POLITICS
The importance of peacekeeping missions to the survival of the Army
BORIS JOHNSON
We can take it for granted, I suppose, that the Government does not intend to take any of the logical courses of action in Bosnia. Mr Major, Mr Hurd, Mr Rifkind and Sir Peter Inge have not elected to go to war with Mr Ratko Mladic and the Bosnian Serbs. That is not the purpose of this deployment of 6,000 more British UN troops, with their artillery, air support, heli- copters and tanks. I think Douglas Hurd even said as much at the meeting of Nato foreign ministers at Noordwijk. 'That will not happen,' he said. So there you are, you hawks who had a rush of blood to the head over the weekend, pounding the arms of your chairs and almost upsetting your tea as you saw the revolting and humiliating spectacle of the 33 British hostages.
We can also take it as read that the Gov- ernment does not intend to do the symmet- rical opposite, and launch a precipitate withdrawal. In this Mr Major is supported by Labour and Mr Paddy Ashdown, even though a fair few Tory MPs are alarmed and angry, and say that the retreat should be beaten forthwith. 'This is insoluble,' says the sage lain Duncan-Smith, himself a for- mer army officer. 'The only people who can resolve this are the people who live there.' He does not quite take the classic, Pow- ellite position of MPs like Teresa Gorman, who say that the whole thing is frankly not our affair, since it is taking place abroad.
Mr Duncan-Smith thinks we might con- ceivably impose a kind of electric cordon round Bosnia, and declare that the first incursion of a Serb toe-cap into e.g., Mace- donia will be met with main force, 250,000 men and bombing of Serb ammo dumps. In his view, however, peacekeeping is by now intellectually bankrupt. You can't have white-painted tanks playing a semi-belliger- ent role. Si vis pacem para bellum, he says. If we want to make peace we should go to war, and since we do not want to go to war we should get out, he says, and his case has force.
And yet it is doubtful that Britain will pull its forces out, at least for some time. Unprofor will dicker quietly on, distribut- ing the pineapple chunks in a spirit of strict neutrality to the chetnik and ustashi guer- rillas, and bringing public school charm and Sandhurst efficiency to the ethnic cleans- ing. Why will they stay? Because to leave now would be to kow-tow to Johnny Serb and it would be a great embarrassment for John Major. To pull out would be to aban- don a great arsenal of British artillery, tanks, field kitchens and latrines, all of which are extremely expensive, and whose loss might well bring about the fall of the Major Government.
Some argue that General Rupert Smith and his men will stay partly because the French are going through a great va t-en guerre frenzy after their heroic action in recapturing part of that bridge in Sarajevo, and we do not want to be shown up by flee- ing the scene. The most preposterous justi- fication for staying (which originates, I sus- pect, in the Foreign Office) is that if the West leaves Bosnia, that will be the signal for Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and the fanatics of Hammas to pile in on the side of the Bosni- an Muslims, so igniting a new global con- flict between Islam and Christendom.
Despite constant predictions to this effect, the Bashi-Bazouks of Islam show a curious reluctance to tangle with the Serbs, perhaps the nastiest, most glass-eating and militaristic nation on earth apart from the Vietnamese. No, I think there is a more practical reason why the Order of the Day will be 'muddle on regardless'. That is because to pull out would do incalculable damage to the post-Cold War understand- ing of what the British army is for, and in what our 'defence policy' consists.
Under Options for Change and Front Line First, the Armed Forces have experi- enced the agony of retrenchment. Since 1 April 1990, the Navy has declined from 63,000 to 51,000. The Army has been more than decimated from 153,000 to 113,000, while the RAF has fallen from 90,000 to 71,000. The Government has made a solemn undertaking to the brass hats that this is the end of their suffering, just as it has promised the teachers and the medical profession that the pain of reform is at an end. And yet still the requirement for British troops falls away.
They are being pulled out of Northern Anyone who buys property loses.' Ireland and out of Germany, victims of the common sense military appraisal that you do not need hundreds of thousands of men on the Rhine waiting to repulse waves of Russian tanks. Fair enough, says the Army: but in the new age you do need the capacity to mount quick, lithe fire-fighting missions across the globe. That is the whole point of the new strategic concept of the British-led Allied Rapid Reaction Force. Britain is taking part in continuous European negoti- ations about the establishment of 'Com- bined Joint Task Forces', detachable from Nato, in which Britain, France and even Germany would team up under the aus- pices of the Western European Union. The entire vision of the Army's future is predi- cated on the assumption that there will be such peacekeeping missions in northern Africa, in the eastern marches of the old Soviet Union.
The concept of peacekeeping has replaced deterrence as the central justifica- tion for the £25 billion of our money that is still spent on the Armed Forces. And that is why, especially after Somalia, the contin- ued presence of the British UN forces in Bosnia is so vital to the Army's propagan- da. You can make fun of the Advance Party and Royal Fleet Auxiliary currently build- ing warehouses in Angola. You may think it odd that Tornado GR1s, Tornado F3s, Jaguars and Harriers are currently on manoeuvres in Sardinia, unless they are keeping an eye on Italian olive oil fraud. But you cannot readily mock the British operation in Bosnia, not when so many lives — or so we are told — are being saved. If you go to the Ministry of Defence, all discussion circles proudly back to Bosnia. Now that Northern Ireland has qui- etened down, it is the only active service environment, the only place to win a gong, the only place where the squaddies have a real chance not just of eating compo rations but of having a crack at Brother Serb. We're here because we're here because there's nowhere else. At £186 mil- lion for the financial year 1994-5, and a fur- ther £400 million for the new deployment, the Unprofor mission is a vast Keynesian employment scheme. That is why it is so important to maintain a peacekeeping operation, when there is no peace to keep.
Boris Johnson is assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.
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