Celebrating 90 Years - Foreign Policy Association

Good Diplomacy
versus Bad Diplomacy
94 | FOREIGN POLICY ASSOCIATION
(Continued)
threatened Milosevic with force if he did not
cooperate, and now we were showing him that
enough was enough.
But Milosevic was a ruthless man, and
he doubled the stakes. Serbian forces drove a
quarter of Kosovo’s Albanian population from
their homes, used rape as a tool of terror, and
created a massive refugee crisis in Macedonia.
I watched this on television from my desk and
felt physically sick. Our policy was causing
millions of people to suffer, and we were not
getting the result we wanted. But defeat at the
hands of Milosevic, who was a cunning and
disturbed man, was unthinkable.
I was with Tony Blair throughout that time.
He gave operational leadership; he gave policy
leadership; and he kept public opinion with us
in Western countries. His Chicago speech during
that crisis proposed a new doctrine of
Our policy was causing millions of
people to suffer, and we were not
getting the result we wanted. But
defeat at the hands of Milosevic,
who was a cunning and disturbed
man, was unthinkable.
I learned a painful lesson: It is
not enough to be right; you also
have to be strong and credible
and effective.
international community, qualifying the principle
of non-intervention in the affairs of sovereign
states when states break fundamental norms.
And we won. The Serbian army was compelled
to leave Kosovo, NATO forces moved in, and the
Albanian refugees went home. But I learned a
painful lesson: It is not enough to be right; you
also have to be strong and credible and effective.
I will briefly mention another careerdefining
episode, which occurred on 1 May 2003,
three weeks after Saddam had fallen. I was in
Cairo, toward the end of my posting as British
ambassador there. I was called into the embassy
to take a phone call from London. The Prime
Minister wanted me to go to Baghdad to head up
the British effort there on the civilian side.
I arrived in Baghdad a few days later. It was
not a happy sight. There was no coherent plan
for the post-war phase. Iraq’s institutions were
still led by Saddam’s people. Public order had
collapsed. The Iraqi army had disintegrated. The
police were ineffectual. And the coalition forces
in Baghdad did not see policing as their job.
It is not fashionable to say it these days,
but under Jerry Bremer [U.S. director of reconstruction
and humanitarian assistance in Iraq],