The Necessity of War

After Somalia and Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo, the heady optimism of the immediate aftermath of the Cold War seems almost as culpably naive as Woodrow Wilson’s assertion in 1918 that World War I had been the “war to end all wars.” And yet both policymakers and the educated public in Western Europe and North America were genuinely astonished when, far from signaling the end of history, the collapse of the Soviet empire seemed to unleash furies that had not been seen, in Europe at least, in half a century.

To an alarming extent, the response to the realization that the post-Cold War world, far from having created a post-ideological utopia of peace and capitalist plenty fueled by technology, is one in which famine, ethnic cleansing and war have reemerged untamed, eerily mirrors Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ famous schema of the five stages of dealing with death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. For all the talk of a human rights revolution, of a revitalized United Nations or of a U.S. foreign policy based on values rather than interests, there is little appetite for turning these millenarian post-Cold War dreams into realities. In less than a decade, elite opinion swung from believing that there was almost no crisis that the so-called international community could not resolve to the pessimistic conclusion that, except in a few rare cases, there was little that could be done.

To his great credit, Michael Ignatieff was one of the few voices to have warned, almost from the moment the Berlin Wall fell, that the West’s euphoria was altogether inappropriate. In his 1994 book, “Blood and Belonging,” he anatomized the rebirth of various sanguinary particularisms in Europe and North America. Using as one of his explanatory keys Freud’s idea of the “narcissism of petty differences,” Ignatieff succeeded in making intelligible both the psychological and the historical underpinnings of the new world of ethnic conflict in which the world so bewilderingly found itself.

Ignatieff has an immensely wide-ranging intellect. The author of a brilliant book on the idea of the prison, as well as the official biographer of the late Isaiah Berlin, he was by no means an obvious candidate for the life of a part-time war correspondent, nor was it obvious that the work would suit his temperament. And yet clearly the theme of the barbarism into which so much of the post-Cold War world beyond the Western European and North American core seemed to be sinking increasingly obsessed him. In his 1998 book, “The Warrior’s Honor,” he attempted to think through the question of humanitarian intervention.

That book was not a success because Ignatieff did not seem prepared to question rigorously enough his own cherished views or those of the aid workers, human rights activists and U.N. officials whom he accompanied into the killing zones. And yet, in retrospect, “The Warrior’s Honor” was probably a necessary way station on Ignatieff’s own progress in thinking through these questions. Certainly, there is nothing willfully optimistic or sentimental about his most recent book, “Virtual War.” To the contrary, Ignatieff, who is now also engaged in a long-term project to try to understand both the accomplishments and the limits of the human rights revolution of the last 50 years, has produced a work that is both intellectually unflinching and genuinely open-minded. Ostensibly a consideration of the moral and political implications of the West’s military intervention in Kosovo, the book is in fact the best exploration of both the operational and moral dilemmas of humanitarian war that has yet been written.

Given Ignatieff’s position, which was strongly in favor of the NATO action, and his close relations with such important figures in the West’s political and military leadership as Richard Holbrooke and Gen. Wesley Clark, writing such a book took courage. Even on a less exalted level, all of us who have been privileged as writers to travel with aid workers have had the experience of wanting to take up the cudgels on their behalf; it is a kind of morally superior version of the Stockholm syndrome and, like Ignatieff, I have certainly fallen victim to it. But Ignatieff takes a very different tack in “Virtual War.” Here, he is clearly more than willing to bite the hand that feeds him--whether the hand in question belongs to NATO, the human rights movement or the United Nations.

The book is not without its flaws. I have the sense that Ignatieff, perhaps for practical reasons or perhaps because time is an enemy when one has as much to say as Ignatieff does, is writing too fast. Much of “Virtual War,” which accompanied a television program Ignatieff did for British television, collects pieces on the Kosovo War that he wrote for The New Yorker. He also reprints the public exchange over the morality of the war he had with the British politician and writer Robert Skidelsky in the London magazine Prospect.

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These pieces were extremely interesting at the time and were plainly well worth collecting. In particular, Ignatieff’s evocations of Holbrooke as he conducted last-ditch negotiations with Slobodan Milosevic, of Clark’s conduct of the bombing campaign and the activities of Louise Arbour, the prosecutor for the War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, are extremely revealing. And Ignatieff’s decision to include critiques of his view, not just in the form of his debate with Skidelsky but also in his narrative of a trip to Belgrade after the bombing in which his old friend Aleksa Djilas challenges the morality of what the West did and what Ignatieff campaigned for, is an extraordinary gesture on the part of a writer who is also an advocate.

Nonetheless, there are times when the joints in the book show through, and one wishes Ignatieff could have taken the time to rework his material. The last section of the book, a brilliant meditation on the nature and moral dangers of what Ignatieff calls “virtual war,” is a considerable achievement. But it is only a freeze-dried version of the argument Ignatieff might have elaborated in this book had he had the time to do so. Perhaps he will do so in the book he is preparing on human rights. For the time being, however, even such a telegraphed version of these arguments is of enormous importance.

What is moving about “Virtual War” is precisely that Ignatieff writes as a supporter of the West’s intervention in Kosovo who is profoundly worried by the way in which the war he campaigned for was waged. “If we will the ends,” he writes, “we had better will the right means.” And he is haunted by the prospect that if the West is really in a position to fight wars in which it takes no risks and suffers no casualties, then such uses of military power in fact risk defeating their own lofty purposes. As Ignatieff puts it, “Virtual reality is seductive. We see ourselves as noble warriors and our enemies as despicable tyrants. We see war as a surgical scalpel and not a bloodstained sword. In so doing we mis-describe ourselves as we mis-describe the instruments of death.”

Anyone who observed the indifference with which the American and Western European public lethargically assented to the Kosovo war, always providing, that is, that there were no casualties on our side, will see that Ignatieff has gone directly to the root of the matter. It is not that wars are supposed to be “fair” fights: Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s aphorism that the point of a battle was to get there first with the most is as true in 2000 as it was in 1863. Rather, the point Ignatieff is making is that once the public believes that there is no risk in allowing the military to go to war, the more these “fables of self-righteous invulnerability,” will make it even likelier that we will not simply go into battle against barbarians but prove to be the real barbarians ourselves.

The paradox, of course, is that Ignatieff passionately believes--as I do--that our claims to civilization are meaningless if, given the realities of our world, as a last resort we are not prepared to use force and use it decisively, in defense of values. That does not mean we should take what Ignatieff calls the “moral abstractions” of a Bill Clinton or a Tony Blair or, for that matter, of the human rights movement he so admires, at face value. But it does mean that, for all its inevitable horror, war is still a necessity.

It is precisely because Ignatieff believes these things that his critique of humanitarian war is both so incisive and so convincing. He desperately wants to find a way to believe that we can reconcile the moral imperative of not permitting a Milosevic to deport 800,000 Kosovars or a Saddam Hussein to use weapons of mass destruction on his own people with fighting wars in ways that are just, ways in which, as he puts it, we do not end up “destroying what we tried to save.” And yet he is honest enough to recognize and, in fact, to insist that the course of virtual war on which we are now embarked seems almost doomed to prevent us from doing what is right.

Ignatieff is well aware that, at present, there are no good answers to the questions he has raised. Doubtless, he also knows that his book will provide ammunition to those who oppose any intervention to prevent a regime from slaughtering its own people or deporting an ethnic minority, whether that regime is in Belgrade or in Baghdad. But it is precisely because he has remained faithful to the only proper role a public intellectual can have--which is to ask questions, to make things more complicated ethically, to smash sacred cows--that Ignatieff has succeeded in writing a book that really matters.