Alarm bells are ringing in interventionist corridors. Faced with the spectre of renewed violence in the Balkans on the eve of the Euro-Atlantic imposed deadline to resolve Kosovo’s status, commentators are screaming at European politicians to pay greater attention to the deteriorating situation. What is unravelling, however, is not so much European security as a decade or so of futile nation-building.
Take, for instance, this ICG-type plea from a spokesman for the militant liberal wing of humanity:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2212980,00.html
Now let's put the fear of violence into its proper context. America, the EU and people like Andrew Rawnsley have tolerated Albanian violence and threats of violence in Kosovo, Macedonia and southern Serbia for nearly 8 years. What disturbs Rawnsley is the recent comment by EUFOR officials that violence in Kosovo could provoke a “chain reaction” in Bosnia that would reverse years of iron-fisted tutelage. Proper examination of this connection is skillfully avoided, however, leaving readers to draw the safe conclusion that the Serbs are simply living up to their reputation as trouble-makers.
Clearly the Balkan patient is in bad shape. Unfortunately Rawnsley's admiration for Tony Blair’s foreign policy prevents him from diagnosing the illness. In fact, he confuses the cure with the disease, ie. interventionism. But his hippocratic zeal remains undiminished. It's time to wheel the patient into the operating theatre and gown up for surgical air strikes. When in doubt, fire missiles.
But his most startling suggestion is that everyone is somehow “sleepwalking” into this latest crisis, as though Bosnia were on the dark side of the moon and not awash in financial aid, NGOs and a military “stabilisation” force. A succession of EU appointed high commissioners have ruled Bosnia for the past decade with near-dictatorial powers. They and their bosses in the European capitals know exactly what is going on in their protectorate but they prefer not to advertise it because of the immense embarrassment that after so many years of intervention, they are no closer to forging a Bosnian identity than at the outbreak of war in 1992. To get a realistic picture of interventionist achievements in Bosnia, we must turn to Professor David Chandler who shares none of Rawnsley's illusions:
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4046/
What becomes obvious is that Dayton did not end the war in Bosnia. It merely shifted it onto a political battlefield. America and the EU have acted in bad faith, siding once more with the Muslims in a process of treaty “re-interpretation” designed to undermine and slowly eliminate the autonomy granted to the Bosnian Serbs under the accords. It was precisely this inflammatory insistence on centralisation of power in Sarajevo which triggered the war in the first place. Compare this with the West's enthusiastic and hypocritical support for Kosovo's split from Belgrade and you have a text-book example of strategic incompetence.
Or perhaps not. As I observed in an earlier post, throwing the Serbs to the wolves is part of the larger propaganda war to appease Muslims and undercut support for al-Qaeda whom, ironically, the Americans welcomed to Bosnia back in the early 90s. Rawnsley wishes we had done it sooner.
Rawnsley concludes by recycling a burned out interventionist article of faith: the glaring falsehood that we can never ignore conflicts beyond our borders because somehow they will always find us. Where is the evidence for this assertion? I do not recall a single mortar or shell landing in Picadilly Circus or the Place de la Bastille during the wars of secession in the former Yugoslavia. What mutual defense pacts forced us into action in the Balkans? Weren't we constantly told that we barged in for enlightened “humanitarian” reasons, not out of self-interest?
As a piece of analysis, Rawnsley's article has the depth of a footprint in wet sand. That's because his entire argument is a smokescreen, a call for intervention to mask the failure of the original intervention similar to a murderer who guns down witnesses to thwart discovery of earlier deeds.
As for those humanitarian “sleepwalkers”, trust me - they are strolling with both eyes wide open.
