A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day One, Panel One: What Will the Next War Look Like and What Will the International Community Do About It?

Moderator/Discussant: Michael Ignatieff, Author
Introduction Michael Ignatieff

JOHN OWEN: I've been asked to segue right in and introduce someone that I've gotten to know well through my former days at CBC and also in London, as he's been very much a part of our European center programs, and that is Michael Ignatieff.

I think we all have great envy about how Michael Ignatieff can turn out the kind of journalism he does, write the kind of serious books he does, and do it with such high quality, and also be a broadcaster. He is indeed a triple threat, and I think most of you are familiar with much of what he has written. He found time to turn out a biography of Isaiah Berlin in the last three years. But he also now has completed his trilogy of books about nationalism, Blood and Belonging, a second book about the
role of the NGO community and the Red Cross, The Warriors' Honor, and now, finally, a third in this trilogy, Virtual War, his brilliant study of Kosovo which we're about to see in the coverage of war and the conduct of war in the future. So it is indeed a pleasure to introduce Michael Ignatieff.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: We thank John Owen very much. The Freedom Forum in London is an open ecumenical shop where the best writers, best journalists, and best broadcasters in Europe come and tangle and argue and fight and shout at each other, as they did recently in a memorable encounter over Kosovo war coverage. John runs one of the liveliest places for discussion of journalistic ethics anywhere in the world, and I want to commend him for the leadership he's given to that center in London.

I also now want to introduce the extremely distinguished panel that we have here. Ralph Peters, Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired, author of Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? I followed Ralph Peters' work when it appeared in relatively obscure journals reserved for Army intellectuals.

He's an Army intellectual, and one I've learned enormously from, with the significant difference that he writes extremely well, and I commend his work to you.

Next, Aryeh Neier, a legend--I think it is fair to say without exaggeration--a legend in the human rights community, internationally, and particularly in the United States through his work at with Human Rights Watch and now as president of the Open Society.

And René Kosirnik, Deputy Director of International Law and Communication at the ICRC. The ICRC is an organization that journalists congenially fight with and argue with and object to and have difficulty with in the field. That is, we're bothered by their neutrality, we're bothered by their stiff upper lip, we're bothered by their refusal to share information, we're bothered by all kinds of things. What we don't often say enough is that they are the toughest and most professional NGO in combat areas in the world today, and they deservedly have a reputation for professionalism which many journalists can only envy and so it's very good that the ICRC is present here, not only with René Kosirnik, but I know there are some other ICRC people here, including my friend Urs Boegli.

I was also asked by Roy Gutman to sort of set the frame for the debate by making a few initial remarks about what the next war will look like. I've just finished a book called Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, and I want to put the emphasis on the word "beyond" in my remarks to you.

Virtual war, as I describe it, is not simply war waged with precision guided munitions and high tech of the kind we saw first in the Gulf War and then in 1999; it's war waged within a certain distinctive model, and moral frame. You might call this frame the modern political correctness as applied to warfare. But the two rules that I have identified when trying to identify the paradigm of virtual war have simply been the zero casualty rule on the one hand and the zero collateral damage rule on the
other. These are asymptotes in geometric parlance that is where the trend lines are moving. They're not- clearly there were collateral damage incidents in the war, but the utopia towards which virtual war intends is the use of military violence so precise that it only hits military targets, causes absolute damage, and does so without the expenditure of a single American life. And I do think this form of warfare has stolen upon us very rapidly as journalists.

My book discusses this in much greater detail. One of the aspects of the war that's extremely important, which relates to ICRC issues and humanitarian law issues, is that these are heavily legalized wars, to the degree that I hadn't realized until I began reporting them. There are lawyers sitting beside every single general and every single targeting cell- of the 700 targets reviewed by NATO for these strikes- and every single one of them was reviewed in a computerized, real time assessment, according to the Geneva Convention's criteria.

In the history of this story, there wasn't a lawyer or a military lawyer within a country mile of a targeting cell for the United States Air Force during the bombing in Vietnam. By 1991, there were targeting lawyers sitting beside Chuck Horner. By 1999, they're actually integrated into the NATO development process. The development of air tasking orders includes a legal assessment of collateral damage, reasonable person assessments of damages, et cetera, and the aim of this seems to be political, that is to provide generals with the ability to stand up at a press conference and say, "we're covered, boys."

