Correlli Barnett: After Kosovo, his stupendous moral vanity blinded him to Britain's interests

As Tony Blair's premiership sputters into darkness, British servicemen and women continue to die because of his decisions to commit Britain to George Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003. In both cases, the calamitous results of Western occupation have indelibly stained Blair's wis hed-for historical "legacy". Yet Afghanistan and Iraq were only the second and third instances of Blair's meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign states. His first war was in 1999 in Kosovo, a province in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. That confirmed his belief that a righteous cause took precedence over international law and respect for the internal sovereignty of nation-states. It confirmed him in an unshakeable faith that his own moral judgements must always be "right". And it fostered his belief in himself as a great leader in peace and war.

The Kosovan conflict launched Blair on his trajectory as an actor on the world stage, soaring to his apogee in 2001-03 as Bush's chief confederate in "the war on terror", then plunging to his present nadir of discredit, moral and political.

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The Nato attack on Yugoslavia was unprovoked, because Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav President, offered no threat to Britain and America, or to the Nato alliance, or to world peace. The attack was also illegal, being a violation of the United Nations Charter, having never sanctioned by a resolution of the UN Security Council, and a violation of the North Atlantic Treaty.This had been Blair's doing. He passionately advocated that "the international community" could not allow Serbian forces to "ethnically cleanse" Kosovo of its majority ethnic Albanian people. Above all, Blair persuaded a reluctant President Bill Clinton to commit American airpower. So Blair got the war he wanted. As Nato bombers and cruise missiles began a ferocious bomb-ardment of Kosovo, a self-righteous Blair preached on television: "To those who say the aim of the military strikes is not clear, I say it is crystal clear. It is to curb Milosevic's ability to wage war on an innocent population."

The bombing, he averred, "was simply the right thing to do", a phrase he was to trot out endlessly in an attempt to justify Iraq. But was it "the right thing to do" even in his own sanctimonious terms? What were Blair's real motives?

First, there was his stupendous moral vanity. Not strategically the right thing to do, in the interests of Britain and her security, but morally, regardless of the consequences. As Blair admitted on the Parkinson show in 2006, he believes he is accountable only to God for his decisions to take Britain to war.

Then there was his grandiose pronouncement in 1999 that the Kosovan war "is no longer just a military conflict. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarity".

He would re-use the grandiose phraseology many times. But Blair was also motivated by personal vanity, blatantly revealed when he swaggered beside President Bush at flag-bedecked press conferences in the White House. The truth is Blair meant the Kosovan conflict to serve as his "Falklands War", establishing him as Margaret Thatcher's equal as a victorious leader.

But President Clinton refused to commit the US to a possible ground war. Memory of Vietnam, with 58,000 American dead, remained all too vivid. Tony Blair grandly offered 50,000 soldiers, half the British Army. Given the Army'scommitments, this was just Blairish fantasy, on a par with his 2006 offer to supply the troops in Afghanistan with all the helicopters they wanted, except that there were none.

But after Milosevic was warned by Russia that they would not back him, the Yugoslav army withdrew.

Now followed Alastair Campbell's brilliant spinning to turn Nato's near-defeat into Blair's personal triumph. In Kosovo, Blair was greeted by a well-rehearsed ethnic-Albanian rent-a-crowd chanting, "Tonee! Tonee!". Newspapers and TV channels carried the image of a dear little girl in her dear little party frock presenting "Tonee" with a dear little posy of flowers.

Less well-covered was the mass exodus of Serbian refugees out of Kosovo that accompanied the return of ethnic-Albanian refugees.Kosovo, like Iraq and Afghanistan, warns us that "humanitarian" meddling by force of arms in the internal affairs of other countries may not be "the right thing to do". Blair's successor in No 10, please note.

Correlli Barnett is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge