Virtual War Book

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 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.