Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond

by Michael Ignatieff

For a decade, Michael Ignatieff has provided eyewitness accounts and penetrating analyses from the world's battle zones. In Virtual War , he offers an analysis of the conflict in Kosovo and what it means for the future of warfare. He describes the latest phase in modern war fought by remote control. In "real" war, nations are mobilized, soldiers fight and die, victories are won. In virtual war, however, there is often no formal declaration of hostilities, the combatants are strike pilots and computer programmers, the nation enlists as a TV audience, and instead of defeat and victory there is only an uncertain endgame.

Kosovo was such a virtual war, a war in which U.S. and NATO forces did the fighting but only Kosovars and Serbs did the dying. Ignatieff examines the conflict through the eyes of key players--politicians, diplomats, and generals--and through the experience of the victims, the refugees and civilians who suffered. As unrest continues in the Balkans, East Timor, and other places around the world, Ignatieff raises the troubling possibility that virtual wars, so much easier to fight, could become the way superpowers impose their will in the century ahead.

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, War, International Relations

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

About the author

Michael Grant Ignatieff is a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, Harvard University and the University of Toronto.

Reviews

[Mija]

The little that I read seemed extremely biased. (Also, I had to return it to the library.)

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another example of a review of book 'in hindsight'. This was written in 2000 by a leading Anglo-Canadian intellectual and later politician (Michael Ignatieff) in the heat of the political battle over liberal interventionism in Kosovo.

The 'hindsight' comes from what interventionism was to became in the hands of a superpower and its acolyte in Iraq and from alternative destabilisation strategies targeting Russia, Iran and other States unloved in Washington. Syria now gives us a fresh perspective.

I was of the anti-intervention camp in 1999 and my own views are pretty well summarised at http://positionreserved.blogspot.co.u... but I am in no mood to crow that Ignatieff got it so wrong (in my view) over a decade and a half ago.

In fact, this is a highly intelligent book (as you would expect) from a decent and thoughtful human being who perhaps failed to understand that liberal interventionism in the hands of Power would be less circumspect, measured and considered than it would be in his. He over-estimates the capacity of the West to act well even if it wished.

The centre-piece is a rather acrimonious debate between himself and Lord Skidelsky that I recall at the time. Ignatieff's deontological sentiment proves to be far more articulate than that of his opponent who cannot think in terms of the sorts of consequence that were obvious to others of us (and which became fact later).

Ignatieff puts his case in such a way that, even after this long period, the book is worth reading as much for the insight into the liberal mind faced with its own impotence in the face of horror and grasping at the straw of state power as for any other reason.

The mistakes of the last decade, which hinged on the malign personality of Prime Minister Blair, required faith in the benignity and capability of a hegemonic military system. An almost religious fervour that 'something must be done' then fuelled the rest. Liberals were to provide the unwitting claque for what became state terror.

Ignatieff sometimes seems blind to the way that crises like Kosovo do not come out of the blue but are manipulated by all the actors involved and that includes the Kosovan emigres and gangsters. The deeply unpleasant Milosevic was only one of many unpleasant manipulative players in this theatre of atavism.

He is driven in the end by sentiment, served by reason, based initially on the recent failure by the 'international community' (which has never been a community but merely a soup of competing interests) to save the victims of massacre in Rwanda - a horror with a complex history that degenerated into a simpler tale of good and evil.

His sentimental commitment is compounded by a predisposition to see the world through the eyes of his class, cosmopolitan intellectuals (hence his frustration that Serbs of his class fail to see what he sees) and his feeling and touching the reality of the border camps. Misreadings of the Nazi hell loom unstated over such liberal activism.

However, a very fine rational mind argues here not merely for liberal interventionism as polemic. He shows an equally fine sense of problems and risks but is thrown bodily by his own lived experience into the 'something must be done' camp ultimately abandoning 'consequence'. He has a theory, tortures himself on that theory and then 'commits'.

