ABSTRACT
The resulting debate was characterised by widespread acceptance of the book’s central theses: that the war was not simply a three-sided quagmire, but essentially a Serbian war of aggression waged by externally supported proxies; that British official sources tried to head off demands for military intervention by suggesting a rough moral equivalence between aggressor and victim; that this equivalence was reinforced by a rhetoric of ‘warring factions’, which failed to distinguish between rebel Serb-and later Croatperpetrators and their victim, the internationally recognised government of Bosnia-Herzegovina; that the ‘orientalist’ mindset of much of the military profoundly affected perceptions on the ground; that Britaineven more so than France-systematically blocked all attempts to support the Bosnian government through the lifting of the arms embargo and the use of air power; that British experts persistently exaggerated Bosnian Serb military capabilities, and under-estimated those of the Bosnians and Croats; that the British government sought to ‘humanitarianise’ what was essentially a political and strategic problem; that disagreements over Bosnia led to the most serious transatlantic rift with the United States since the Suez Crisis in 1956; and that all of this was intellectually driven by a profound ‘conservative realism’ which was intensely sceptical of the morality, legality and practicality of military intervention.
