ABSTRACT
The military intervention over Kosovo had been, in a sense, the logical
culmination of the experience of the 1990s. As we have seen, the roots of the
Kosovo War lay in the retrospective assessments of both Labour and Con-
servative politicians that military intervention should have come sooner in
Bosnia.1 Additionally, memories of the consequences of the failure to intervene
to curb slaughter in Rwanda – what Paul Kennedy has termed, ‘‘the single
worst decision the United Nations ever made’’, and the ‘‘lowest point in the
UN’s history’’ – remained fresh.2 It was clearly possible to reconcile this humanitarian military interventionism with the Labour principles and traditions
outlined in Chapter 1. After all, it was Clement Attlee, speaking at the launch
of the UN General Assembly in 1946, who had told his audience that he was:
glad that the Charter of the United Nations does not deal only with
Governments and States or with politics and war, but with the simple
elemental needs of human beings whatever be their race, their colour or their
creed. In the Charter we reaffirm our faith in fundamental human rights. We see the freedom of the individual in the State as an essential com-
plement to the freedom of the State in the world community of nations.3
However, it was just as possible to see the military intervention over Kosovo
as representing a departure from the core element of the traditional Labour
approach – its insistence on the centrality of the UN. While the shift over
Kosovo proved controversial, it was not damagingly so. The Blair government’s
case for war in Iraq, however, was of a different order. This chapter begins by considering the influences that shaped Blair’s interventionism and the factors
that enabled it to prevail with regard to Iraq, before considering the 2002-03
case for war and the extent to which the principles Blair himself outlined as
guiding interventionism were met.
