Postscript. Some events and reports since the book was published.

Big Brother is watching you.
(October 2008). The Government’s withdrawal of the Bill for 42-day detention without charge was a small tactical retreat to disguise a major advance in another sector. (The Home Secretary has another Bill in waiting, to be introduced in the emotional aftermath of the next terrorist incident). A new Counter-terrorism Bill provides for an ‘Interception Modernisation Programme’ - a giant database which, in addition to the already extensive data already collated, will record, for everyone for life, details of every letter and email sent, every phone call made and every web-site visited. Privacy will be a thing of the past. At present, permission is needed to open mail, tap phones, bug houses etc. but permission is now granted routinely by civil servants. Requests for surveillance are not confined to cases of suspected terrorism. In 2007 around 500,000 (sic) permissions were given, the vast majority for suspected non-terrorist offences, including benefit fraud, fly-tipping or organizing protests at motorway expansion. Many people were unjustly suspected on the basis of the anonymous denunciations that are now encouraged.

When the giant database has been set up, a member of the public dealing with an official will know that the official can easily find out - unless, of course, s/he has carefully covered his/her tracks - with whom s/he ever had business/social relations, whether s/he ever made enquiries about abortion, sexual problems or alcohol/drug rehabilitation, whether s/he has ever had money problems, what social/political websites s/he has visited. S/he will also know – as is, indeed, already the case – that the official can easily have him/her put under surveillance. The scope for intimidation, or the fear of intimidation, is evident. The relation between the citizen and the state will be profoundly altered. The Information Commissioner has for some time warned that Britain is ‘sleepwalking into a surveillance society’.

Once this database is accessible from computers in public and private organisations throughout the country, it will certainly be used for identity theft and blackmail. Even now, Ministries regularly lose computer records containing personal details of large numbers of people. Geoff Hoon, now Minister for Transport, says that the Government is prepared ‘to go quite a long way’ in restricting civil liberties and that not creating the database would ‘give terrorists a licence to kill’.

The Bill also contains provisions for extra punishment without trial beyond the original sentence, a new offence for volunteer workers of not giving information about clients to the police, and a new offence of publishing information about the armed services. Some critics believe that this provision will become another convenient tool against the peace movement. It could, for example, be used – as similar laws have been used in other countries – against non-embedded war reporters or scientists who publish estimates like one that a Trident discharge could initiate a nuclear winter. (Philip Webber, ‘Trident’s Nuclear Winter? The Spokesman 99, 2008). The bill’s provisions may, it is thought, allow long-term travel bans and daily reporting for anyone convicted under terrorism legislation, irrespective of the seriousness of the offence, or even whether it was connected with terrorism at all. ‘Terrorism’ legislation has already been used by the police to prevent peaceful demonstrations, and by Gordon Brown to seize Icelandic assets when the bankrupt Icelandic Government did not compensate British depositors after the failure of Icelandic banks. Critics argue that these plans have more to do with New Labour’s passion for control than with terrorism, and that legal rights fought for and won over the centuries will be swept away.

Bosnia
(October 2008). Myths about the Yugoslav civil wars and the Nato air war on Serbia still influence policies or proposed policies. A recent article referred to ‘the Serb invasion of Kosovo’. Examinations of the aftermath in Kosovo by the columnists who so passionately called for war on Serbia have been noticeably absent, and books that question the official line either receive no reviews or are sneered at. (For an account of how the wars affected ordinary people see Dervla Murphy, Through the Ashes of Chaos; Balkan Journeys, John Murray, 2002). An article by Paddy Ashdown and Richard Holbrooke begins, ‘Thirteen years ago, American leadership brought an end to the Bosnian War through the Dayton peace agreement’(‘Bosnian tensions are set to explode’, The Guardian, 22.10.08). The sub-text is the widely held view that the US bombing ended the ‘appeasement’ of the Serbs by Britain and France and forced the Serbs to agree to a settlement. (For a somewhat different account, and the authors’ role in the Bosnian, Kosovo and Iraq wars, see European Security-- Chaps. 4, 5, 6). The Dayton Agreement was not imposed by US bombing. It happened because the war had reached a stalemate and all three main parties realised that they would gain more from a settlement than by continuing the war. The Bosnian Serbs were losing ground and, a year earlier, had proposed a partition similar to that agreed at Dayton. Once the USA abandoned its support for a unitary state under the mainly Moslem ‘Bosnian Government’, the Moslems also realized that they had nothing to gain by continuing fighting.

