Dr Sarah Ingham is the author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.

 A war of choice, fought from the air, of contested legality but undoubted legitimacy. A successful military mission, highlighting the utility of force. A United States-led conflict, avoiding boots on the ground, intending to effect political change from 30,000 feet.

Is Iran 2026, Kosovo 1999 2.0?

The bloody century’s brief, last war underlines the fluidity of international law. Many of the 1.6million people living in Kosovo today are grateful that Britain and NATO intervened decisively on their behalf, as lawyers quibbled from the sidelines.

The Kosovo war had its roots in the post-Cold War break-up of Yugoslavia, which had resulted in four years of ethnic conflict, primarily between rival factions in Bosnia. The impotence of the United Nations-led peacekeeping effort was underscored by ethnic cleansing on Western Europe’s doorstep, the siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica.  It came a year after the genocide in Rwanda, in which 800,000 died.

This week the current can’t do Labour Prime Minister has consigned Britain and the Armed Forces to being bystanders. What a sorry contrast to another Labour PM who believed in Britain taking a global lead.

Tony Blair was clear that Britain’s Armed Forces should be deployed on humanitarian grounds; “saving strangers”, as one commentator described it. From 1997, British foreign policy, along with the national interest, would also include an ethical dimension. Blair stated traditional foreign policy was “flawed and out of date”.

In a speech on the 1998 Strategic Defence Review, the Defence Secretary George Robertson confirmed Britain’s military would not only be  more mobile, better manned, better supported and equipped, but “better able to act as a force for good in the world.” This would be tested months later in Kosovo.

In 1998, tensions grew between Serbia and Kosovo, its semi-autonomous enclave with a majority ethnic Albanian population. Violence escalated between Serb militias and the Kosovo Liberation Front, reflecting by the January 1999 Račak massacre in which 45 civilians were executed. Fearing ethnic cleansing, tens of thousands of Kosovars fled their homes.

Blair demanded a military intervention to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe and “set about trying to build a consensus for action”. He argued that the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic would continue to act with impunity because of the previous failure of will by the West to intervene in Bosnia.

Unable to build a coalition to commit ground troops, Blair persuaded the Clinton administration and many European leaders to back an air campaign.

NATO’s Operation Allied Force began on 29 March 1999. By then, an estimated 350,000 Kosovars were displaced. It ended on 10 June. More than 38,000 sorties were flown, almost 10,500 of them strike sorties against Serbian targets.

The campaign achieved its objectives: Serbia’s forces withdrew from Kosovo, Kosovar refugees returned, Belgrade surrendered control over the enclave and KFOR, an international security presence, moved in. It was a triumph of strategic air-power.  Contrary to PM Starmer’s assertion at Wednesday’s PMQs, Kosovo highlighted that major political change can be brought about from the skies.

Have American military decision-makers studied Kosovo before Epic Fury? If so, they will be aware of the negatives. Allied Force was expected to last three days. Collateral damage included 87 civilians killed in a refugee camp and a strike on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. With Serb civilians wearing bulls-eye targets gathering in the capital, Serbia did not lose the battle for public opinion across Europe.

As the conflict continued, Blair proposed the “Doctrine of the International Community”. It suggested five guidelines before military intervention. Similarly in 2001, the UN’s Responsibility to Protect doctrine set out the duties of individual states and of the international community to prevent four mass atrocity crimes.

Today, Tony Blair might suggest that Operation Allied Force could be judged illegal but legitimate. It averted a humanitarian catastrophe. Alas, another war – Iraq – still mired in the quagmire of contested international law and just war assessments, casts too large a shadow for either his views or his record to be assessed objectively.

Since 1979, the theocratic regime in Iran has brought global instability and internal tyranny. In 2022 during the Women, Life, Freedom protests, women’s eyes were specifically targeted, a horror repeated in January’s protests in which an estimated 30,000 were killed. On Monday, President Trump described Epic Fury in moral terms: a “righteous mission”.

In the 1990s, against a background of a new world order, globalisation and the “CNN effect” giving new insight into human suffering, international law in relation to military intervention was questioned, notably by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. Which should prevail: state sovereignty or the interests of international peace and security?

If, as is said, war is too important to be left to the generals, it should never be left to the lawyers.

The pros of nacho parenting

The cons associated with nacho parenting

The key to navigating this successfully

Julie Redmond is a former nurse and Conservative candidate for Westminster City Council and the London Assembly. She has seen firsthand the impact of mental ill-health, addiction and homelessness in Westminster, both on the frontline of nursing and through her work as a community campaigner.

Step off the Tube in central London and the reality hits you. How often do we emerge onto the pavement and see a tent pitched against railings, or someone clearly in the grip of addiction, dealing, or injecting in plain sight? In Vincent Square, Pimlico and many other Westminster wards, residents regularly report open drug use and associated anti-social behaviour spilling into our residential streets, and in some cases in close proximity to our children’s nurseries and schools. Alongside petty theft, shoplifting and intimidation, the daily erosion of public order.

Westminster Conservatives will not accept this as the new normal.

