ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Tony Blair government and the development of its approach to the use of military force as a means of achieving its evolving international political aims. It considers the history of military intervention during Blair's time as Prime Minister and highlights how military intervention evolved over time and how the use of force in Sierra Leone neatly dove-tailed into his developing thinking on the use of the military for humanitarian intervention. The chapter then considers how this policy of military intervention fitted within the wider Labour Party and the support it had prior to the Iraq debacle. For the United Kingdom, and indeed for the whole of NATO, the Kosovo operation highlighted a series of weaknesses within Britain and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO's military forces. As diplomacy foundered and the threat of force by NATO failed to deter President Milosevic the NATO governments found themselves in the organisation's first war.
