Austin Bay Blog

David Aaronovitch in the Times On-Line tells us how he got Milosevic wrong. He connects failing to remove Milosevic –the moral as well as military failure — to taking out Saddam.

The lede:

ONE OF THE MORE tragic aspects of the demise of Slobodan Milosevic is that the international committee to defend him will now have to be wound up. The committee have been assiduous jail-visitors, invariably finding the former Serbian leader resolute or unbowed, his belief in his own innocence virtually luminescent. And they have been determined petitioners, demanding Mr Milosevic’s release and the jailing of “the real war criminals: the Nato leaders who committed crimes against humanity and against Yugoslav sovereignty and who continue to commit those crimes today”. One of their signatories was the new Nobel laureate for literature, Harold Pinter, though somehow this fact was left off the citation.
All that remains for them to do is to spread as many rumours as they can that the forces of imperialism done the old boy in, and then they can get down to the business of pre-emptively defending Kim Jong Il, or posthumously rehabilitating Beria, or something useful like that. What I want to do, however, is to chronicle how the Serbian leader was responsible for the invasion of Iraq. Along a line of logic that runs, crudely, no Slobbo, no Bosnia, no Kosovo, no fashion for intervention, no Iraq.

Another useful excerpt:

Someone recently wrote that everything is either Vietnam or Munich. It’s either a quagmire, where it would have been better to stay out — or it’s inaction in the face of an enemy, who merely sees passivity as an invitation to behave worse. I was a child of the Vietnam era, but Srebrenica — and Slobbo — moved me and thousands more from one column to the other. It was our Munich. When Slobbo turned his attention to Kosovo, it was Poland. Working backwards I could see that Bell and others had been right. We had betrayed the Bosnian Muslims, and we couldn’t do it again.

Aaronovitch’s realization:

If Bosnia was the betrayal through inaction and appeasement, Srebrenica the consequence and Kosovo the determination not to let it happen again, then the line runs clear. And if Milosevic, far from being someone we could do business with, was in fact an opportunistic tyrant who played us for fools until we saw the light, then what was Saddam?

In 1991 I fingered Milosevic as the culprit and sketched a diplomatic-military operation to stop him– when he was attacking Croatia. In 1993 I produced a detailed military action to topple him (that ran in the Houston Chronicle and Dallas Morning News). Glad Aaronovitch is aboard now.

Aaronovitch points out:

Slobodan Milosevic, more than anyone else, caused a division within the Left and Centre Left, dividing the pacifists, anti-imperialists and anti-Americans from the anti-fascists and the internationalists…

Well, World War Two and the Cold War divided the right, between isolationists and internationalists, between America Firsters and Americans who understood we live in a dangerous world where the defense of Kansas begins in Somalia. To a degree anti-Communism camouflaged this right-wing rift, but the end of the Cold War saw a return of paleo-conservative isolationists. They make strange common cause with the pacifist/anti-imperialist/anti-Americans Aaronovitch describes.

My column this week will explore another connection between Milosevic and Saddam.

UPDATE: Readers are encouraged to donate for travel expenses to the milblog conference in Washington, DC on April 22. Just hit the paypal tip jar on this page.