Ashdown and Holbrooke argue that the ‘Bosnian state’ is on the verge of collapse, which must be prevented; this is understood in Washington but not in the ‘sleepwalking’ EU. They blame Milorad Dodik, Prime Minister of the Serb ‘entity’, Republika Srpska for undoing the ‘real progress over past thirteen years’ and call for ‘resolve’ and ‘transatlantic unity’. However, the federal institutions set up at Dayton were the icing on a cake which had been cut into three pieces. They have never worked as intended, and nor has democracy within the entities, which is characterised by ‘ethnicity-based party-politiking, confrontational discourse, political pressure on the press and media, reform stalemate, inflammatory political rhetoric, and perpetuation of political crisis’ (Denise Spajlic-Maglic, ‘EU democratization of BiH’, www.soros.org.ba/, 2007). Ashdown and Holbrooke are right in stating that Haris Salijdjic, the Moslem senior President of all Bosnia, and Dodik loathe each other. Until recently, the Serbs have been the strongest supporters of the Dayton Agreement. Salajdjic, when PM of the Bosnian Government during the war, waged a mendacious media campaign, with the aim of inducing a Nato war against the Serbs, so as to achieve a unitary Moslem-led state. He secured his return to political life by strong opposition to a package of constitutional amendments designed to make the Bosnian arrangements more functional. His main argument was that the package did not go far enough in ending the autonomy of Republika Srpska which, in his view, should be abolished altogether. In response, Dodik called for a referendum on the separation of Republika Srpska from Bosnia.

It would be desirable to preserve the bare bones of federation, in the hope that future politicians will breathe life into them. More important, however, are practical issues such as keeping trade and transport links open, ensuring that ethic minorities in the entities are at least not killed, installing peacekeeping forces at points of conflict, and tackling the endemic corruption and organized crime. (The need for a permanent corps of civilian peacekeepers, continually opposed by the British Government, is clear). The EU should link aid - at least aid to official bodies - to progress on these issues. Substantial progress will probably require a generational change, after the retirement of politicians like Salajdjic and Dodik who are obsessed with grievances stemming from the war.

There have been few successful federations. In the 1960s, Britain set up federations in many parts of the Empire; they all failed. In Bosnia, a federation would be desirable but peaceful co-existence with ‘cross border arrangements’, like those between Ulster and the Irish Republic, would be a reasonable objective. There is not going to be a return to the Bosnian war, but there will be tensions for the foreseeable future. Outsiders can help, above all by not adopting the kind of self-interested and prejudiced policies which played a role in the Yugoslav tragedy. However, what happens in Bosnia will be mainly determined by its ‘three nations’. The idea that sufficient resolve, backed by armed force, by outsiders can force people in divided societies to behave in a rational and cooperative way is the enemy of the limited amount of good that can be done. As George F. Kennan wrote, with reference to the ‘distracted Balkan region’;

‘In the long run, no region can solve any other region’s problems. The best that an outsider can do is to give occasional supplementary help in the pinches’ (European Security -. p.168).

South Ossetia
(November, 2008). A ‘File on 4’ radio programme on 1.11.08 gave a report by the BBC correspondent, Tim Whewel, who was the first foreigner to enter South Ossetia after the August war. His report from Tskhinvali, the main town, calls in question the account given by the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, of how the war started. His report demonstrates both why BBC foreign correspondents are irreplaceable and perhaps why they are an endangered species. South Ossetia, before August, had a population of around 120,000; the majority were ethnic Ossetians, many with Russian passports, but there was a substantial minority of ethnic Georgians. Tskhinvali is just inside the border with the rest of Georgia. The only armed force in South Ossetia, apart from the Russian peacekeepers, was a gendarmerie of around 200 men, armed with rifles. On the evening of 7.August, people in Tskhinvali were watching TV in their homes when the Georgian Army, which had entered South Ossetia with tanks and artillery, began shelling the town, killing about forty people and destroying a number of houses and the Parliament building. The population fled. Russian forces arrived in the night of 9/10 August. When the population returned, young Ossetian men set fire to houses owned by Georgians, forcing them to flee over the border. (During the war in the 1990s, South Ossetians in Georgian villages were forced out, and their houses destroyed. After that, Georgians and Ossetians were socially segregated but continued to trade with each other. The attack by Georgia, like Nato’s Kosovo War, destroyed any hope of peaceful ethnic co-existence).

