make the mistakes that that Yankee stooge the IMF did a decade ago, imposing "market reforms", demanding massive cuts in state expenditure and forcing almost a quarter of the country's workers out of their jobs, freeing them up to hang around the streets burning the Stars and Stripes. The new Yugoslavia will be some Schrodo-Blairite "Third Way" confection of generous social provision. Those Europeans who wonder why the only superpower supposedly has "40 million" of its citizens without health coverage are missing the point: those 40, 80, whatever million will be too busy paying for new hospitals for the Serb NHS to worry about their own health care.
And, in making up the slack for Western Europe's vestigial armed forces, they're also paying for the British NHS, and the German, and the Italian . . . In the UK, between 1951 and 1997, the proportion of expenditure on defence fell from 24 per cent to seven, while the proportion on health and welfare rose from 22 per cent to 53.
The other big losers of this war are the two extremes of the Republican presidential spectrum: at one end, the neo-isolationist candidates (Pat Buchanan, the fire-and-brimstone speechifier Alan Keyes and my own Senator Bob Smith, whose first act as President will be to withdraw from the United Nations, kick 'em out of New York and make 'em find some other fleshpot to run up unpaid parking tickets in); and, at the other end, the pro-war candidate Senator John McCain, the only major US politician prepared to supply the ground troops for Tony Blair's victory march into Belgrade.
But, with the war over, both McCain and the isolationists lose their issue. The mainstream position was superbly articulated by the US Congress, which voted not to support the war in Kosovo but then voted to carry on financing it. This was, in its way, a brilliant distillation of the average American's attitude to foreign affairs: he doesn't want to hear about foreigners or have foreign coverage clogging up his TV bulletins, distracting attention from the real issues like the new fat pill or how much Star Wars took over the weekend, but he's happy to give foreigners all the money they want just to go away.
Which brings us to the big winner, the People's Patton, the Caring General Tony Blair. If the Yugoslav settlement falls short, his record's clear: he wanted to push on and occupy Serbia. If it works, he gets credit for stiffening the President. Either way, he ends both the off-the-record sniping from the Clintonites, who resent the way he's showing their man up, and the ever more ferocious assaults on him by Messrs Buchanan, Keyes and Co, who'd more or less decided to make the Prime Minister the Willie Horton of the 2000 campaign. You remember Willie, the poster boy of George Bush's attacks on Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts: he was a black convict who, in the course of a weekend pass from one of the governor's prisons, stabbed a man and raped a woman. That's pretty much the Buchanan/Keyes line on the efforts of Mr Clinton's British chum to conscript American ground troops: here we go again, another bloodthirsty madman let loose by a liberal whacko Democrat to endanger Americans.
The Republicans have a point. Who is this guy Blair? A hitch-hiker who strings along for the ride and then suddenly demands to take the wheel. The actual UK commitment has been barely more substantial than Canada's: Britain's first progressive warmonger has all the qualities of leadership except followers. As Geoffrey Wheatcroft pointed out to Wall Street Journal readers, even the illustrious regiments from conflicts as recent as the Korean War are gone. The King's Own Scottish Borderers, the Northumberland Fusiliers, the Eighth Royal Irish Hussars have all been merged and downsized into the Metropolitan County of West Midlands Two-By-Fours and the Queen's Own Group 4 Security Van. Yet Mr Blair can now be a Third Way war hero at US expense. In America, there's no such thing as a free lunch - except for Europeans.
from The Daily Telegraph, June 5th 1999 |
