The Hazards of Selfless War

The Hazards of Selfless War

"Virtual War" by Michael Ignatieff, in Prospect (Apr. 2000), 4 Bedford Sq., London WC1B 3RA, England.

Share:
Read Time:
2m 37sec

"Virtual War" by Michael Ignatieff, in Prospect (Apr. 2000), 4 Bedford Sq., London WC1B 3RA, England.

For the comfortable citizens of the NATO countries, far removed from the bombing and killing, and with no vital national interests at stake, the "humanitarian" war in Kosovo last year was only a spectacle, in which they had nothing to lose. Though he believes that particular war was justified, Ignatieff, a journalist and historian, worries that democracies may too readily engage in such "virtual wars" in the future.

"Democracies may remain peace-loving only so long as the risks of war remain real to their citizens," he writes. "If war becomes virtual— without risk—democratic electorates may be more willing to fight, especially if the cause is justified in the language of human rights and democracy itself."

By "virtual," he means not simply that war is waged largely with bombing and high-tech weaponry, and seems "to take place on a screen," but that "it enlists societies only in virtual ways. Nothing ultimate is at stake: neither national survival nor the fate of the economy." As a result, war becomes "a spectator sport," with the media "a decisive theater of operations," and both sides trying "to inflict perceptual damage."

Two centuries ago, with the French revolutionary army of the 1790s, war became associated with mass mobilization. But in the United States, conscription ended more than a quartercentury ago. The Vietnam War, Ignatieff adds, "widened the gulf between civilian and military culture." And for advanced societies, even the economic impact of war has much diminished. "In times past, wars could bankrupt societies, and economic constraints were a fundamental limit on the length and ferocity of conflict." Today, America’s $290 billion annual defense outlay is only three percent of its gross domestic product.

With "nothing ultimate" at stake in virtual war, Ignatieff contends, the democratic legislature’s check on the executive’s war-making powers becomes very important, as a way of clarifying the war’s purposes. In the Kosovo conflict, however, military operations were "unsanctioned and undeclared" by Congress or other national parliaments. Yet "the decay of institutional checks and balances . . . has received little attention," he says.

"Hidden in abstractions such as human rights" is "the potential for self-righteous irrationality," Ignatieff warns, and for "a host of unwinnable wars." There are, after all, "substantial" limits, "mainly self-imposed," on the use of military power for such missions, that limit what can be achieved—the democracies are unwilling to take up an imperial burden. "The language of human rights easily lends itself to the invention of a virtual moral world peopled by demonized enemies and rogue states, facing virtuous allies and noble armies." Those who support humanitarian interventions, he concludes, must pay close attention in each case to "the question of whether, by intervening, we end up destroying what we tried to save."

 

More From This Issue