Neil Clark

How the battle lies were drawn

The WMDs haven't turned up. In 1999 there was no genocide in Kosovo. But, says Neil Clark, Tony Blair has never allowed the facts to get in the way of a good war

issue 14 June 2003

If you ever get to Belgrade Zoo, don’t miss the snake house. There, in nicely heated tanks, you will see two rather fearsome-looking pythons, one named Warren and the other Madeleine. The names of Bill Clinton’s secretaries of state – Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright – will not be forgotten quickly in the capital of the former Yugoslavia. Seeing the two pythons slithering in their tanks reminded me of the murderous foreign policy of the Clinton administration and the enthusiastic support it received from New Labour.

For amid the present furore over the no-show of Iraqi WMDs, let us remember that in Kosovo our humanitarian Prime Minister dragged this country into an illegal, US-sponsored war on grounds which later proved to be fraudulent. In 2003 Tony’s Big Whopper was that Saddam’s WMDs ‘could be activated within 45 minutes’. In 1999 it was that Slobodan Milosevic’s Yugoslavia was ‘set on a Hitler-style genocide equivalent to the extermination of the Jews during World War Two’.

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