Georgian spokesmen claimed that the Russian Army and Air Force began the war and that Russian forces had been moving into South Ossetia for several days before 7. August. One would have thought that the USA, from its world-wide surveillance, would have been informed of military movements in the area but US spokesmen said that they had no intelligence. However, the US Defense Secretary was sceptical of the Georgian claims about Russian troop movements. It is also quite likely that President Saakashvili (like Saddam Hussein before the invasion of Kuwait!) would have consulted the US Administration; the comments of some State Department officials that the USA ‘advised caution’ to Georgia may mean that he did.

The Foreign Secretary said in the programme that the war started when ‘Ossetian fighters attacked Georgia’ and that the Georgian action was ‘tit for tat’. This raises several questions. The term ‘fighters’ implies a para-military force. Why should such a force have been formed to attack Georgia when South Ossetia had enjoyed peaceful de facto independence for fifteen years? What did the fighters attack Georgia with? What did they attack in Georgia? How could such an attack have triggered an immediate advance by Georgian tanks and artillery, which would have taken days, if not weeks, to prepare, and would have required a political decision at the highest level? Tim Whewel did not ask the Foreign Secretary these questions. He did, however, pose the question whether Britain’s perceived strategic interests had led the Government to accept uncritically the Georgian version of events. He also concluded that nothing had been learned from the war.

The Three Trillion Dollar War
(November 2008). General Loquai argues, with reference to the Kosovo war, that war is not only the cruelest but also the most expensive way of settling disputes (European Security---, p.163). However, governments thinking of embarking on aggressive wars always underestimate the cost to their nation and over-estimate the expected benefits, as well as ignoring the usually disastrous consequences for the country attacked (op.cit. pp.188/9, Chap.8). Two American economists have made a meticulous study of the costs to the USA of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (Joseph. F .Stiglitz & Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trillion Dollar War, Norton, 2008).

‘Given the human suffering the war in Iraq has caused, it may seem callous to even think about the financial cost. Dry numbers will not capture the pain of those killed and maimed and scarred for life. But we believe that understanding the cost of war is essential’. Before the war, the Congressional Budget Office put the cost of the invasion at $6-13 million. The Secretary of State for Defense put it at $200 m. but believed that this would be more than covered by the benefits of controlling Iraq’s oil. The Head of the Agency for International Development put the cost of reconstruction at $1.7 billion and said that the war would be ‘good for business’.

Stiglitz and Bilmes lump the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan together, because the Administration’s figures do not allow a separation. They state that the Administration’s accounting methods are opaque and misleading, and that a private firm using them would be prosecuted for deceptive practices. They use information from various sources to estimate the budgetary cost to the American taxpayer over forty years, the social costs of death and disability going beyond budgetary costs, and wider macro-economic costs. They reach the following totals – in 2007.

Cost in billions of $ Best Case Realistic/Moderate
Budgetary costs 1,721 2,680
Social costs 295 415
Macro-economic costs 263 1,900
TOTAL 2,279 4,995


Excluding the more imponderable macro-economic costs, the total is $3,095 bn. for the ‘realistic’ and $2,016 bn. for the ‘best case’ scenario. These figures exclude unquantifiable costs, such as the stimulus to anti-American feeling and terrorism. The authors mention that the USA holds 26,000 ‘combatants’ in long-term detention outside the USA and Iraq. (Many have been tortured, and Britain has played a key role in their ‘rendition’)

The ‘best case’ is thus roughly $2 trillion; the ‘realistic’ is $3 trillion plus $2 trillion macro-economic costs. (The figure of $3 trillion is similar to the value of assets recently destroyed by US and British banks and, according to some estimates, less than the annual cost to the world of deforestation.) It makes this war the most expensive that the USA has fought, apart from WW2, which cost around $5 trillion (in 2007 dollars). The authors point out that the $18 bn. voted by Congress for the reconstruction of Iraq was in fact spent on military purposes and that US administration was marked by massive corruption. Moreover, the privatisation of the military – a policy also being adopted by Britain – not only undermines democracy and leads to atrocities but is also extraordinarily expensive. The authors argue that the USA can afford $3 trillion but that the money could have been better spent.

The authors discuss the devastating human cost to the Iraqis but sensibly do not try to quantify it. Iraq has been destroyed, and it is hard to see how it can be rebuilt.

