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

a) Military Perspective
Ralph Peters, Lt.Col. U.S. Army (Ret.), author of Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? (Stackpole, 1999).

RALPH PETERS: Thank you, Michael. I'm a big Michael fan, as I'm a fan of journalists overall, for peculiar reasons. One as a former soldier who joined the Army as a private in 1976, it took me a while to figure it out, but then I realized that in the year of our Lord 2000, were it not for journalists, we'd still be in Vietnam.

And the second reason is since I left the military a few years ago, so that I could write and speak freely, the military is not a strong censorship regime, but I just hit a wall where I couldn't say much more in uniform.

But since then I've really found that as a former soldier who your tax dollars sent to 49 different countries, from the Caucasus to Burma, except for my fellow soldiers, the only people I could spend an evening with were journalists, because they were the only people that had seen it and shared it and been there. I mean, not that I'm socially dysfunctional- my wife might say, yes, I am- but past a certain point of cocktail party chatter, these were the people that had a grip on reality. And whatever our divergences may or may not be- politically, I hope not morally- the crucial quality for any idealist who wishes to be successful is a strong sense of reality, and good journalism does bring that strong sense of reality home to people, not least the people in Washington, for whom foreign exposure was a honeymoon in Greece.

Now Roy and I spoke in advance. Time is limited. I'm not going to talk to you about how many tanks should be in a tank battalion and whether or not we need the F-22, which we do not. But rather, I want to try to put things in context for you.

In this tremendously, in fact unprecedentedly complex world, some things are very, very simple. But you have to back off, and it's hard for you under the press of deadlines. The Hill and the White House at most think in terms of election cycles. The military thinks in terms of budget cycles. Business, of course, thinks of quarterly return cycles. Americans- we want it done now. It's a great quality. We want to make things happen, and we have changed the world. But the down side of this energetic American vigor is we often fail to see- to use a cliche- the forest for the trees.

I believe the 21st Century, the 21st Century and perhaps beyond, barring cataclysms that end history, will be a period of tremendous conflicts. Not world wars, necessarily. I certainly don't see those in the coming decades. Beyond that I certainly cannot see. But in terms of these nasty little wars around the world- each of the wars Michael talked about. And I see, not a replacement of traditional forms of violence, but rather a resurgence of Cain and Abel warfare and an expansion of the spectrum, unfortunately, to include everything, up to virtual, neo-virtual wars, the next phase coming.

But why? What is the context of the conflicts we see today? Philippines, Sri Lanka, Kashmir, Chechnya, Colombia- throw a dart at the map- obviously, Folda Sankho, the real friend of journalists everywhere in Sierra Leone, in Africa, Rwanda, eastern Congo/Zaire, Congo. It's really pretty simple.

Now I'm not saying the details are simple or the solutions are simple, for they are not. What's simple is we've inherited the problems of 500 years of European colonialism. Now this is not a neo-liberal argument or a traditional liberal argument. On the contrary, it's just, I think, realistic.

When academics on campus who have successfully spent their lives avoiding reality speak about the post-colonial era, they're generally talking about the period from 1948 to 1975, following Saigon. The post-colonial era has barely begun. Surely we will find a more interesting name for it. But does anyone here believe that 500 years- actually more- more than half a millennium of deformations, malformations, and some reformations around the world by the European empires can be undone, rectified, or even partially ameliorated in three decades or in five decades? Far from it.

If you look at these conflicts, pick any armed conflict around the world, and it has a colonial legacy. Even in the Philippines today- it goes back beyond U.S. occupation to really two colonial religions at war- Christianity and the previously expansionist Muslim religion. The primary manifestation of colonialism's horrific legacy, in practical terms for us, is bad borders. I mean, it's a no-brainer. When you go talking about Chechnya, Africa, Kashmir, and the former Yugoslavia-false borders. The primary practical legacy of the European empires- destroyed, by the way, by the United States for the most part either directly or with us as catalysts or giving the coup de grace- the legacy is bad borders. In Africa, most obviously borders drawn in Berlin in two conferences in the 1880's by men who had never been there, and didn't much care. And these bad borders- often the maps weren't even good- they had no care. It was imperial horse-trading. And they didn't care about where the tribal boundaries were.

So you have basically borders in this world that force together people who do not feel-at least at this point in history- affinities for one another, or pulling apart people who do feel affinities. For example, Kosovo Albanians, obviously, with other Albanians.

Now it is really a simple test. Even in Latin America. Latin America is interesting. For any Pollyannas who believe that these post colonial conflicts can be immediately resolved -you know, buy him a Coke and give him some aid and it's going to go away- look at Latin America. Liberated in the first few decades of the 19th Century and still resolving colonial era problems.

Now admittedly, that was a hermetic society for almost three centuries. It has a different problem set; nonetheless, the model for decolonization around the world, unfortunately, may be more like Latin America, with its enduring problems, than any immediate resolution. I hope it is otherwise.

Now, again, I flunked plenty of classes in high school and in college, which is why I wound up in the Army, I suppose, but some things are simple to understand. Now junior high school physics. What happens when you force a physical system out of balance, keep it in an artificial balance by force, and suddenly in 1989 or 1991, remove the pressure?

What you're seeing around the world in the Balkans, in Africa, in the sub-continent, in the former Soviet Union, and in East Asia, are human ecosystems or human physical systems seeking a new equilibrium. Well, unfortunately, most human beings are not ready to sit down and compromise. We're crippled in our views by many things. One, obviously, is our western tradition that makes democracy a work of compromise.

In most macho cultures around the world, compromise is unthinkable, literally. To compromise, to offer a compromise means you're dealing from a position of weakness. And also we are, to some extent, prisoners of a Judeo-Christian ethic or tradition inheritance. But really it's the Christian tradition that hurts us, the New Testament notion that all men and women can be redeemed.

