Waging war on the wobblers

Finally, this week, a clear target emerged for Whitehall's Afghan-war planners. After three weeks of unresolved air strikes, it was time to smoke out the real enemy: the "doom merchants" in the media, as Tony Blair saw them, who were having what Jack Straw called another "Kosovo wobble".

Facing a wall-to-wall barrage of increasingly sceptical coverage, Britain's war spinners turned all guns on the messengers.

The pundits were similarly mis-taken three weeks into the 1999 Kosovo bombings, the Foreign Secretary warned on Breakfast with Frost. "Many of the commentators who are now saying this is a mis-take were saying Kosovo was a mistake," he said. In fact, even though columnists from Simon Jenkins to Paul Routledge had argued that air strikes alone would not force the Serbs out of Kosovo, history had proved them wrong. "The press, in a sense, have almost no humility and no memory."

It is nothing new for this Government to condemn media "carping" during an uncertain military venture. In June 1999, Clare Short, the International Development Secretary, said critics of the Kosovo campaign were so "profoundly wrong" they would have been "in the bunker with Mr Hitler" reporting his daily criticisms.

This time, however, the breadth of media criticism has clearly rattled the Government, from Nick Cohen's argument in The Observer that the bombing "is a moral and political disaster" to Stephen Glover's view in the Daily Mail that "the Allies seem to be making up the script as they go along". Even this paper, which continues to support military action against al Qaeda, warned this week of "a growing belief that the coalition is continuing to bomb only because it cannot think what else to do".

Yet how accurate is Straw's view that the armchair generals got it wrong over Kosovo? Simon Jenkins sees no reason to apologise for his views in 1999. "The bombing was illegitimate then, as it is now," he says. "All wars are completely different, and it's completely unhelpful making parallels. But I don't think anyone believes that bombing alone worked in Kosovo. It was the presence of 30,000 (Nato) troops on the border, ready to invade, that swayed Milosevic; plus the Russians were ratting on him. The only matter of debate today is the precise role the bombing played in his withdrawal."

Of the other pundits who spoke out against the Kosovo war, only John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph's defence editor, has acknowledged making a mistake. On 4 June 1999, he told his readers: "I am delighted to recognise that I was, almost until the last moment, wrong, and I reproach myself for not having seen the light sooner."

Others have been less willing to admit to what were clearly misjudgments. John Laughland, an academic, has not written to qualify his Spectator argument of the time that "mass graves in Kosovo are a myth".

Nor has John Simpson explained why, even as the Serb regime was collapsing, he was predicting in The Sunday Telegraph that "Milo-sevic is going to survive".

"It wasn't just the hacks," says Guardian columnist Francis Wheen, who has chronicled the pitfalls of those making "Mystic Meg-style predictions". "Martin Bell argued in a Commons debate that the bombing had strengthened Milosevic, and everyone from Tony Benn to Henry Kissinger voiced similar views. There's nothing wrong with getting it wrong; we're human and fallible. But journalists' mistakes need to be acknowledged occasionally if readers are expected to keep faith with them."

When points to "noticeable differences" between bombing Kosovo and Afghanistan: this time, there is a widespread view that the Alliance has no clear goal. "'Wobble' implies that the media were all onside but are now losing their nerve, when in fact most critics have been consistent from the start," he says. "Besides, journalists don't need any lessons from the likes of Jack Straw. He's been wrong about any number of things. Didn't he introduce asylum vouchers?"