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