There is a short section on Britain. The authors point out that the British role was crucial in achieving popular American political support for the war. Tony Blair was considered to represent ‘sensible world opinion’. Gordon Brown, as Chancellor (who shared with the rest of the Cabinet the responsibility for supporting the plan to invade Iraq, and for dispatching British troops), set aside £1 bn. for the cost of the war. The authors estimate the budgetary costs so far at £18 bn. plus £2 bn. social costs. (The callous treatment of soldiers broken in the wars has been similar to that in the USA, and the damage to the British Army perhaps even greater than that to the US Army).

Parliament, through its Select Committees, did not undertake any examination of how Ministers came to make demonstrably false statements to Parliament before the invasion, of the British role in the occupation (when the Army had an impossible task and was humiliated) or of the rationale and progress of the war in Afghanistan. On Armistice Day, the Defence Secretary, John Hutton, likened that the threat to the world from the Afghan insurgents to that posed by Imperial Germany in 1914 and the Nazis in 1939; many British officers in Afghanistan have come to a different assessment. Although this war, like the Iraq War, is a Nato war, it has become Britain’s Fourth Afghan War. (The main US role is now air attacks on villages, often by unmanned aircraft. There have been repeated bombings of wedding parties, killing women and children and alienating the population). The Mother of Parliaments appears to have abdicated any serious role in foreign policy.

Stiglitz and Bilmes make several recommendations for giving Congress better information on the cost of US wars. Although desirable, this would do little in the absence of political will. Congress failed to ensure that the money it voted for the reconstruction of Iraq was used for this purpose, or to investigate the extraordinary blunders, massive corruption, systematic torture and the ruthless flattening of cities that marked American rule, because Republican members did not want to do so.

‘The Russian Threat’
(November 2008). President Medvedev of Russia has outlined plans for a security pact to ban the use of force in Europe and decrease the increasing tensions between Moscow and Nato. He promised that Russian troops would leave ‘security zones’ in the undisputed areas of Georgian territory. EU observers in Georgia confirmed that Russian forces had dismantled 17 checkpoints, one signals post and one military base in zones adjacent to the ‘breakaway regions’. ‘We are absolutely not interested in confrontation’ Medvedev said, outlining a new European security treaty that he proposed earlier in the year. The new pact would include a ‘clear affirmation of the use of force – or of the threat of force – in international relations’ and would be based on the territorial integrity of independent nations. It would also prevent ‘the development of military alliances to harm the security of other members of the treaty’.

This plea for a rapprochement fell on deaf ears in the USA and Europe. The plans for Georgia and Ukraine to join Nato are on track. The incorporation of these, respectively, irresponsible and divided countries will mean a commitment to defend them if ‘attacked’ and to help Georgia recapture the ‘breakaway regions’. Saakashvili has promised to do so, and the Ossetians expect Georgia to devise a pretext for a third war. Ukraine’s membership will presumably cut off Russia’s access to the Black Sea. An anti-missile shield (which US strategists have never pretended is purely defensive or aimed at Iran) and nuclear missiles aimed at Russia have been installed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia has sought to neutralize this threat by moving nuclear missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad on the Baltic, and is following the lead of the USA and Britain in developing new nuclear weapons. We are back with Able Archer. The ‘best case’ scenario for the foreseeable future – assuming that US strategy remains essentially unchanged and that Europe continues to accept it unquestioningly - is an unnecessary new Cold War and nuclear arms race, the inflaming of nationalist sentiment in Russia, more support for savage attacks on minority groups in countries where the Government is ‘friendly’ to the USA and for minority insurrection where it is not, more terrorist attacks, and a heavy burden of military expenditure in all countries. How have we reached this sorry pass so soon after the collapse of the Soviet bloc held out hopes of a more peaceful world?

The new Cold War had its origins in the early 1990s when the Clinton Administration decided to abandon arms control agreements and the principles of the UN Charter and OCSE, and to enlarge Nato up to Russia’s borders. That this would lead to conflict with Russia was not a concern, given the USA’s overwhelming military superiority. In 1999, the Clinton Administration was quite prepared to start a shooting war with Russia, in order to break the agreement to include Russian troops in the peacekeeping force in Kosovo. War was prevented only by an extraordinary act of insubordination by a British general; see European Security --, p.160.

