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October 11, 2009

The Scottish Review

A Defining Moment Of My Life

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation passed its 60th birthday this year. Sixty years for a defence alliance is a long period and it has had quite a history in these 60 years. Indeed it has been a period and history which would have surprised, dismayed but maybe also encouraged and inspired many of those who breathed life into the North Atlantic Treaty which was signed in 1949. It is however unlikely that any of them would have predicted the way the child they gave birth to would grow up and adapt over the years.

Some of those founders, especially in the United States Senate, who saw it as a temporary expedient to stop the roll of Stalin’s tanks into more of Europe, and to force Europe's constantly warring tribes to live in peace, would have been astonished at what actually happened. These architects of post World War security structures were fighting against American public opinion in committing their nation to the 'attack-on-one-is-an attack-on-all' Article 5 of the treaty. For some senators, NATO should have been time limited and wound up in a relatively short period.

For them, and many others world-wide, there would be astonishment, if not total dismay, to think that NATO would have to stand firm and steadfast for 40 years against Stalin and his heirs until the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, the Communist hegemony in Europe, and even the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself would disappear into history.

Imagine their bewilderment deepening further if they had thought that far from winding up when the enemy had been seen off, NATO had found a new mission – to reach out to those former Communist states as they faced a very different and difficult future and offer a helping hand with reform of the military, civilianisation of their control and the development of democratic structures. Those who had wanted NATO to dissolve itself after 10 years, and the senators who saw the treaty as a sly mechanism for the Americans being automatically dragged into another European war: they would have wondered at the role NATO had to play, as only NATO could, in stopping the civil war, and its unimaginable horrors, in the disintegrating Yugoslavia. But even they would have been proud that the creature they formed to deal with Stalin was there, and equipped, to stop the homicidal ambitions of Slobodan Milosovic.

But the born-again isolationists in the US, and others among the victors of World War II, would never have imagined the events of 11 September 2001. After 52 years of Article 5 pledging automatic US involvement in an attack on any NATO country, however small, the first time the collective security clause was to be invoked was by this Scottish voice declaring 24 hours after the attacks on New York, Washington and Philadelphia that they were to be seen as an attack on all 19 members of the alliance. As far as I know there are none of the original doom-saying legislators around today, but if they were and had got over their astonishment at what happened to their prophesies, how would they cope with the fact that the first attack on US soil since Pearl Harbour would emanate from the far side of the world in Afghanistan and it was to there, 6,000 miles away from the US, that the troops of the alliance would have to go to prevent further 9/11 attacks on American and European cities.

But dismay, bordering on incredulity, by some of the founding fathers (and they were mostly men) should yet have been tempered if they were to know of NATO's huge successes. A Soviet road-roller stopped in its tracks; a fragmented, fractious Europe of constantly fighting nation-states now prosperous, at peace and increasingly integrated and cooperating; the former Soviet satellites not only freed from the shackles but firm members of NATO and of the European Union; and, on top of that, Russia as a valued, if occasionally turbulent, partner in the fight against new threats like terrorism. It has turned out to be the most successful defence alliance in world history – and that history is still being written.

NATO is now not only in Afghanistan, protecting our liberties at home by making it impossible for the Taliban to host Qu'ida again; it leads the anti-piracy patrols off the east African coast and polices sea-lanes in the Mediterranean. It has provided help to Pakistan after its devastating earthquake and to the African Union in Darfur. It seeks out and captures war criminals in the Balkans. It helped stop a civil war in Macedonia. It has modernised its fighting forces and formations to deal with current threats like chemical, biologial and radiological attack. Quite a transformed organisation.

For all of my life, even if for the early part of it I did not appreciate it, NATO has been the backbone of our country's safety and security. Without that alliance of free nations committing themselves to each other it is unlikely we would be able to enjoy the freedoms and choices we have, and take for granted. But not only that, it also has to be the most enduringly popular of defence alliances ever. Not a single nation has left it in its 60-year history. It has grown from 11 states to a total of 28 after the summit earlier this year and there is still a queue of countries wanting to join. Opposition to NATO membership is now confined only to fringe and odd-ball parties of the Left and Right in member and applicant states.

