How Britain got it wrong in Bosnia

On every side it seems as if the talk is of a new world order, rebuilding a fairer, more stable and equitable system of international relations, reinjecting a sense of moral purpose into global affairs. Where did all this suddenly come from, the cynic may ask?

Statesmen - from Napoleon to Hitler - have often allowed themselves to dream great dreams in public. What happened to the visions of a fairer world embodied in the idealistic rhetoric of the United Nations Charter? Stuck perhaps in the quicksands and murkier realities of the Cold War. What, for that matter, of the new world order heralded by Bush senior as he sent his troops into battle against Saddam Hussein, the international enemy of choice last time round? Buried in the quagmire of the Balkans.

And here we come to the importance of this lively and useful book. Reading Unfinest Hour, what a contrast between the impassioned moral oratory of Tony Blair as he goes into battle in Afghanistan and the cautiously amoral realism of his predecessor in Yugoslavia a decade ago! It is as though the real task now before the British Government is to bury once and for all any memory of the passivity and foot-dragging of the Major government, and to make good what it cost this country in terms of international respect and prestige.

For the truth is that, as Simms demonstrates with panache, what started out as prudence ended with this country being dragged along by its allies into an activism its leaders neither desired nor believed in. This was all the fault of what the author terms "conservative pessimism", an attitude which led the Major government both to reject the idea of intervening itself and to work hard to prevent anyone else intervening either.

As Simms's satirical pen surveys the political landscape of the time, few emerge with any credit. Talking heads in the defence establishment overestimated the strength of the Bosnian Serbs; Parliament did its best to avoid such a complicated issue and retreated into parochialism; the Press, with a few honourable exceptions, took the view that analysis meant parroting what government spokesmen told them; as for public opinion, it remained largely unmoved, even when one protester set himself on fire outside Parliament in protest.

It was thus largely in vain that a few protesters tried to call for a change of heart. Against the forces of inertia, it was idle to suggest that both morality and self-interest lay, not in doing as little as possible, but in helping a government which stood for a sane and civilised attitude to multi-ethnic relations to save itself from heavily armed and well-supported nationalist fanatics who sought to apply Nazi-era policies such as ethnic cleansing in order to create a statelet for themselves and a huge refugee problem for everyone else. With precious little pressure from below for a more active or honourable policy, the way was open for the Major government to do what it did best - as little as possible.

A series of British diplomats combined arrogance, aloofness and shortsightedness in equal, disastrous measure. Douglas Hurd and Malcolm Rifkind tried to present the war as a purely humanitarian issue and suggested that since there were civil wars all over the globe, it was hard to see why Britain should be intervening in this one. Centuries of mutual hatred were suddenly invented by politicians previously ignorant of Balkan history in order to justify doing nothing. Spin-doctors from the intelligence services whispered that the Bosnian Government was notoriously unreliable and that the Serbs were badly misunderstood.

The Major government had one ally - the United Nations of Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali. These two did their best to suggest all the parties in Bosnia were as bad as each other. The UN found itself in the absurd situation of protecting the Bosnians while preventing them from defending themselves. But gradually it became clear that what was at stake in Bosnia reached far beyond the Balkans. In 1994, when the UN allowed nearly one million civilians to be murdered in cold blood in Rwanda, its prestige slumped. The following year, Bosnian Serb forces overran a UN safe area at Srebrenica and shot more than 5,000 men.

Nato saw what had happened to the reputation of the UN and was determined not to allow the same thing to happen to itself. Under combined French and American pressure, the UN role in Bosnia was scaled back, aid to the anti-Serb forces was beefed up, and in a series of lightning offensives in the summer of 1995, the Bosnian Serbs were forced backwards and the war brought to a swift end.

But by then the US had acquired a deep loathing of British foot-dragging. Only with the arrival of Blair in Downing Street did this change. Suddenly Britain was being led by a man whose fondness for moral rhetoric sounded positively American. In Kosovo, he took a high-profile lead and sounded far more gung-ho than even Washington. The latest war has confirmed the convergence between a prime minister of almost overwhelming sincerity and his American counterpart.