Editor's Notebook: The Sacred Duty of Copping Out

Now that it’s clear our troops will not be diddling about the scenic foothills of Macedonia, keeping the peace or what have you, and that peacekeeping in general will probably receive short shrift in the next few years, the enlightened section of humanity is getting that righteous floored-huffy look again.

The military-industrial complex, you see, has reared its bloody head with renewed vengeance. But big-hearted professors of The Rights of Man need not despair just yet, if only we can divert some of the war-mongering wampum from bombers, battleships and other things armies generally need to—dum-da-da-dee-DUM!—a beefed-up force of permanent peacekeepers.

Nader Hasan’s April 11 tour de force on “The Sacred Duty of Peacekeeping,” makes the impassioned case. Fear not, seasoned realpolitikers and sober diplomats—our munchkins will be trained in what Hasan calls the venerable “arts of humanitarian relief and peacebuilding.” They will take their cues from military dynamos such as Canada, further along than we no doubt on the celestial arch of Progress, and they will dutifully sit in on seminars about the food and drink of the society-to-be-saved. (Seminars with neat little napkins, Diet Coke, and those fun ice cubes with the holes in the middle.)

That way, at least, icky incidents like 19 dead servicemen being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu will be avoided—if only the boors had taken more care not to “offend the Somali people through their brazen disregard for cultural mores and practices”! Special sessions in which Gandhi is contemplated and the love-force imbibed are also in the works.

Why, after more than 200 years of moderately successful foreign policy, does our military need this kind of retooling? Oh, because in the post-Cold War jungle of local ethnic conflict, digital landscapes and e-everything, war is just a different beast.

That’s right. Sun-Tzu, Machiavelli, Clausewitz and all those other boutique theorizers aren’t relevant anymore, and war is no longer about inflicting, or plausibly threatening to inflict, more pain than the other side can bear. Christiane Amanpour and CNN change everything.

Sure, peacekeeping missions never seem to work out, but why get discouraged? Is it that League of Nations fiasco they told us about in eighth grade? Or the farcical fecklessness of the United Nations? Fuhgettaboutit. This time around we’ll get it right; since we won’t be relying on run-of-the-mill, amateur Joe Soldiers but actual specialized Peacekeepers, we can respectfully conflict-manage and dialogue on, what ho! till the cows come home. We will specialize in making our safe havens safe, as secure as the sturdiest Swiss vault. Just not like Srebrenica, you understand.

Yes, everyone looooves a peacekeeper. Need to expel some East Timorese? Get a solid start, then call the peacekeepers in, with red carpet to boot! Need to buff your Georgian signature on the Yalta Declaration of Liberated Europe? Call in the international observers! What are guns, we good liberal democrats ask, next to a balmy blue? Or physical power, next to the moral power of that noblest of all goddesses, the international community?

It’s all so utterly convenient, isn’t it. Tyranny rears its head, women and children are slaughtered. We are not man enough to buck up, take responsibility, and send an army down to impose our will, or to simply admit, honestly, that the events do not concern us, and that the time and money are better spent at home. This would be—gasp!—imperialistic, or it would be callous. It would not be easy, and we need it to be easy.

And so we make it seem that we are doing something, anything; we pat ourselves on the back, consciences assuaged, and we watch as intelligent Harvard undergrads go on to write impressive doctoral dissertations on peacekeeping at the Kennedy School. The words of Weber, although taken from a different context, are perhaps appropriate: how sad, that “this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”