The difficulty with this, of course, is that as we know from our own personal life, what is legal is not necessarily moral. The lawyers provide legal coverage which hopes in a way to short circuit the moral discussion that the public wants to have about the ethics of targeting decisions. And the function of these lawyers is basically to provide political coverage for military leaders. And it seems to me this raises an important issue for journalists which is that as a rule of thumb we should not take the assertion by any commander that he has Geneva Conventions coverage as the end of an argument as to the appropriateness of the target. Not because I disrespect the Geneva Conventions- I respect them greatly- but simply because many of these issues of targeting are intrinsically controversial morally. That is, is the targeting of the Belgrade power grid a military or civilian target? Is it a dual use target? What forms of strikes are appropriate?

These are issues on which the whole legitimacy of an air campaign can turn. And what NATO is trying to tell you is, we've got it covered, boys, with legal stuff. The journalistic obligation is to raise those questions because they are the questions the public wants to know. Is what is legal, moral? So that's one issue.

I call these wars virtual because they export the mortal risks of combat to the other side. War is real in Belgrade. War is horribly real in Belgrade. War is horribly real in Kosovo. But it's not especially real in the United States or Britain, in the combatant nations. This poses an enormous challenge for journalists. I mean, in a sense my slogan to you is if the wars of the future are virtual, our job as journalists is to make them real for our viewers, our readers, our fellow citizens. The fundamental issue I raise in the book is that if you have virtual war technology- as is available to the United States President, which allows him to strike any target in the globe in next to real time, with next to perfect accuracy, with very limited forms of collateral damage- the political risks of using military violence appear to me to go way down.

The threshold at which a President can engage military violence is decreasing, because the technology is giving him weapons that he can actually use. This scenario of the past 40, 50 years of our post-war history, which was -- the President had nuclear weapons, and those were so horrible in their effects that it disciplined his resort to them to the point that they were never used.

But he now has a new armory of technology that is extremely easy to use. And the question is: If he's using them in a context where there is no risk to American citizens or no risk to allied citizens, will citizens care enough to restrain the violence used in their name? What are the democratic consequences of virtual war? As journalists and editors, you're on the front lines of this, because the thing that stares me in the face in the Kosovo campaign is that there the War Powers Act was in
abeyance. There was no scrutiny by Congress or Parliament or the institutions that represented the democracy of this exercise in military violence. The scrutiny was entirely conducted by the media. I mean, entirely-by the presence of cameramen in Belgrade and, previously, in Baghdad-they relayed the doleful pictures back to the American public, the British public, and the Canadian public. And it was that transmission mechanism, the transparency of virtual war, in other words, which was the sole democratic control on that form of use of military violence.

So we, as a writing and reporting and broadcasting community, are the democratic regulators of modern military violence, because institutional regulation of this violence is in abeyance.

Now that gives us a substantial responsibility. It's a responsibility systematically exploited by the other side. Let's be clear that Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein's chief air defense weapon was CNN and the BBC.

The ability to use collateral damage incidents like theAmeriyaa bunker incident in February 1991, which effectively shot off further strategic bombing over the city of Baghdad. Once those images were played out to the American public, the clamp on air targeting over Baghdad went on and the air campaign shifted elsewhere. So he literally managed to turn off an air campaign by using the media.

So we're in the front line both of the democratic control of military violence, but we're also in the front line in the counter war. And the difficulties of being used by our antagonists are enormous. We go out and report collateral damage incidents on the jack of a road as conscientious journalists. We don't know what the hell we're seeing-have the bodies been rearranged, have they been transported, are they the bodies that were hit, are these body parts the real body parts?

Enormous issues turn on this. The whole legitimacy of the NATO campaign could have gone tilt had the jack of the road incident been reported in a certain way. Journalists had to strain to find out facts in highly controlled situations where an authoritarian press leadership is spinning us this way and that way, and the consequences for the democratic public and the capacity for us to wage virtual war are enormous.

So our job is to make the virtual, real. Our job is to regulate the use of military violence by our democracies because nobody else seems to be doing it. Certainly, our Congress isn't doing it.

And there are two other issues that I want to raise before I sit down, because the thing says what will the next war look like? There is no guarantee that the next war will look like Kosovo at all. Maybe we have no way of knowing whether Kosovo is the end of 20th Century warfare as we know it or if it is the harbinger of what's to come.

