Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: Also on the below, Oliver Kamm:

"The most abject failure in British foreign policy in my lifetime was the abandonment, under the Conservative Government of John Major, of Bosnia's multi-ethnic democracy to Serb aggression in the early 1990s. The issue - and the state of transatlantic relations - reached a nadir between 1993 and 1995 in the person of Malcolm Rifkind, then Defence Secretary, later Foreign Secretary, now Tory candidate in the safe seat of Chelsea (he lost his Edinburgh seat in 1997, and failed to win it back in 2001), and probable future Tory leader. As related in Brendan Simms' superb book Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, 2001, p. 96, Rifkind refused to countenance a policy of 'lift and strike' (i.e. lift the arms embargo, so Bosnia could defend itself, and for Nato to strike Serb positions directly) being proposed by critics of UK inactivity. At the end of 1994, when Mrs Thatcher was pressing for a pro-Bosnian stance, Rifkind condemned her "emotional nonsense". He also remarked to despairing American senators that, "You Americans don't know the horrors of war." The particular senator he was addressing was Bob Dole, who was permanently disabled and nearly killed in WWII. Dole replied, with commendable restraint, "Don't talk to me about sacrifice." Simms also records that Senator John McCain, a POW in the Vietnam War, became so heated in meeting Rifkind that he almost hit the man (according to a staff member).

I have argued in earlier posts that the Conservatives' position on the Iraq War - first supporting it, and then engaging in embittered criticisms of Tony Blair's supposed duplicity - does not even reach the level of honest opportunism: it's just cynical. But in fact it does have some parallels with this earlier history of Tory indifference to an aggressive dictatorship. In the Bosnian debacle, Rifkind and then-Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd espoused a Conservative tradition of pessimism about the limits of political action in the international order. The consequences were appalling from a humanitarian point of view. It is an approach that would be still more destructive when dealing with theocratic totalitarians who have attacked the American mainland and who seek the literal destruction of western civilisation."