Sarah Ingham: Is the Iran campaign of 2026, Kosovo 1999 v2.0?

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 Blair stated traditional foreign policy was “flawed and out of date”.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.