Two elements, or three potential elements, of future war cause me concern as a writer. One of them is what if virtual war is invisible? What if the next war is cyberwar? NATO is at the edge of using--and probably did use, although we don't know the exact degree--an enormous amount of computer attacks on central systems of the opposing side, from emptying out Milosevic's bank account to hitting C-4 centers with cyberwar attacks.

Do we have a journalism that's capable of exerting democratic control over cyberwar? Over war that you don't even know is happening until it's over? The commercial media is having enough trouble covering the e-commerce revolution. Just think about the difficulties of covering the cyberwar revolution, because I do believe that's where combat is going. I do believe that the chief strategic threat to the United States, conversely, is attack on the computer networks that run everything from our credit cards to our personal computers. If that's the strategic center of gravity of modern societies, do we have a journalism adequate to raise the moral, ethical, and legal issues involved in cyberwar attacks? That is where virtual war is invisible.

There's another kind of invisible war which is being waged at the moment, which is the air interdiction operation over Iraq. Here's a virtual war where we rained high precision lethality on a loathed and despised regime and there's no one covering the war at all. So it goes on in perfect impunity- political impunity, moral impunity, every kind of impunity. This is not to say I either approve or disapprove of air interdiction over Iraq. All I'm saying is that we're not there. And because we're not there, it's under no form of control at all. No one is accountable to anybody as a result of the fact that we're not there. That's the second kind of invisible virtual war that we need to think about.

The third kind of war is not virtual at all. It's real as hell, and that's a much more traditional problem, such as wars like Chechnya. Horrible, horrible, combat casualties. Horrible, horrible collateral damages which are kept from our screens by the simple expedient of excluding journalists altogether. This is a different kind of challenge, but I didn't want to neglect it.

There's absolutely no guarantee that the wars of the future will all be virtual. It seems to me that one of the competitive advantages of those faced with the new virtual technologies- virtual war technologies of the United States-and it's a point that Ralph Peters has made repeatedly, is that if we fight clean, they're going to fight dirty. If we fight high-tech and at 15,000 feet, the competitive advantage lies in low-tech, low rent warfare.

That is, if our moral asymptotes are zero collateral damage and zero casualties, competitive advantage in the use of military violence lies in reversing those moral asymptotes. It lies in saying if there's an American way of war which is zero casualties and zero collateral damage, then they'll be a Russian way of war, or a Chinese way of war, or a North Korean way of war, which is high collateral damage, high casualties. And we have to be aware that the American monopoly in this area is contingent, limited, finite, bound to run out and, secondly, that strategic competitors see what the game is. They see that the crucial Achilles heel of modern American power are these two moral asymptotes and will therefore move military force towards other and competing moral asymptotes. They will put a third thing into the ringer which is that they will keep you out and do their dirty work outside of scrutiny.

So here are four scenarios of future war that I've laid out. One is the kind of Kosovo, high visibility, humanitarian intervention conducted in the glare of publicity. You're on the front line because you provide the democratic accountability over the use of military violence. You've got a huge responsibility. That's one kind of case in the future.

The second one gets much tougher. It's when virtual war is invisible; namely, cyberwar. The third case is when it's not cyberwar, but it's still invisible. It's an air interdiction regime where your editors say to you, where the hell is this? Who cares about this place? Yet people are dying. If we don't go, there's simply no ccountability, no control, and no regulation of this use of violence.

And the fourth case is a different kind of case, which is a dirty, casualty-intensive war, which we are kept out of by a foreign competitor like the Russians. And when we're kept out, the consequences are massive. Human rights violations of a horrible kind.

So here are some scenarios. All of them pose great challenges to journalists. And in spite of all the negative things I’ve mentioned, I want to conclude with a positive thing. I do think, to a degree that journalists are often not aware of, we are the fundamental democratic regulators of the use of violence in the modern world. It's a hell of a responsibility. And my judgment about the Kosovo campaign is that we were spun like crazy by NATO. We were spun like crazy by Belgrade. And a few journalists saved the collective honor of our profession by doing an honest job on the ground in difficult circumstances.

So I want to end on a positive note. I'm very proud to be part of some of the journalism I saw in extremely difficult situations in Belgrade and it performed an essential regulatory function. Having said that, I'm in favor of military intervention in Kosovo. I'm not in favor of military intervention that is not subject to democratic regulation, and we are on the front line of that, in my view, noble case.

Having said that, I want to turn it over to Ralph Peters to contribute next and then go along the panel in this order.