Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour by Andrew Rawnsley

Author:Andrew Rawnsley [Rawnsley, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141939049
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

The real victor of the NATO summit was the American air force. Wesley Clark and Mike Short had finally won their argument that success was being limited by the shackles imposed upon them by political nervousness of casualties, a contention General Short had reinforced with several threats to resign. Whether this was true or not – it served as a useful excuse for the military’s own failings – the politicians were now groping for anything which might offer a breakthrough. They conceded to the military’s urge to ‘go downtown’ and blitz Belgrade. Dr Strangelove was given his head. He was allowed to target power supplies and other civilian structures which Blair had initially recoiled from attacking for fear of ‘killing babies’. At the outset of the war, Blair wanted to know where each individual Harrier and Tornado was going. He insisted on personally vetting any targets that might risk civilian casualties. According to RAF officers, when the daily plans came in, they were immediately taken round to Number 10 for Blair’s ‘blessing’. As the conflict endured, this task had been delegated to the Defence Secretary who had, in turn, passed it further down the chain. By early May, George Robertson was asking to see only highly sensitive targets. The British politicians had surrendered virtually all control over the air campaign. Not that, since it was so predominantly waged by the Americans, they ever had that much command over the bombing. Clark circumvented NATO’s systems of restraint by excluding other nations from decisions about sorties involving only American planes. The Americans had their own targeting team, separate from the NATO operation. Even the British – in theory Washington’s most trusted and reliable ally – were not being given comprehensive information about US plans. The conflict had switched to American auto-pilot. This was about to prove an extremely unreliable mechanism.

On 7 May, a B2‘Spirit’ stealth bomber, the most expensive war machine on the planet, took off from its base in Missouri to make the fifteen-hour flight to Belgrade. As the American aircraft ploughed above the clouds, George Robertson was not at Winston Churchill’s desk in the Ministry of Defence. In the middle of the war, the British Defence Secretary had found time to join the election campaign for the Scottish Parliament. As Robertson pressed the flesh, the B2 opened its black belly over the Adriatic to disgorge the Joint Defence Air Munition, the most sophisticated flying bomb possessed by the American air force. A few minutes before midnight in Belgrade, the bomb struck Number 3 Cherry Blossom Street and demolished the southern wing of the embassy of the People’s Republic of China.

The first Robertson heard about this catastrophe was on his car radio. ‘Oh shit,’ he shouted to himself. Once Robertson had got on to a secure line to Washington, the American Defense Secretary gave him the official explanation. Robertson was told by William Cohen that they had planned to hit the Hotel Yugoslavia, a base for the war criminal, Arkan. That

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.