Simon Jenkins - Mission Accomplished?: The Crisis of International Intervention

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Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian as well as broadcasting for the BBC. He was political editor of The Economist and has written for and edited The Times and the LondonEvening Standard. His books include A Short History of England and The Battle for the Falklands (co-authored by Max Hastings). He has also written on architecture and chaired the National Trust.

As I expected, I found Simons book sharply observed, excellently judged, and pretty much unanswerable. His arguments are crystal-clear, and often savage. Highly readable, informed by Jenkins own observations from the ground, this is a book of remarkable precision and intelligence. I just hope that everyone who argued in favour of the various interventions he writes about will have the decency to read it, and repent; but I dont suppose for a moment that most of them will.

JOHN SIMPSON

A rare and intriguing voyage. Most of us would not dare to do what Simon Jenkins has done revisit what he wrote on issues which are still current. Too often journalists turn out to be right in their reporting, and the decision makers prove to be wrong. Heres a book that proves it.

JON SNOW

MISSION
ACCOMPLISHED?

THE CRISIS OF INTERNATIONAL
INTERVENTION

SIMON JENKINS

Published in paperback in 2015 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

Reprinted 2015

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2015 Simon Jenkins

The right of Simon Jenkins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

ISBN: 978 1 78453 132 4

eISBN: 978 0 85773 917 9

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Contents

Preface

The end of the Cold War with the Soviet Union left Western governments seeking a new sense of purpose on the world stage. They found it in the profession of the policeman. They concerned themselves with countries that had, in their view, offended international peace and order and also standards of good behaviour towards their own peoples. This intervention moved from that of charitable aid and exhortation to economic sanction and eventually military aggression. The turn of the twenty-first century has come to be known as the age of intervention humanitarian, liberal, neo-conservative or neo-imperial according to taste. The targets were almost all small Muslim states.

By 2015 sheer exhaustion and a public perception of failure appeared to be bringing this age to an end. At any rate a definable period in international relations appeared to have reached punctuation. This book is not a history of that period or an essay on military intervention. It is a commentary on events as I saw them at the time, commentary in context.

I was sceptical of most, though not all, of these wars, puzzled by the urge of Western democracies to return to the battlefield after decades in which their statesmen had meticulously avoided it. In particular I was surprised at younger people finding nothing exceptional in unprovoked aggression against foreign states or in their armed forces bombing civilian populations. These were, after all, wars of choice not of self-defence. Few were set-piece battles, rather what strategists call wars among the people on foreign soil. As such they were hard to explain and hard to win. Yet apart from Iraq in 2003 they encountered little public opposition.

Almost all wars are reported from one side or the other, from that of the bomber or the bombed. During the period covered in this book, I visited most of the places in contention, including Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Gulf, Lebanon and Syria, plus frequent trips to America. That said, I am not a foreign correspondent let alone a war reporter. My beat is mostly London. Wars of intervention arise in large part from the political climate in the intervening states, in this case America and Britain. Action is determined by decisions in their capitals, driven by domestic pressures on leaders, by alliances, military traditions, public opinion and the media.

During this time I was writing some 1,200 words of commentary for various British newspapers, usually twice a week. Revisiting such material after the event may seem self-indulgent, but I hope that retelling recent history through contemporary witness might help it to seem fresh. I was intrigued to see where I was right or wrong, how far my judgments stood the test of time. I harbour no pretence that what commentators write influences events, but it does feed into political debate. As such, its validity matters. It cannot be bad for writers on current affairs sometimes to consider their words in the light of history. They might proceed with greater caution next time.

The extracted material appeared from 1999 to 2014 in the London Times and the Guardian. None of the words have been changed, though most entries have been shortened to avoid repetition. None have been censored to save authorial embarrassment. Where I was wrong, and I reflect on this at the end, I can only say I believed it at the time.

Simon Jenkins

Introduction

In the summer of 1992 I was invited for a briefing to the private office of the British foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd. The room overlooking St Jamess Park was festooned with pictures and paraphernalia recalling the British Empire, its triumphs and its ruling personalities. From this room for centuries, edicts had gone out setting the world to rights. It was perhaps not the best place to give a sense of proportion to Britains diminished role overseas. Hurd was struggling to do just that.

The former communist state of Yugoslavia was decomposing. While the separation of Slovenia in 1991 had passed peacefully to independence, that of Croatia a year later was fiercely resisted by the Yugoslav government in Belgrade, and by the provinces Serb population. The result was a bitter civil war, awash in atrocities on both sides. The Germans were supporting the Croats. Most other countries, including America, were in favour of neutrality, a so-called level playing field. Either way, humanitarian relief was urgently needed. This Britain was supplying but there was a dispute over military protection for the relief convoys.

Hurd was dog-tired and kept nodding off during the conversation. But he was adamant to convey one message, that the rules of engagement for the escorts were to avoid contact and fire only in self-defence. There would be no mission creep. However terrible the conflict, said Hurd, it was not Britains business. For good measure, Washingtons military chief, General Colin Powell, said the same. Britain was in Red Cross mode, intervening impartially to relieve all those suffering in war.

Hurd was honouring a long-standing principle of the UN, set out in the Charters Chapter I, Article 2. This states, All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state. This assertion of sovereign integrity is traced back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. In the UNs case, in the aftermath of World War II, it underpinned the willingness to join the UN of many non-democratic states, notably within the communist bloc. Without it there would have been no such world body.

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