If it isn’t Haiti, it’s Somalia; if it isn’t Somalia, it’s Rwanda. As far as the eye can see, this is what military engagement now means – the intervention by a multinational force of the rich world’s soldiers, under the authority of the United Nations, in the affairs of a Godforsaken “failed nation.” To be prepared for such actions (it doesn’t matter a jot if they are called “peacekeeping,” “peacemaking,” “police actions” or “humanitarian interventions”), long years spent figuring how many Russian tanks can swarm through the Fulda Gap are useless. Today’s wars, and tomorrow’s, will be messy, unconventional, low intensity. The weapons of such wars will not just be Uzis and Stingers but machetes, chicken wire and a well-aimed spit in the face. As Gen. John Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently told U.S. troops, “Like it or not, most of you will find yourselves in a place you never heard of, doing things you never wanted to do.”
Shalikashvili had to hit that point hard, because it’s clear that America hates sending its young men to fight such wars, in the places they are likely to happen, when the “vital interests” of America are not at stake. And we may as well be honest: they rarely will be. Few failed nations are ever likely to have an intercontinental missile aimed at New York. Americans simply cannot stand the thin drizzle of casualties from countries far away, the kind to which old colonial powers like France and Britain have long been accustomed. Modern Americans want – as the French Gen. Philippe Morillon told The Washington Post – “zero-dead wars.”
Why have Americans become so skittish about taking part in wars in which people die? Part of the answer is well known: the ugliness of a Vietnam War that tore America apart. Part of it turns on the sheer ubiquity of television, which brings the horror of modern combat into Americans’ homes in real time. There are other, less conventional explanations. In a recent issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, Edward Luttwak of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies argued that in today’s small families, the loss of even one child is a catastrophe; in years gone by, families expected to lose children, often in war. Perhaps Americans have never quite come to terms with the military behemoth they created after 1945. Instead of treating soldiers as professionals who may kill or be killed, we sometimes treat them as if they were yeomen on a short leave from the plow. And then there’s the American attachment to symbols (a kind of surrogate history) of a peculiarly lugubrious kind: Arlington Cemetery, “Taps,” the slow folding of a flag over a coffin.
Many of these factors are unique to America. Some of them reflect well on its democratic habits, placing pitfalls in front of those who would unthinkingly spill young blood. Unlike France’s, say, the American political system is both open and fragmented, giving Congress (in fact, small groups of its members) the ability to stymie military action. But cumulatively, these factors have made the United States a neurotic lion. And since in a one-superpower world, Washington will often be asked (or, as in the case of Haiti, volunteer) to lead a multinational force, other nations and peoples are held hostage to America’s neuroses. Just think what it must have been like to be in Haiti in the last three months, listening to every twist and turn of American policy, never sure if, when or how international intervention would come. Think what life in Sarajevo must have been like, not just for months but for two years. Indecision can be terribly cruel.
Of course, the rest of the world could try peacekeeping without Americans. John Sanderson, the Australian general who led the U.N. peacekeeping force in Cambodia, says a key to the operation’s success was, “No American combat troops.” No GIs means no teary widows on the evening news, fewer flak-jacketed heroes of the Fourth Estate, no freelancing TV anchors, no teenage staffers on a “vital” congressional delegation – none of the stuff that gets in the way of operational decisiveness.
Yet like it or not, America can’t be kept out of tomorrow’s wars. For the next decade (at least), only America will have the transport planes, the sealift, the spies, the satellites, without which any kind of intervention is dangerous, if not impossible. Indeed, America provided just such support to the U.N. peacekeeping force in Cambodia. The NATO action in Bosnia has shown one way forward: American logistical support in the air and at sea, with French, British and other troops on the ground. But NATO isn’t ready or willing to act everywhere in the world; and even if it were, it’s the United Nations, not NATO, which has worldwide membership and the authority to order interventions.
Eventually, the yearlong mess that stretches from the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu to Port-au-Prince is probably susceptible to only one solution. The United Nations needs its own army, accountable not to national governments but to the United Nations itself. The rich world would have to donate equipment to such an army; real live soldiers would be recruited from volunteers. Some would be trained mercenaries, like the Nepalese Gurkhas; others would be units of the rich world’s armies. The Americans (of whom there would doubtless be many) could call themselves “The Lincoln Brigade,” just as the volunteers did in the Spanish Civil War. This won’t happen for years; it has its own dangers, and there will be scores of details that would have to be put right along the way. But few who watched America’s collective neurosis over Haiti can doubt that we need a fresh start. That, or let the new world’s disorder roam untamed.
