The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience.

The Warrior's Honor Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience Michael Ignatieff Metropolitan Books, $24.95, 207 pp.

British journalist Michael Ignatieff continues his tour through the rubble and ruin of late twentieth-century violence in his latest book. If, in Blood and Belonging (1993), he took us inside situations of internecine disintegration and war, here he aims to probe the mentality of Western nations that embark on intervention, aid, and assistance to those in trouble or those we think will likely be in trouble unless we assist in putting things right. This mix of "moral solidarity and hubris" intrigues Ignatieff, a frequent contributor to the New Republic and the New York Review of Books. "What impulses led us to supervise elections in Cambodia, try to protect the Kurds from Saddam, send UN troops to Bosnia, restore democracy to Haiti, bring the warriors to the table in Angola?" There is a further question: how are our "zones of safety" and their "zones of danger" linked? Why do we feel that we must "do something" for strangers well beyond our own families, friendships, and nations?

Ignatieff devotes five essays, here collected, to the matter. This is not a work in systematic moral philosophy; rather, Ignatieff gathers intimations, impressions, and narratives in a way that adds up to a decent road map if not a comprehensive encyclopedia. Here is the world according to Ignatieff. First, we citizens of the settled West are everywhere, as "aid workers, reporters, lawyers for war crimes tribunals, humanrights observers"--on and on. Clearly, the problems of other people concern us. So we get involved. Why does the world we find seem so chaotic and terrible? In the past fifty years an ever more robust regime of human rights has grown up alongside the most horrific carnage. The first discovery we make, then, is that "human rights have little or no purchase on this world of war. Far better to appeal to these fighters as warriors than as human beings, for warriors have codes of honor; human beings--qua human beings--have none." That, in a nutshell, is Ignatieff's thesis and the text is devoted to its exploration.

Ignatieff does well to warn us off a few of our pet evasions, the most common being that the tribal bloodshed in Rwanda, the upheavals in India, the disaster in Bosnia, can be summed up as "atavistic eruption of ... incorrigible tribalism," an urgency we in the West long ago left off or never suffered in the first place. That is far too easy, he insists, as it doesn't reckon with the overwhelming fears created by the "disintegration of states," especially in light of the fact that there are no alternative institutions that help individuals to form and to hold secure civic identities. The temptation of triumphalism may be great on our part: we respect human rights; they do no such thing. Ignatieff suggests that we have no real idea of what it would be like to find ourselves in situations that resemble Chapter XIII of Hobbes's Leviathan, where life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Yet we are drawn as moths to flames to the Bosnias and Rwandas. Why? Television is his preferred answer, a "new kind of electronic internationalism linking the consciences of the rich and the needs of the poor." These images of human suffering prick the conscience and animate a moral claim. We were prepared for this response by Christianity and the radical equality of all persons in the eyes of God, an egalitarianism that fueled modern human-rights discourse and argument. To be sure, European imperialism embodied a particularistic definition of human obligations, dividing the world into "us" and "them," but the European heritage also contained the seeds of a powerful corrective to this moral partiality. Universalism now trumps particularism. But the danger here is watery sentimentalism: we feel good about feeling bad about the misfortunes of others. Confronted with a "pure victim," we may fall into an unhealthy combination of pity and contempt as we prefer our victims to be blameless. Tougher by far to recognize that victims are likely to be victimizers as well--a narrative that doesn't play as well on television.

Moving to "the narcissism of minor difference," a term he owes to Freud, Ignatieff puzzles over identities and the sometimes deadly "fictions" of nationalism. He doesn't really get beyond the themes of Blood and Belonging, here repeating his argument about the ways in which, given a particular concatenation of circumstances, even minor differences get magnified into deadly incommensurabilities that blind human beings to the suffering of others and justify wounding those same others. Returning to the theme of moral disgust, Ignatieff scores the West's cautious and incautious reactions. We are sufficiently disgusted that we send UN troops into Bosnia and declare "safe havens." We are sufficiently loath to risk "our" lives for "theirs" that we stand by and watch helpless civilians being shelled to pieces in refugee cities. Perhaps, he suggests, we feel a kind of moral disgust toward victims, toward those who cannot help themselves.

Finally, he lifts up the honor of warriors and suggests that where humanrights language and just-war argument fall on hostile or uncomprehending ears, appeals to the honor of warriors might take us some distance in limiting the damage. Honorable warriors do not slaughter civilians indiscriminately. But it is none too clear how we are to go about enforcing codes of warrior honor in disintegrated situations and in light of the fact that, as Ignatieff makes painfully evident, many of those doing the killing are not warriors at all but irregulars who fight without training, without rules, and in the throes of a nigh-unlimited blood lust. Still, he would have us enforce the various Geneva Conventions that seek to ensure "that warriors conform to certain basic principles of humanity...." I'm not sure that has any better chance of stanching the flow of blood than appeals to human rights. But Ignatieff, horrified by what he has seen, believes that we should call up and call upon whatever is in our cultural and political armamentarium to interdict killing, and in this he is surely right.

The Warrior's Honor is vivid in description; thin in prescription. But we are all in Ignatieff's debt for his insistent plumbing of the heart of contemporary darkness. His concluding call for a healing "forgetting" if nations are to move on from traumatic collective wounds is particularly provocative.

Jean Bethke Elshtain's most recent book is Real Politics (Johns Hopkins).