A N Wilson - They probably thought Bulgaria was part of Serbia
A recent survey by Gallup suggests that public support for the war grows and grows, each bloody, bungling week that it continues . Apparently, our arguments, the anti-war arguments, have counted for absolutely nothing: namely that bombing could only make life infinitely worse for the people it was supposed to help. The hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into Macedonia (the next theatre of war if this crisis continues) and Albania only convince the pro-bombers of the rightness of their cause.
You could go round in circles for ever arguing with these people. We, the anti-bombers would want to say the worst atrocities only took place under the cover of bombing. The bombers would say that Milosevic had planned all along to massacre, rape and pillage. The pacific-minded ask why then adequate provision was not made in advance to help the refugees. And the armchair bombers say, "What? And give Milosevic carte blanche to expel the Kosovan Albanians into our carefully prepared refugee camps?"
These arguments have been rehearsed so often that they would be boring if they were not so enraging, so heart-rending. Behind them, however, lurks a whole range of bigger, more nebulous questions: what is Nato's game? Why have the rapists and cut-throats in other parts of the world not provoked a five-week bombing campaign from the massed power of America and her allies? What is so special about the Balkans? If we are all internationalists now (hooray!) - Tony's latest conviction - why can't we produce a shopping list of places, from Rwanda to East Timor to Israel, where flagrant abuses of human rights should surely excite our Prime Minister's moral indignation and the wrath of America's more hawkish generals and air marshals?
We don't ask such questions merely for the pleasure of making cheap anti-Blair or anti-Clinton points, irresistible as these are. It is all too easy to wonder why Tony and Cherie could grin as they shared jokes and steamed dumplings with the mass murderers of Beijing, but feel uncontrollable indignation when they contemplate the savagery of our former allies in war, the Serbs.
Maybe it is in the blunder of bombing Bulgaria that some of the answer lies. The answer, that is, to our underlying, uneasy question - what's it all for? What does Nato hope to achieve by simply bombing a European nation into political non-existence? How is the cause of European civilisation served by more and more B52s, Harriers and Tornados taking off into the night skies on their monstrous missions? What is the end-game?
The almost certain answer is that there is no one single aim behind this war. Blair might believe, or might like us to believe, that it is simply a very forceful method of preventing one group of bullies from intimidating, raping and massacring another group of people. But in that case, what explains - politically and psychologically - his perceptible hawkishness when compared with all the other European leaders? When Gerhard Schroder or President Yeltsin appear to be able to extract some assurances from the Serbs, some hope that a peacekeeping force might be allowed into Kosovo, it has sounded, to date, as if Tony was the one urging Bill not to believe those guys, but just to keep on bombing. We all know that a peacekeeping force will eventually have to move into the region. Equally, we know that the failure to help the former Yugoslavia find peace with its conflicting races and religions is the greatest of all the EU's failings.
The pro-bombing party would want to say that it was Europe's failure to act, first in Bosnia then in Kosovo, which necessitates an American intervention now - for that is what we mean by Nato intervening.
We anti-bombers feel our European paranoia stir up all kinds of profoundly pessimistic misgivings. Could it be that the greatest super-power in the world (indeed, apart from China the only superpower) only half likes the success of the European Union? We are not suggesting that there was anything like a plot, still less a sustained policy here. We are thinking more of the habits of mind which are suggested by this bombing campaign. This isn't a war being conducted by the Noel Malcolms or the Melanie Macdonaghs, the tiny band of Western Europeans who are for their own eccentric reasons obsessed by the Balkans. It is being conducted not merely by automatic weapons but by politicians and generals who until five weeks ago probably would have believed it if you'd told them that Bulgaria was part of Serbia.
If Tony Blair's instincts had been as European as it suits him, sometimes, to pretend, he would have been joining British peacekeeping forces with the Italians, the French, the Russians and the Germans to work for rehabilitation and peace in Yugoslavia. Instinct, history and memory would have told him, as it tells true Europeans, the calamities which can befall the rest of Europe when the Balkans go wrong.
He has no such instincts, memories or sense of history. Blair's instincts, like those of his Dominatrix or Fairy Godmother, Lady Thatcher, are to go running to America as a pathetic way of pretending that Britain still matters, still struts large on the world stage. We don't. Our involvement in the Balkans war and the particular way in which we've urged our European partners to go along with a bungled American campaign is not just morally repellent: it is politically tragic. It springs from our ambivalence about Europe as a whole: that sense that the EU was bringing about a new realpolitik has been wrecked by the bombs. Is that in fact the big idea?