By the end of the book, I am informed about a great deal - how 'on the hoof' American diplomacy works, the unpreparedness of the liberal West for humanitarian crisis on its doorstep, how the military make decisions, the politics of international justice, the incompatibility of combatant world views - but remain unpersuaded.

The final chapter in which he worries that the risk that precision wafare conducted virtually will increase the chances of populations accepting war as an instrument of policy before diplomatic and political measures have been tried has proved to be wrong but the fears were reasonable at the time.

In fact, populations proved not so passive and not so liberal internationalist as their intelligentsia. Not the first time the intellectual class had become detached from its base. Liberal humanitarians commanded the heights of culture by the late 1990s but their bluff was to be called by a population that does not like war.

Ernie Bevan put it well in 1945: "There has never been a war yet which if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk could not have been prevented. The common man is the greatest protection against war."

The common man got very edgy about the filmed bombing of civilians in Iraq in the early 1990s and in Belgrade in 1999 and it is equally edgy today about drone warfare that takes out wedding parties. It may empathise with people in camps but equally empathises with people obliterated by remote control.

The attempt by the military to control information through 'psychological operations' is now more noticeable for the distrust it creates than for its success. Half the population may be suckers for authority but half the population are not. The liberal militarists have repeatedly failed to make their case.

To wage war effectively a State must have a nation behind it. The self-evident manipulation of data before every neo-conservative and liberal internationalist foreign policy action of the last two decades has built a constituency of resistance of formidable size. The public has become inoculated as Cameron found on Syrian intervention.

We are perhaps living through the final stage of liberal failure with the type case of Syria. Russia not only has, self-evidently, the support of its own nation in a defensive narrative but has considerable sympathy in the Western street for being effective at destroying a threat where our military appeared to show incompetence.

The flow of refugees represent an important element of that threat to large Western constituencies questioning the competence of their elites just as significant minorities question why Western expansion was permitted to bring us to the edge of the nuclear abyss over a gangster state like Ukraine.

Today, liberals plead for humanity deontologically and experientially from the front line of migrant camps just as Ignatieff once did in Kosovo and they still command the mainstream liberal media - but a counter-narrative flows through the street and social media and builds support for not only national populists but a revived socialism.

And, finally, the strategy of holding massive military force over the heads of 'dictators' (now increasingly seen as forces for order amidst chaos) to bring them to heel has collapsed. The West's bluff has been called and massive human misery has resulted from the detabilisation of a whole region through Western interventions formal and informal.

There would be more to say on Syria but this would take us too far from this still useful book. The book is not a polemic in itself (except in the debate with Skidelsky which can be read as of its time and place) but is a reasoned position that just required better responses than Skidelsky provided.

History eventually answered Ignatieff with far more force than the noble Lord but at a dreadful cost in lives, destroyed property and the revival of long-lost atavistic and brutal obscurantisms. To have engineered the revival of autocratic Russian power in itself was an own goal by traditional liberalism of staggering proportions.

I suspect that historians will consider Ignatieff's texts to be important foundational stones for understanding the ideology of liberal humanitarian interventionism. He will continue to be contested and studied throughout the twenty-first century. I think he was wrong then and is wrong now but you may not.

[Harinder · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an international relations practitioner, I read a lot about war. But it struck me that it is not that often that I read about the morality of war. This is what Ignatieff meditates on in this terrific book, written about the Kosovo war, only a couple of years after the 15 month conflict ended. It is a series of essays covering conversations with all the key players - Richard Holbrooke, General Wes Clark, Judge Louise Arbour - as well as a fascinating philosophical email exchange with Robert Skidelsky (the Keynes biographer - my favourite line in it, by the way, is when Skidelsky says to Ignatieff You define several fruitful areas of disagreement between us. (p.79) Oh! If only we could have such a civilised approach to modern internet debates!).

Ignatieff focuses on the intention behind, and conduct of, an all-air war (with no ground component) in the Kosovo conflict. The crux of his argument is that to set out to kill others without risking death yourselves imbalances the moral justification for war, and erodes its moral legitimacy. "...we had talked the language of ultimate causes and practised the art of minimum risk." (p.155) In his final chapter, he sets out all the consequences of such an approach - the detachment of citizens from their responsibility for or interest in war:

The concept of human rights assumes that all human life is of equal value. Risk-free warfare presumes that our lives matter more than those we are intervening to save.