The current response to tackling these issues is fragmented. The council funds public health. The NHS commissions treatment. The police enforce the law. Probation manages prison release. Charities conduct outreach. The system as a whole lacks integration. The result is a revolving door: too often mental health challenges lead to addiction, addiction leads to prison, prison leads to the street, the street leads to reoffending and round again.

It is time for a more serious and structured response.

I am proposing a Westminster Street Recovery & Public Safety Plan centred on the creation of a 50-bed Recovery and Stabilisation Centre, a true Centre of Excellence for mental health stabilisation, drug recovery, and structured street transition.

This would not be a simple shelter. It would be a controlled, clinically led facility with four clear pathways.

First, individuals leaving prison particularly high-risk or repeat offenders, would be transferred directly into short-term stabilisation, linked to probation supervision and structured recovery plans. No more release with a travel warrant and nowhere to go.

Second, hospital discharge patients with addiction or homelessness risk would move straight into supported stabilisation beds. No discharge back to the street.

Third, individuals arrested for possession or anti-social behaviour linked to drug misuse could be diverted into mandatory engagement at the centre as part of a conditional caution. Treatment with consequences. Refusal to engage would mean prosecution proceeds.

Fourth, those with severe mental health needs and dual diagnosis would receive rapid psychiatric assessment and, where required, referral under the Mental Health Act.

This model is not theoretical. Finland has shown that a properly funded, integrated Housing First strategy can dramatically reduce rough sleeping by combining permanent accommodation with wraparound support. Switzerland, after facing an escalation in open drug use in Zurich in the 1990s, combined firm policing with medically supervised treatment and heroin-assisted therapy. Open drug markets were dismantled. Overdose deaths fell. Public order was restored. It’s a shame that Sadiq Khan has not chosen to learn from these approaches during his decade as Mayor of London.

The common thread was clarity and integration. Approaches did not oscillate between leniency and crackdowns. They built capacity, aligned agencies and made long-term commitments.  London struggles because we have not done the same. Treatment beds have declined. Mental health services are stretched. Housing shortages undermine recovery. And enforcement without pathways simply has people travelling round the destructive circle.

The cost of 50-bed stabilisation centre would be modest in comparison to the combined costs of policing our troubled communities, imprisoning addicts, A&E admissions, and emergency accommodation. Funding could come from a blend of council public health budgets, NHS Integrated Care Board contributions, Ministry of Justice support for prison-release cases and targeted Home Office grants.

The principles are straightforward: compassion with enforcement; treatment with accountability; structured recovery pathways; public safety restored.  Westminster has the visibility, the resources and the responsibility to lead and should not tolerate open drug addiction and street disorder any longer.

Safer streets and structured recovery are not opposing goals. They are the same goal. Compassionate Conservatism in action.

Israel’s racist colonial regime has demanded the immediate evacuation of the southern suburb of Lebanon’s capital Beirut. Fascist Israeli government minister Bezalel Smotrich announced that the southern suburbs will be “like Khan Younis”:

The threat has forced thousands of Lebanese civilians to flee on foot amid heavy bombing that has flattened or badly damaged large areas of the city. Israel has notionally had a ceasefire agreement with Lebanon since its 2024 terrorist attacks using exploding pagers killed and maimed thousands across the country, including children. However, the occupation regime has violated it multiple times daily and is now attempting to invade southern Lebanon. It is reportedly meeting heavy resistance from Lebanese militia, with several tanks destroyed and retaliatory attacks on Israeli bases.

The evacuation order shows the extent of the area of the city Israel thinks it has the right to order residents to flee:

Israel, which has already begun to sell Lebanese land it doesn’t own, to would-be illegal settlers, has also ordered the evacuation of all of southern Lebanon up to the Litani river, which runs more than half the length of the country.

Israeli military spokespeople have confessed to Hebrew-language broadcasters that Israel did not expect the fierce resistance its troops have encountered.

The rogue and terror state being its usual appalling self.

Featured image via the Canary

US generals have told a ‘closed door’ Congressional meeting that their air defences in West Asia won’t be able to keep up for long with the rate at which Iran is firing its drones and missiles. The stark warning contradicts US president Donald Trump’s wild and self-contradicting claims on his ‘Truth Social’ platform that the US has “unlimited” stocks of air defence missiles but somehow “we are not where we want to be”.

Iran has been launching a stream of attacks on US bases and interests in their vassal states in the region, as well as on Israel. These have mostly consisted of its basic ‘Shahed’ drones, yet US systems have failed to intercept many even of these low-cost weapons despite abundant footage showing multiple interceptors launched at each incoming drone:

The senior officers briefing members of Congress included General Dan Caine, the chair of the ‘Joint Chiefs of Staff’. They acknowledged the “thousands” of Iranian attack drones were forcing the United States and its allies to expend huge quantities of extremely expensive defensive weaponry and even then many were getting through.

Many analysts say the US only has stocks to last a week or two at best and potentially only a few days. Iran has also destroyed two US radar installations essential for targeting incoming missiles, as well as at least two ‘THAAD’ interceptor batteries. The THAAD launchers are the most expensive air defence systems in the world. The United States reportedly only has three of these specific radar installations.

The chaos caused by the constant Iranian barrage saw Kuwaiti-based US systems shoot down three US fighter jets in a single day on 2 March 2026.

Featured image via the Canary