So next time we propose to bomb Syldavia or Ackhinxa, we might first listen to a few people who speak Syldavian or Ackhinxan and know a little history. It would cost less than the safety-belt on an F-16.Prepare for a protectorate: One year on, the head of the UN interim administration in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, reportedly says it is unable to fulfil its mandate in relation to the Serbian minority. Among the many ways in which this ramshackle, underfunded operation has fallen short, the most serious has been the lack of sufficient well-trained police, and the laws, prosecutors and judges to support them. The lesson is that, in the cases where we do intervene, we must be fully prepared to make a temporary colony, with all that implies Wenn schon, denn schon, as the Germans say. Since countries don’t usually have any police trained and waiting for deployment in foreign parts, we need to have the police equivalent of a rapid reaction force, preferably under UN auspices.All these commandments might be summed up in two. First, there is the old Roman wisdom: if you want peace, prepare for war. (And the Roman air force would certainly have called for some legions on the ground.) Second, if you make war, prepare for peace.Now you may say that most of these lessons are childishly simple; indeed, would be obvious to a 12-year-old who has read a little history You are right.

But there is just one thing that the 12-year-old probably would not understand. For among the sweetest illusions of childhood is the belief that those in charge of our lives actually know what they are doing.The author’s updated ‘History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s’ has just been published by Penguin. They wouldn’t have done it to Maggie The WI aren’t the NUT. If it had been the Iron Lady in her heyday up there, all icy enunciation and blue menace, there’d have been no slow handclaps or walk-outs

They wouldn’t have done it to Maggie The WI aren’t the NUT.

If it had been the Iron Lady in her heyday up there, all icy enunciation and blue menace, there’d have been no slow handclaps or walk-outs.
I don’t mean that the decision of the Prime Minister to use the WI conference as a convenient moment to address the nation was a wise one, only undermined by a rudeness as unexpected and unlovely as Keith Chegwin’s genitals. No, it was a bad miscalculation, and almost an act of discourtesy in itself. All that “as David Blunkett will be announcing later” stuff made it clear to the assembled matrons that they were a stage army, a passive chorus, there to witness someone else making history.Well, they certainly made their own. We will be seeing those pictures for years to come.Even so, they wouldn’t have done it to Maggie. They were scared of her in a way that people are not of Tony Blair.

And not just scared of her, but of what came with her: a fiercely partisan press that adored her and saw itself as fighting in the trenches alongside her. Mr Blair has no such friends, for all the talk of “easy rides”; one only has to contrast the way that most newspapers treated dissent over the Falklands, with the way in which the sceptics were handled during the Kosovo conflict.And Mr Blair’s treatment was ironic for two further reasons. The first was that few politicians could believe more in the need for organisations like the WI than does Tony Blair – not as a source of votes, but as an essential part of civil society, filling the gap between the individual and the state. He really does think that the WI is vital.And the second irony was emphasised yesterday, when the WI handed in a petition (non-political, one presumes) at No 10 calling for the retention of village post offices. What, one wonders, would have been Maggie’s response to such a petition? Might she not have told the floral-print tide that village post offices would only deserve to stay open if people actually wanted to use them?Maybe, some people have almost suggested in the wake of the WI débâcle, a good wigging is what the ladies would have preferred.