The durability of the NATO alliance is one of the greatest success stories of the last part of the turbulent 20th century and in spite of the regular cycles of denigrators and doubters, its role and relevance into the 21st century is still guaranteed.

And why is that, you might legitimately ask, given that the glue binding it together in the past, the Soviet Union, has gone forever? The answer, in my view, lies in the nature of the world today and the new threats which exist to our vulnerable societies. The USSR and its satellites with their massed armies and crusading objective to spread its societal model across the world has indeed gone, but has been replaced by a range of new vulnerabilities and threats which will only be tackled, and seen off, by collective and not national action.

But before I catalogue these new perils and how they can and must be tackled, let me deal with one other anniversary being marked this year. Ten years ago, our country and the other 18 countries of NATO were engaged in military action in the Balkans to stop the vicious, horrifying ethnic cleansing of the province of Kosovo by the troops and para-military thugs of President Slobodan Milosovic of Yugoslavia.

Kosovo remains a defining moment in my life – and that of a whole generation of radical politicians who at that moment had come to power in European governments and were faced by a homicidal megalomaniac in Belgrade. This man and his henchmen, many now languishing in jail, were defying international standards and human decency by using the most hideous means to expel or destroy the Albanian majority in Kosovo. We knew, and the world saw, the horrors going on. We saw nightly on TV the gutted houses, the torched schools and mosques, the thousands of refugees hiding in the cold, wet forests. We could all listen to the traumatised eye-witnesses of the killing, the torture, the rapes. And we all felt the frustration of the failure of diplomacy to stop the killing.

We, the defence and foreign ministers, all of us youthful opponents of the Vietnam War ('the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time'), knew that for us there was only one way to stop the daily horrors. A UN mandate was impossible because of Russian and Chinese blockage, so we had to order in the military without a UN resolution. To have done any less would have condemned more than a million human beings to a terrible fate. Nineteen NATO nations, unanimously (as every NATO decision small or large has to be) ordered air attacks on Milosovic's military machine. And yet it was a decision I and Robin Cook, Defence and Foreign Secretaries of this country, would never forget – or regret.

I summed up our objectives quite simply (and gained a place in the Penguin Book of Political Quotations) as 'Serbs out, NATO in, refugees home'. It took 78 long days, huge and careful allied effort – including from the magnificent aircrews at Lossiemouth who were deployed to Italy's Goia del Colle airbase – and huge risks, but all three objectives were achieved. Kosovo is now a free nation in its own right and while not without its problems, is living in peace and on track to be part of mainstream Europe.

I was later to go and see the damage to property and people. I met survivors and people who mourned those butchered, looked at graves, shed a tear at a rebuilt school some of whose pupils had been burned to death in their parents' homes. But even if I had not had these first-hand experiences I would still have known we did the right thing.

There were some at the time who opposed NATO action or had reservations about it. They were, of course, entitled to do so. The right to dissent is part of the freedom NATO has protected for us. But had we, with the heavy responsibility in our hands, stood back in the face of all the evidence, then today hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians would not be in their own homes and at peace but would have been either dead or in refugee camps scattered across the world.

So 60 years of NATO is a long time but so is 10 years from the events of 1999 in Kosovo. They live on and inform us on tough decisions which will still require to be made if this and future generations are to be protected and kept as safe as ours has been. This last year has shown us just how volatile and unpredictable our new post-post-Cold War world has become. The dramatic melt-down in the global financial crisis and the recent spread of the not-yet-finished swine flu epidemic have shown us how vulnerable and interlinked our societies are. Beyond health and financial systems there are other new global threats to our way of life and peace of mind. None of them can be dealt with by nations on their own. All of them have to be countered by nations acting together.

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