If you want to give a society like Kosovo or Rwanda a chance, you've got to get over the idea that all human life is equally sacred and all human beings are redeemable, and this includes child warriors in some cases, too.

In order to give any society a chance to reconstruct itself, if indeed you are morally bound or practically bound or bound by any interest to intervene, the first thing you have to do is establish the rule of law. Now when we went into Kosovo the thing that would have helped us most in the national community and the military wasn't a new weapon system. You know, Lockheed Martin isn't here to help you folks. What we needed was a U.N.-mandated international template constitution that you could lay down.

I mean, the problem in Kosovo is that whose rules apply? Does Serbian law apply? You need something you can lay down and say: until you guys get it together and write your own constitution, that by the way has to conform to international norms of human rights, you're going to use ours. I mean, it's not hard. Now getting the UN to agree on one might be very, very hard. But a culturally neutral constitution would be a tremendous plus. Now, obviously it would be great if we had a more peaceful, you'll never have a fully peaceful, but a more peaceable means of ameliorating, of rectifying, of changing borders. You say that to a diplomat, and diplomats are creatures of the status quo. As you know very well, as long as there's one mid-level bureaucrat with a functioning telephone line in the burning capital city, they'll pretend there's still a functioning government there and it's legitimate.

They love the status quo. And you talk about changing borders to them and in military technical terms, they go ape shit. Well, if you're not willing to do the laborious, frustrating chore of finding an international means of more peacefully changing borders through referendums, plebiscites, et cetera, and there will be some human dislocations, can't get around it. Some folks hate each other. Hatred's a powerful emotion. You know, all religions recognize the power of hatred and the will to kill. Without it there would be no commandant that says, thou shalt not kill, if some human beings didn't feel the impulse to do it.

We need to find means of changing borders. Well, we're a long way from that. Until we do, and even when we do, not everyone will sign up for that program. Until we do, you are going to see literally no end of Kosovos, hopefully limited Rwandas, Bosnias, Sierra Leones. Now the other thing diplomats will tell you is that some of these people are too small. They're not viable countries. Who are we to tell them? Suppose in the 1770's Spain and France had looked at us and said, hey, you boys over there, the 13 colonies, too few, too spread out, you're not big enough to be a viable country. Well, great power politics came to our aid. The thing is in the 1990's the tragedy of American foreign policy is after destroying the empires, we'd embrace their legacy. We've embraced the sanctity of bad, of foul borders they left behind, of these forced human togetherness or separations. It's bipartisan. Remember, Jim Baker actually tried to keep the Soviet Union together briefly, and both administrations successively tried to keep Yugoslavia together. So what you see is in 1991, when the Soviet incarnation of the empire of the czars came apart, we were left with the fact that all the great empires are gone, except for our peculiar economic culture empire, which is a voluntary empire. People pay to join.

But American mass culture is the first mass culture. We're the first culture that doesn't try to exclude people. Traditional high culture is to stratify and exclude. American culture says, hey, you got a buck, come on in. But we need to find a way to deal with these very practical problems, bad borders and the popular world, and we have answered the age of the popular world. That doesn't mean the age of democracy. The popular world can take you to Nazi Germany every bit as easily or more easily, perhaps, than it can take you to the United States or Great Britain or Sweden. In fact, democracy, I love it. Best system. It may be a hothouse flower that doesn't transplant well.

The last thing I'll say is this. In sympathy with our diplomats, they're in some ways more lost than the Pentagon is, and the Pentagon is definitely at sea. You know, they're used to fighting anti-imperial wars, great wars. That's really all they've ever done that they've liked to do. The brushfire wars were always going to be the last one.

Reviewing 1960 accounts of the wars against native Americans, every one was the last one. Just like now, Bosnia was the last one, Kosovo is the last one, Somalia is the last one. It's traditional. But they've got to get over that, and reality will force them to.

There's been no foreign policy in the 1990's. There's been a shifting set of prejudices and infatuations and reactions. But in our lifetimes we are unlikely to ever see a unified foreign policy again. The world is too complex, too multi-faceted. The great diplomatic systems of Bismarck, down to Henry Kissinger, who really got lucky, of those unified fields, are as foreign policy, no longer practical. The templates don't work. No set of templates is likely to work. What we as Americans can have are core values from which you operate that allow you to turn and adjust to the problem. React to problems around the world. And those core values are really, again, I think, simple. Simple to list, hard to implement.

Obviously, national interest. You cannot get away from it. No country will ever have a genuine altruistic foreign policy. Hopefully, we'll have enlightened national interest, but national interest, rule of law, and human rights. Those three.

I love democracy. I love market economies. They come after. Without rule of law and respect for human rights, at best you get Russian bandit markets. You get democracy a la many African countries where the largest tribe wins the election and regards it as a license to oppress the lesser tribes.

That's not very romantic. It's not as romantic as democracy. But if you want to give, as were our military goals, if you want to give peace a chance, or if you want to at least give human rights a chance, then the rule of law, respect for human life, and let all else go. As far as those little peoples who are seeking their freedom, perhaps someday, Kosovo, Albanians, if they're too small to be viable countries, they'll figure it out. We're in an age of devolution from great empires to the mini-empires, like Nigeria, Indonesia, the Russian Federation, and to an extent, perhaps, Mexico. But
after the period of devolution they will begin reconstructing the world.

Today, the United States- tragically, in view of our history and our potential- is impeding the reformation and reconstruction of a true new world order.

MICHAEL IGNATIEFF: Thank you to Ralph Peters for giving us so much controversial and incendiary material to think about.