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On March 24, 1999, after talks at the French chateau of Rambouillet and further negotiations in Paris failed to produce an agreement between Kosovar and Serbian leaders, NATO commenced air strikes against Serbia. The Kosovo war would last 78 days. According to Michael Ignatieff, the war in Kosovo broke new ground. For those killed in the air strikes and the Kosovar Albanians murdered by Serbian police and paramilitaries, the war was real; yet it was "virtual" for the citizens of the NATO nations, who became spectators to events as "remote from their essential concerns as a football game." NATO combatants (who suffered no casualties) experienced the war as "split-second decisions made through the lens of a gun camera or over a video conferencing system." They rarely saw those they killed. Kosovo was a virtual war also in the political and legal sense, and in
Virtual War Ignatieff explores the political and moral implications of what happens when war ceases to be fully real--when technological mastery removes death from the equation on one side.
Five characters figure prominently in Ignatieff's narrative of the war in Kosovo and its aftermath: Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton administration's special envoy for the Balkans; Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe; Louise Arbour, prosecutor of the War Crimes Tribunal; Robert Skidelsky, independent member of the British House of Lords and critic of the war; and Aleksa Djilas, Yugoslav opponent of the bombing campaign. Though Ignatieff supports the military intervention, his encounters with these figures, particularly the opponents of the war, put his convictions to the test. The differing viewponts lend a sense of balance and evenhandedness in what is ultimately a deeply moral work. "Virtual reality is seductive," Ignatieff writes. "We see ourselves as noble warriors and our enemies as despicable tyrants. We see a 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. We need to stay away from such fables of self-righteous invulnerability. Only then can we get our hands dirty. Only then can we do what is right." --Svenja Soldovieri
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From Publishers Weekly
The past decade has kept London-based journalist Ignatieff busy exploring ethnic nationalism and ethnic war. This latest work (portions of which have appeared in the New Yorker and elsewhere) completes an unplanned trilogy that took shape around current events. Like the trilogy's previous two titles (Blood and Belonging and The Warrior's Honor), this book critiques the West's selective use of military power to protect human rights and the failure of Western governments to "back principle with decisive military force"--but here Ignatieff pushes this critique a step further, attempting to explain the paradox of the West's moral activism around human rights and its unwillingness to use force or put its own soldiers at risk: war, he suggests, has ceased to be real to those with technological mastery. Whereas Kosovo "looked and sounded like a war" to those on the ground, it was a virtual event for citizens of NATO countries--it was "a spectacle: it aroused emotions in the intense but shallow way that sports do." In other words, the basic equality of moral risk (kill or be killed) in traditional war was replaced by something akin to "a turkey shoot." In a series of profiles of major players in the Kosovo crisis (including American negotiator Richard Holbrook and war crimes prosecutor Louise Arbour and Aleksa Djilas, a Yugoslav opposed to the bombing), as well as in other writings--including a fine, concluding essay--the author presents a strong argument on the need to avoid wars that let the West off easily and don't have clear-cut results. Ignatieff offers an original analysis of the nature and repercussions of NATO's Kosovo campaign. Only when we have recognized the seductiveness and failures of virtual war, he warns, can we truly assess the risks and benefits of decisive action. This is a timely and provocative book for the politically astute reader. Author tour.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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