I once attended an illuminating and interesting lecture by General Sir Michael Rose at Dillington House, near Ilminster, in South Somerset, and so I took especial note of the letter below. It was published in The Week on 27th August having first appeared in The Times.
Illusions of Victory
To The Times
To quote Kosovo as an example
of a substantial military success, as William Hague does in his article, is to
commit the same error as Tony Blair did.
Believing his own propaganda that Nato’s bombing campaign in Kosovo had
been successful, Blair led Britain into the disastrous invasion of Iraq. Yet the reality in Kosovo was very
different. At the end of 11 weeks of the
most intensive bombing by Nato since the War, the Serb army in Kosovo emerged
undefeated, and peace only came about when Boris Yeltsin withdrew his support
for the Milosevic regime. Furthermore,
it was the people of Serbia who removed Slobodan Milosevic from power in a
democratic election nearly 14 months later – not Nato as Hague implies. Surely the true lesson we can draw from the
crisis in Afghanistan is that if strategy is not based on reality, then
disaster will surely follow.
General Sir Michael Rose, former commander of the UN
forces in Bosnia.