The US strategy was clearly expounded by Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard. In his words, it was to expand the American Empire, first through the Balkans and then through the ‘Asiatic Balkans’ – the huge unstable area stretching around Russia’s Southern flank from the Caucusus through the Levant, Iraq and Iran to Afghanistan. Nato would be the main instrument. Nato membership means putting national armed forces under US command. This was agreed to by Britain in 1948 because of a false assessment of the Soviet threat and its mistrust of France and Germany but Nato was originally defensive; it was given an aggressive, interventionist remit. The methods used would be a combination of cultural and economic imperialism, bribery of elites, guarantees of military support against external attacks or insurrection and, if necessary, war. (The fourth Nato war produced the client state of Kosovo and the largest US air base outside the USA). President Bush continued this strategy but tilted the balance towards war in a way that Brzezinski has criticised (‘Turbulence in the Global Balkans’, The Spokesman, 99 2008).

Writers like Brzezinski and the more hawkish Bobbitt, Kagan and Thomas Friedman - heirs to a tradition stretching back to Alexander Hamilton – have justified this strategy in terms of Realpolitik but it has been sold to the public (in the USA and in its vassals, as Brzezinski puts it) in terms of countering ‘threats’, ‘defending liberty’ and ‘God bless America!’. Before the Kosovo and Iraq wars, government-sponsored media operations in the USA and Britain successfully portrayed Milosevic and Saddam Hussein as Hitlers who could be stopped only by war. (In Germany, during the Kosovo war, there was an appeal to rather different history; a WW1 song ‘Serbia must die’ was revived). There are signs that a similar campaign about Russia has begun. Writers close to the British Government portray Russia as irrationally aggressive state which, as its completely unjustified attack on Georgia shows, plans to dominate, or at least ‘Finlandise’, all Europe. This is an even grosser exaggeration than that of the military ‘threats’ from the Soviet Union and Vietnam during the Cold War, when there was at least an ideological conflict and when the Soviet Army controlled half of Europe. In Britain, ‘defence’ policy since the run-up to the Kosovo air war has been justified with lies, misleading statements and Newspeak (‘We were not at war with Serbia’) on an unprecedented scale. Politicians brought up in the advertising/PR methods which now dominate politics seem incapable of understanding the difference between what is true and what is expedient, while the scope for rational and independent thought - in political parties, the Foreign Service, the media, the Universities - has been narrowed; see Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying and The Triumph of the Political Class.

Political lying has become sophisticated and ingenious. The CIA has long told its political masters what they wanted to hear, so that they can say ‘The experts have told me ---‘. In Britain, the Joint Intelligence Committee has followed suit, even to the extent of endorsing known CIA forgeries. The forgery reported in European Security, fn.252 has since been confirmed by investigative journalists. In future, reports of skullduggery, torture, rendition etc. will be suppressed if a proposal by the Intelligence and Security Committee is implemented – that the Government be given the power to censor any report which ‘endangers national security’. Such a law, or the secret inquests which the Government would like to introduce, would have prevented the revelations at the Menezes inquest. The ISC, which is supposed to supervise the ‘secret state’, has produced a report that is beyond satire; op.cit. p.273. Who will guard the guardians?

What are the driving forces behind the ‘culture of lies’ – in the words of the ‘Yugoslav’ writer Dubravska Ugresic? One of the reasons for the ‘nightmarish growth of nuclear arsenals’ was pin-pointed in 1986 by George F. Kennan - the Cassandra of US foreign policy from the formation of Nato to the invasion of Iraq. The dominant and uncontrolled ‘military-industrial complex’ needed foreign threats. ‘Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unaltered, until some new adversary could be invented’.

Gulf War
Thanks to the research for a ‘docudrama’ (The House of Saddam, BBC2, August 2008) we now know that the US Administration not only failed to warn Saddam against invading Kuwait, but actually gave him the green light. Saddam was worried that Kuwait’s expansion of oil production was driving down prices and threatening the Iraqi economy. He gave clear signals that he was considering invasion. Shortly before the invasion, the US Ambassador, Ms April Galspie, told him,’We do not have a view on Arab-Arab’ disputes’. (Saddam taped the interview). He took this as an assurance that the US would not react to an invasion of Kuwait, which it clearly was, although Ms Galspie has denied any such meaning.

