Michael Ignatieff is a familiar presence on British television. Of the intellectual heavies recruited to probe the meaning behind the facts of ethnic hatreds and community violence, his is the comfortable face, the easy act to follow as he weighs his thoughts with a scholarly frown before enlightening us in that soft Canadian drawl.
This book is companion to Ignatieff's series of television programmes, starting next weekend - the anniversary of the Kosovo war. The aim in both is to defend the thesis that Kosovo marks a significant change in the nature of war and that future wars will pose problems of legitimacy and politics radically different from all the wars we have experienced in the past. In passing, the opportunity is taken to restate his conviction of the justification of NATO's war.
Ignatieff never convinces in his attempt to stamp the Kosovo war with the futuristic tag "virtual". He is by no means the first to try to sell NATO's attack on the Milosevic regime as a military novelty, but he is the most reckless, going for broke on the idea of war as "virtual reality" but unable to sustain the argument beyond the first limp attempts to define his terms.
Nine years ago in the Gulf, he tells us, the West fought the last of the old wars. Kosovo brought us into a new era because it was not legally sanctioned, it was fought for a new end, no ground troops were involved, and no-one was killed on the victors' side. These are virtual realities for Ignatieff, and they herald a future in which war will involve virtual mobilisation, virtual alliances, virtual consent, virtual victory . . . no doubt it was just good manners that stopped him throwing in virtual death.
That wars are fought under new conditions does not mean that any new principles of legitimacy and justification are involved. Submarines were novel in the First World War, rockets in the second, and missiles turned left at the traffic lights in the Gulf. That does not make them virtual, less real, transformed by electronics into disembodied experience. All wars entail innovative methods to gain advantage and limit vulnerability. But they are still wars - human tragedies which call upon the same fundamental principles to justify them and to persuade the participants that it is right and fitting to die for the fatherland. They still kill real people and leave a pus of real destruction suppurating in their trail. Ignatieff wants none of that boring continuity. He has a catchy title in need of substance to support it.
The book is presented in seven chapters, only the last two of which have not already appeared in various American outlets. There is a chapter on "The Virtual Commander", General Wesley Clark, who is credited as "the man who won the first postmodern war in history". We have to take it on faith that Ignatieff knows what that means. Another chapter, on the work of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, offers a fetching snapshot of Louise Arbor, its former head, but makes no mention of the debate which has cast the forensic evidence of her Tribunal and its support for the NATO cause in serious doubt.
The new material offers the most interest. Ignatieff recounts his post-war conversation with Aleksa Djilas, son of the illustrious Yugoslav partisan and writer. In the course of their walk around the bomb sites of Belgrade, Djilas reflects on the gap between Serb and Western intellectuals on the justification of NATO's war and the fallout of collective guilt which has enveloped the people of Serbia in the eyes of their former Western friends and allies.
The author is at his most persuasive on the dilemma raised by the pursuit of risk-free war. War is about killing and being killed, and prosperous societies with higher life-expectancy, are no longer willing to stake all on a military adventure. Now that Kosovo has shown us that the cruel facts of war can be exchanged for virtual reality, we can bomb with impunity. If we can kill without being killed, then, as Ignatieff says, "democratic electorates may be more willing to fight, especially if the cause is justified in the language of human rights and even democracy itself."
Ignatieff recapitulates his unswerving support for the NATO cause while conceding the obvious grey areas, such as the bombing of the TV station and the moral inconsistency of the West in ignoring the expulsion of Serbs from Croatia. But he pays scant attention to the factual evidence on which such support must be based, all of which was available to him months before this book went to print. The findings of the International Tribunal investigating war crimes bear critically on the first principle of the just war to which Ignatieff subscribes. We cannot continue to hold that the war was just without examining the factual evidence available in support of that belief. How many innocent Albanians were killed by the Serbs before the war started is the key question before the Tribunal's forensic scientists. Their interim report does not make comfortable reading for NATO. It appears to be no less uncomfortable for Ignatieff, since he ignores the report and the debate entirely.
Again, as the author notes, the justification of war demands that it be prosecuted only as a last resort. In the light of all that we now know about the calculated deceptions of and by journalists, and the distortion of information on the negotiations which preceded the war, no-one can seriously believe that a settlement in line with humanitarian needs, if not with NATO's demands, was not achievable by diplomatic means. Ignatieff was well placed to test the facts. He seems to be unaware of them.
In its dual purpose - to defend the NATO cause and to forge a new concept out of the peculiarities of modern warfare - this book does not come up to the mark. Ignatieff appears to have learned nothing since the beginning of the war last year, when he - like most of us - was persuaded by TV images to back the NATO line. Has war become virtual? Not really. Just the same bloody carnage wrapped in sanitised metaphors of postmodernism to shield us from reality.
(Michael Ignatieff's TV documentary series, Future War, linked to this book, starts next Sunday on BBC 2 at 6 p.m.)
Bill McSweeney's new book, Security Identity & Interests: A Sociology of International Relations, was recently published by Cambridge University Press. He teaches at the Irish School of Ecumenics.