A reader asks:

I’m dimly aware of some of the covert aid the US offered to Milosevic’s opposition prior to his downfall.  I am wondering if you can share some details about those events as well as whether your government also provided similar aid.

This would be a very long posting were I to answer it in full, and who has time for that?

Yes, there was plenty of assistance given to anti-Milosevic tendencies in Serbia from 1999-2000. Most of it was not really ‘covert’, at least insofar as the Milosevic regime knew what was happening. His political opponents would turn up at the FCO and other Western Ministries and seminars quite openly. No-one expected Milosevic to massacre Serbs in large numbers to stay in power.

Milosevic himself confidently expected to outmanoeuvre all of us. He called an election, banking on simply proclaiming himself the winner come what may then brazening out the ensuing uproar.

Hah.

The point there was that Milosevic had been indicted by ICTY. This meant that the earlier policy ("better the devil you know") was no longer credible or possible. We had to invest in Serbia’s future, not its bonkers present. So we did, in all sorts of ways.

One of my favourities was to set up an ‘off-shore centre’ (so to speak) in Budapest where we ran a series of seminars for Serbian democrats to help them formulate real-life policies for actually running Serbia as and when Milosevic fell. This had several positive effects:

  • it made everyone more serious
  • it showed the opposition people that we were investing systematically in them and in Hope and Change
  • it sent a signal that such change was inevitable (as eventually summed up in the anti-Milosevic campaign slogan Gotov Je – "He’s a Goner")

This model can and should be rolled out to many other situations.

Behind all that, other things were done to get across to senior people around Milosevic that they would be better off leaving the sinking ship, or at least not fighting to defend it when the democratic monent finally arrived.

In Iran things are very different. Ahmadinejad is unindicted and may well end up simply crushing any attempts to change things, so the temptation lingers on in Western capitals to ‘keep options open’ (better the devil you know, it will take a hard-liner to cut a deal, cliché cliché etc etc). Wedge-driving at a high level in such a theocratic space is far harder.

Plus there is no sign now that the USA under new management wants ‘regime change’ as a policy goal across the Middle East (other perhaps than in Israel). The sense of the Obama Cairo speech was to reassure ‘moderate’ Arab conservatives and regimes, such as they are, that the USA wants to work with them in a measured way, not against them. Evolution, not Revolution.

Which is fine, until the oppressed people start to fight back for themselves in a rather revolutionary way.