Obama
After he won the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama for the first time made some substantive statements on foreign policy. It is now clear that, under his Presidency, unconditional support for Israel’s ‘security’ policies would continue; US troops would remain in Iraq, although normally in bases; the war in Afghanistan would be intensified, without any informed political strategy; the long-running undeclared wars on Cuba and Iran would continue. Obama’s foreign policy advisor is Madelaine (‘What’s the point of this wonderful military machine if you don’t use it?’) Albright. The outcome of the Presidential election seems unlikely to lead to any significant changes in US foreign policy.

Georgia
In August 2008, the dangers of extending Nato up to the Russian border, of which George Kennan warned in the 1990s (see European Security---, p.51ff) became apparent. The Georgian President Saakashvili started a war to conquer the ‘breakaway’ provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russian forces intervened and drove back the Georgian forces, bombing military and civilian targets in Georgia. As in Kosovo, the war had disastrous outcomes for the regional minorities, mainly Georgians. The ‘Russian aggression’ was denounced by the USA and the EU, which demanded immediate withdrawal, with the threat of ‘serious consequences’. (Proposals have been made to remove Russia from international bodies). The British Prime Minister described the Russian intervention as ‘a completely unjustified violation of Georgia’s territorial integrity’, a view endorsed by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The media coverage created the impression that the war had been started by Russia. It appears to have been as successful as the media campaign which convinced most Americans that Saddam was behind 9/11.

Although the Russian use of force was excessive and clearly had wider aims in Georgia, it was President Saakashvili who started a war that was completely unjustified. Georgia, with its present borders, never had the conventional requirement for diplomatic recognition, namely that it controlled all its territory - a sound convention which the EU foolishly ignored in Bosnia. Before 1990, ‘Georgia’ was merely an administrative region for the Communist Party (whose only virtue was that it was multi-racial). The border was drawn by Stalin, cutting through the Ossetian region. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Ossetians and Abkhazians, who were determined not to be ruled Georgians, set up autonomous governments. When Georgian forces attacked, they fought back and - with Russian help - gained de facto independence, monitored by Russian forces. This arrangement remained reasonably peaceful and satisfactory for eighteen years. South Ossetia/Abkhazia was never part of Georgia in the way that Kosovo was part of Yugoslavia.

Saakashvili sought to end the independence of South Ossetia/Abkhazia with a new war. The USA, from its ’sigint’ (signals intelligence), would almost certainly have known about the planned attack in advance, even if Saakashvili did not inform the USA and receive the green light, as he may well have done. A well-informed schoolboy could have told the US Administration what the Russian response would be. If Britain had a border with Kosovo and a large Kosovan population, and Serbia sought to reconquer Kosovo, it would have done the same; indeed, it did the same without this justification! If the US Administration really was surprised by the Russian response, its ’humint’ (human intelligence) is as abysmal as it was throughout the Cold War. And the assertions by the British Foreign Secretary that the enlargement of Nato (with its US air bases, nuclear missiles and anti-missile shield) does not represent an American zone of influence and a threat to Russia is breathtakingly disingenuous.

The starting point for a rational European policy would be to recognise the legitimate fears of some of Russia’s neighbours as well as Russia’s legitimate security concerns. (The planned incorporation of Ukraine into Nato would be a greater threat to Russia than Soviet missiles in Cuba were to the USA). It would also recognise that the collapse of Communist rule has produced regional minority/majority problems which cannot be dismissed by simplistic slogans. Such a policy would also be ready to criticise the authoritarian and kleptocratic elements in the regime in Russia - and in most countries of the world, including some in the EU - while also considering the policies best calculated to encourage democratic and liberal forces.

In both Kosovo and South Ossetia/Abkhazia, the best solution would have been an internationally enforced ceasefire and autonomy, with guarantees for the regional minorities. This solution - which the American diplomat Christopher Hill was trying to negotiate for Kosovo - was rejected by the US Administration, which encouraged the Kosovo Liberation Army to go on fighting for independence. After Serbia‘s capitulation, the USA was prepared to fire on Russian troops and shoot down Russian planes to prevent the agreed participation of Russian troops in the peacekeeping force K-For. The prize of an ‘aircraft carrier’ (Camp Bondsteel) in the Balkans, and now of an oil-strategic Georgia in Nato, has overridden all other considerations

If Russian forces withdrew from South Ossetia/Abkhazia, without an effective international system for guaranteeing the independence of these regions, the Georgian forces would, perhaps after a decent interval, march back in again. Saakashvili has said that he will ‘never accept the sacrifice of a square kilometre of Georgian territory’.

