NATO needs a nap

Jamie Shea, the man who sometimes wears glasses and at other times can see perfectly without them, is the NATO spokesperson. What he says...

Jamie Shea, the man who sometimes wears glasses and at other times can see perfectly without them, is the NATO spokesperson. What he says is what the world believes about the war in Kosovo. Recently he spake thus: 8220;NATO never sleeps.8221;

It was meant to be an enunciation of heroism. Only it ended up looking like he wished someone would give the men and women at war time off for a nap. His bloodshot eyes lent a great deal of credence to the imagined request.

Even apart from Shea8217;s personal performance, there is no questioning NATO8217;s need for a nod. A look at US State Department spokesman James Rubin will further convince you that even those with Greek-god looks need a wink. The other night it was morning in the US Rubin had a hard time keeping his eyes open and an even harder time keeping his brain thinking. It was no wonder he said in his superior tone that the US had already apologised for the bombing of the Chi-nese embassy in Beijing.

This from the man who has the world8217;s most famous woman warcorrespondent for a wife Christ-iane Amanpour. Fortunately, not everyone in the State Department was asleep on their feet. He was reminded of his mistake that despite not being the Most Favoured Nation in the world, China does not have to resort to building embassies in its backyard. The bombing happened in Belgrade. Rubin laug-hed off the gaffe but the sorry episode had the effect of waking him up temporarily.

The Chinese, no one can doubt, were not amu-sed. They probably thought that the pilot who bombed the embassy was sleeping too. One of the hazards of flying automatic aircraft no doubt. First it was reported that the pilot had made a mistake. On being asked of what kind, reports reached the pinnacle of creative thought. They said it was the result of faulty information and outdated maps. In an alliance of state-of-the-art military might, cost-cutting is saved for maps.

Then William Cohen, the US Defence Secre-tary, made what can only be described as an unbelievable assessment. He said: 8220;Theypresumably anyone other than himself failed to identify the target, when they did identify them it turned out to be the Chinese embassy. Their maps show the Chinese embassy in another part of the city.8221;

These kinds of banalities, however, surprise only those who have joined the war in Kosovo recently. A bit like the reaction you get when people join a cricket match at the lunch interval. Slobodan Milo-sevic has stretched incredulity worldwide by maintaining there is no systematic ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia probably why he thought it fit to turn away UN High Commissioner for Hum-an Rights Mary Robinson from his doorstep. But NATO too has do-ne its fair bit towards giving precision bombing a new definition. The three dead Chinese apart, NATO has trundled through civilians killed on trains, in tractor convoys and even simply walking through their villages.

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Probably those maps at work again. Or it could be just history at work. For its first 40 years, NATO was the arcane acronym that prevented aNuclear Holocaust, by the end of the Cold War it seemed virtually redundant barring Bosnia briefly, and if ever an organisation needed a corporate revamp it was NATO. Instead, it got a war on its hands. In other words, NATO needed a facelift but got a makeover instead. From being an organisation that slumbered through practising the theory of conflict, it has gone on to managing actual conflicts. A rude wake-up call if ever there was one.

One that made Shea, in an interview with The Guardian, wish for a return to the past: 8220;Maybe8230; after Kosovo, NATO will go back to being what it was before 8212; an organisation practising the theory, but not actually doing anything.8221; Catching up on lost sleep, no doubt.