Or:

...if war in the future is sold to voters with the promise of impunity they may be tempted to throw caution to the winds. If military action is cost-free, what democratic restraints will remain on the resort to force?

You can see why I found this so thought provoking. In the noise of international politics, it is good now and again to reflect on what our motivations and actions mean, and what the consequences on the citizen are.

[Robert DeForest · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this years ago...and it still holds true today. Not what you think -- and I'm sure today's USAF, USA, USN and USMC operators of "drones" would not question some of the conclusions (and unanswered questions) Mr. Ignatieff writes about here.

[Oleg Lenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first account of what would later become a normal everyday warfare.

[Flamur Vehapi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although the book was written decades ago, many of the concepts he covers still hold true regarding the nature of war and intervention. I enjoyed it.

[Ike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very prescient for what the next 2+ decades of American Intervention would look like, dispels some of the myths of the Kosovo intervention without delving into crankery.

[La Oxímoron · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bueeeno... el libro es interesante en el sentido que explica el funcionamiento de las guerras postmodernas, las guerras que luchan por los valores pero que no arriesgan la vida de sus paladines. Está dividido en 7 grandes capítulos, los más interesantes en cuanto a riqueza de debate son "La guerra de las palabras" y "Amigos y enemigos", en el primero ofrece al lector una serie de intercambios epistolares (mail-eares) con Robert Skidelsky... los argumentos de Ignetieff son bastante pasionales mientras que Skidelsky ofrece una visión extremadamente neutral y precisa acerca del conflicto en Kosovo, el segundo capitulo que me parece digno de mención es el de Amigos y Enemigos en el cual narra su relación y visita a su amigo serbio Alexsa Djilas, un escritor e historiador de renombre... es digamos un encuentro entre los balcanes y occidente, la defensa de ciertos argumentos en detrimento de otros y de nueva cuenta, Alexsa da bastantes lecciones de política y ética a Ignatieff.

Guerra Virtual es un libro que en términos generales es muy útil cuando uno está leyendo más acerca del tema y sabe el contexto bajo el cual se desarrolló la invasión virtual de la OTAN en la región. El autor es nieto de un conde ruso e hijo de diplomático canadiense : se formó entre Canadá e Inglaterra, teniendo contacto con universidades de la Ivy League... es historiador, político, reportero, etc, etc, desde mi punto de vista bastante aristocrático y muy creyente de lo que occidente representa y debe representar. Les puedo decir con seguridad que no es uno de mis autores favoritos.

[Meredoc Mcminn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book, really undervalued but seminal. Michael Ignatieff's thesis is essentially that if war is made easier, either by weapons or politics, then war will be more prevalent, and that type conflict will be more random, less controlled and result in more destruction and casualties among civilians. Unfortunately his theory is correct. With the end of the cold war international structures collapsed, including military control, while this is not solely Ignatieff's theory and has been fairly widely postulated by range of academics, what Ignatieff has analysed is the consequences. The post-cold war landscape is more difficult to define because the drivers of conflict are more difficult to define but Ignatieff has, I argued correctly and facts on the ground support this, identified that the drivers are a plethora of cheap weaponry and regional and localised power structures without supra-control that vie for power and wealth through conflict. It is not so much Clausewitz's 'war is politics by other means', but that war has displaced political discourse as it is quicker, cheaper and, without supra control, with less consequences. This is a post structural world and conflict is virtual- specific example is drones, without the threat of consequences, whether physical or moral, it is easier to make the kill.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why read a 10 year old book written before, during and after the Kosovo bombing campaign? For Ignatieff's prophetic insights, e.g., "In virtual war, citizens are not only divested of their power to give consent. they are demobilized." He would not agree but as I read Ignatieff, nonviolent intervention is the best way to deal with major human rights problems in other countries.