However, the ‘Russian aggression’ has provided a heaven-sent opportunity to make a media case for bringing Georgia and Ukraine into Nato and generally ‘being tough with the Russians‘. The ‘indignant morality’ which was used to justify a ’coercive’ air war on Yugoslavia, to protect the majority ethnic group in Kosovo (and drive out the minority groups) is now being used to denounce a war to protect the majority ethnic groups in South Ossetia/Abkhazia. Politicians and journalists have shown a remarkable facility to switch their moral fervour from a people’s ‘right to secede’ to ‘the inviolability of territorial integrity‘.

European leaders have once again failed to adopt a realistic foreign/military policy and have abdicated responsibility for matters of war and peace in favour of the Americans. We are now in 1914. Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia/Abkhazia was a miscalculation similar to Austria’s invasion of Serbia.To bring Georgia into Nato while recognising the borders it claims would mean an commitment to support the use of armed force to impose Georgian rule on peoples who have successfully resisted it, and a war with Russia to bring this about.

The new Cold War began, not in August 2008 but in the early 1990s, when President Clinton decided to extend Nato up to Russia’s border and break international arms control treaties by installing a missile shield in Eastern Europe. Cold War II has already meant, throughout Europe, a huge diversion of resources into military uses which are badly needed to deal with social problems and the imminent threat of climatic disaster., not to mention the non-negligible danger of a nuclear war by miscalculation - as nearly happened on at least two occasions.

The few people in Britain who have questioned the Western response to the conflict in Georgia (or been able to make their views known) have been subject to the same epithets as those who criticised the Vietnam, Kosovo and Iraq wars (’anti-American’, ’fellow-travellers of dictators’, ‘Lefties’ etc). Neal Ascherson, one of most knowledgeable British journalists on Eastern Europe, has written.

‘It’s time the West stopped talking about ‘Georgian territorial integrity’ and about ‘breakaway regions of Georgia’ as though their ‘illegal secession’ can somehow be reversed. It cannot. That useless dream is dead. The question now is quite different. It is how their independence can be recognised and made real. Only in that way can the outside world make it harder for Russia to use them as pawns in the game of crippling Georgian freedom.

It may not be possible to rescue South Ossetia, tiny and without resources, from becoming a Russian protectorate or even part of the Russian Federation - and most of its people seem to want that. But Abkhazia, with its once-flourishing holiday coast and rich agriculture, can be a perfectly viable Black Sea state. The European Union has a Black Sea neighbourhood programme. It’s time for the EU to stop pretending that Abkhazia does not exist, to integrate it into the programme and to give it vigorous help.

And Georgia, that marvellous little nation that contains some of the world’s most talented people, and some of its worst politicians, must change. It is not Georgia which has been defeated, but a particular Georgian policy which has again and again played into Russian hands.

We now know that Russia’s revival as a big power is under way. Outside competition for influence over the ex-Soviet nations is going to be fiercely resisted. After Georgia come Ukraine, where attempts to join Nato could end by splitting the nation and, with the Russian fleet still based in Crimea, bring about a terrifying confrontation.

Nato, with the Americans, can protect its own members against blackmail by standing firm. But the brutal truth is that if Nato is to survive, it must not sign up nations for which at heart it is not prepared to figh. The best way to prevent war is not windy condemnation but clear, credible, rules of engagement. Bluffing can be fatal.’ (The Observer, 18.08.08).

Iraq.
In February 2007, the USA and Britain put strong pressure on the Iraq Government - which was in no position to refuse - to pass a law allowing the country's oil reserves to be sold off to multinational firms. (The Observer, Feb 25 2007).

The US Congress had authorised a former Secretary of State to make a study of the situation in Iraq and the options for US policy. His report ( The Iraq Study Group Report; The Way Forward, James A Baker et al, Vintage, 2007) made proposals for a phased withdrawal and dialogue with Iran, but warned that sending more US troops could worsen the security problem by strengthening the view that the US presence was intended to be a long-term occupation. These proposals were rejected by the Administration and the Democrats. The Administration, with Democrat support, sent more troops to Iraq and stated that it intended to remain there because of the importance of the Gulf area to the USA.

The most comprehensive and informed account of the events before and after the invasion is given in Ali A.Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq; Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale UP, 2007). The author was an Opposition leader who became Minister of Defence and Finance. In judicious and understated prose, he gives a daming assessment of US/British policy. His only lacuna is to describe the shooting-down of the Iranian Airbus as 'unexplained'.

