http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Europe/2000-10/kosovofisk251000.shtml

THE INDEPENDENT (UK), Wednesday, October 25, 2000

The questionable legitimacy of our generals' claims

'Not many of us believed the jolly generals at the Ministry of Defence
when they insisted on Britain's unblemished role in the bombing of
Serbia'

By Robert Fisk

So who is surprised? Not many of us believed the jolly generals at the
Ministry of Defence when they insisted on Britain's unblemished role in
the bombing of Serbia. It was an RAF aircraft that scattered cluster
bombs across the city of Nis and – according to the Yugoslavs – an RAF
jet which spread its bomb-load through a housing estate in Aleksinac. I
watched an old woman there as her husband's body was dug out of the
rubble.

No one expected the Commons Select Committee on Defence to go any
further on cluster bombs than the phrase "questionable legitimacy"; in
the real world, we might have discussed another term – war crimes – for
such promiscuous use of weaponry. But Nato was the good guy and the
Serbs had to be taught a lesson and it was our failure to teach them
with maximum efficiency which preoccupied the committee. It was the
failure rate – not the success rate – of unguided bombs which upset our
MPs.

I wonder if the Commons committee members read the private comment of a
British Harrier pilot in April of last year (quoted in The Officer
magazine for which the MoD allows the editor to act as a security
clearance) that "after a while you've got to ignore the collateral
damage and start smashing those targets. But the politicians aren't
ready for that yet".

As for all that Serbian armour supposedly "degraded" by General Wesley
Clark's boys – in June of last year, Nato claimed 150 tanks destroyed –
it turned out to be a paltry 14 battle-tanks. So was it any surprise
that "strikes against fielded forces [ie, Yugoslav armour] failed in
their declared objective of limiting the humanitarian disaster"?

The statistics – which are not included in the committee's report – show
that fewer than 3,000 people had died in Kosovo before the bombing
began; up to 10,000 Kosovo Albanians were murdered by the Serbs
afterwards (or so claimed Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary). As General
Clark conceded later "you cannot stop paramilitary murder with
aeroplanes". Given that General Nobojsa Pavkovic – now another good guy
because he does not oppose the newly elected President Vojislav
Kostunica – warned that the Albanians would "pay the price" of a Nato
bombing campaign, it does raise again the hoary old question that
bothered us throughout the blitz: what on earth was it for?

Since General Clark, in a different interview, also claimed that the
scale of Serb brutality did not surprise him, one wonders why the
defence committee claims that the extent of Serb beastliness "took Nato
by surprise". It clearly did not. And even when the enormity of what was
happening was finally grasped – and publicised by Shea and the other
hacks in Brussels – Nato was too craven to risk a single Allied life by
ordering pilots to fly lower to hit the right targets.

As for the "serious error of judgement" in Nato's public admission that
it had no plans for a land campaign, why not just blame President Bill
Clinton? I recall the delight on the face of Yugoslav army officers in
Belgrade when they watched Mr Clinton declare on CNN there would be no
ground invasion of Kosovo. From that moment on, the ethnic cleansers
were safe and the refugees we were supposed to save were doomed. Along,
of course, with hundreds of innocent Serb civilians. Failure of
imagination indeed.