The USA and Britain are making making increased use of mercenaries, whose actions are virtually unaccountable. In Iraq, British troops are being replaced by mercenaries (or, since this term is disliked, private security forces). There is also evidence that British soldiers who have been physically or mentally disabled in Iraq and Afghanistan have been have been abandonned without care or support.

Bosnia
In February 2007, the World Court ruled that Serbia had not committed genocide during the Bosnian War, although it criticised Serbia for not stopping the Srebrenica massacre, which it categorised as genocide.

Tiri (www.tiri.org)
Studies carried out for Tiri, an NGO committed to integrity in public affairs, conclude that international aid to countries following interventionist or civil war - including Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Lebanon - has often been wasted, as it is linked to the interests of the donors rather than the recipients, or directed to favoured groups. The need for the rule of law, a non-corrupt civil service, independent media, an effective legislature and an accountable executive has generally been ignored. In Bosnia, Lord Ashdown's 'enlightened despotism' did nothing to develop representative home-grown institutions. Sierra Leone still suffers from the corrupt autocratic government, politicised civil service and judiciary, and a muzzled press which ruined the country.

H.M.The Queen.
In May 2007, the Queen effectively told an American audience that she was the Head not of a sovereign state but of a US vassal. With apparent reference to the Iraq war, she said that Britain should always act in concert with the USA. The Queen's self-abasement merely set the royal seal on a political commonplace. David Cameron, and others, have said that, as the USA had decided to invade Iraq, Britain was right to join in. The alternative view, put by ex-President Carter, that 'Blair's -- almost undeviating support for the ill-advised policies of President Bush on Iraq has been a major tragedy for the world' has found little support among British politicians or journalists. (And the Brown government does not represent any change of substance in British policy).

France.
Nicolas Sarkozy's victory on 6 May -- marks a turning point in the history of the fifth republic. -- The programme presented by Sarkozy, and the forces he sought to gather around him, represent a major change of direction, making him the first French President to be at once authoritatarian, neo-liberal, pro-American and pro-Israeli'. (Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2007.

Sarkozy's ministry includes at least one strong supporter of 'humanitarian intervention' like the Iraq war. For the next seven years, one can expect France to be almost as keen as Britain to support America's and Israel's wars.

'1983 The Brink of Catastrophe'.
(see Chap.1).The story of how Europe narrowly escaped an accidental nuclear war was told in a Channel 4 programme on 4 January 2008. The head of the KGB believed that the USA was using an exercise, Able Archer, as a cloak for an attack on the Soviet Union, as Germany had done with Operation Barbarossa. The programme clearly brought out three things. (a) The insanity of the Nato war game, which assumed a Soviet desire to overrun Western Europe which no Soviet leader had ever had, and ended after Nato had created 24 Hiroshimas in East Germany, Poland and the Soviet Union, ignoring Soviet retaliation. (b) The military on both sides misinterpreted the plentiful 'sigint' because of a complete misunderstanding of the other side's psychology. The only people who told the truth were two honest spies, Gordievsky and 'Topaz', who told the Kremlin that there were no Nato preparations for immediate war. (c) The dangers of automatic devices. Col.Stanislav Petrov, who was in charge of the Soviet early warning system, disclosed that (at a time when Soviet missiles were on highest alert, ready to be fired once they received the codes), the warning sounded for an imminent missile attack. A satellite had reported the launch of five nuclear missiles from the USA. Petrov, relying on his training that a US first strike would involve hundreds of missiles, did not believe it, and overruled the system. He was soon proved right; the 'missiles' were clouds, but he was dismissed. Events in recent years suggest that nothing has been learned from 1983.

Kosovo.
In 2007 the political wing of the KLA (Democratic Party of Kosova), led by Hashim Thaci (see Chap.6), won an election. In December 2007, UN-sponsored talks between the Kosovars and the Kosovan Serbs broke down, and it was expected that Thaci, as Prime Minister, would unilaterally declare Kosova's independence in January 2008, with at least tacit US support. The EU will give diplomatic recognition to Kosova and it is likely that, in one way or another, it will drive out the 100,000 remaining Kosovan Serbs. The success of the Kosovan Albanians, with Nato help, in obtaining secession and carrying out 'ethnic cleansing' is likely to give encouragement to other secessionist movements in Eastern Europe.