Slightly longer version than the one published in the Vancouver Sun

Over the years, we've all learned to listen when the Canadian born, British TV intellectual Michael Ignatieff speaks. It was only a matter of time before he would be put before us again to explain the significance of NATO's Kosovo campaign. After all, Ignatieff had already explained to us everything that a good liberal should know about the nasty business of Balkan nationalism in an earlier TV series.

The other night (11 June) Ignatieff was in his book-lined study telling the CBC's The Magazine that the war in Kosovo was both necessary and morally justifiable. The gracious Ignatieff explained the moral foundations of humanitarian war. And, as usual, it was a superb performance.

He quickly bore in on the fact that the NATO leadership had finally undertaken the noble task of policing the behavior of foreign governments within their own national boundaries when that behavior did not enjoy the approval of the "international community," or in its more aw-shucks variant the " family of nations." Yes, yes, there were injustices everywhere, but NATO had at long last drawn the line. And Belgrade had been chosen to receive the bounty of this new moral scrupulousness in the form of a 79 day bombardment.

National boundaries are, for all intents and purposes, a thing of the past it seems. No government is now immune from scrutiny in the conduct of its own internal affairs.

Errors of execution, like errant missile strikes, are regrettable and any loss of life is particularly painful, but liberals could take comfort from the purity of NATO's motives and the nobility of its goals. He was calm and re-assuring. It was vintage Ignatieff.

The painstaking care with which he chose his words and put forward his ideas was meant, I suppose, to convey quietly and gravely his moral seriousness. It was a performance that will have thoroughly allayed whatever queasiness a liberal conscience might have in the face of cluster bombs in crowded market squares and the careless rocketing of passenger trains.

But it was when he concluded with the astonishing claim that the NATO bombing campaign was going to bring peace to Kosovo for a generation, that Ignatieff inadvertently exposed the squishy core of humanitarian warmaking.

Peace for a generation in Kosovo? Like the bombing campaign, this is thinking carried on 15,000 feet above the devastation. Looking down from that height, nothing much seems to be happening on the ground. Human beings resemble busy little ants. It's easy enough to call it peace, if you don't go down for a closer look.

But then it's only from such heights that our TV intellectual finds it difficult to see that the only national boundaries which don't count any more are the national boundaries of small countries. I rather doubt the governments of the United States of America, Britain, Germany, Russia, and France will ever allow foreigners to meddle in their internal affairs.

The "international community" that President Clinton invokes is not an actual international institution like the United Nations or the International Court of Justice, the jurisdiction of which, incidentally, the Americans utterly refuse to recognize. No, Mr. Clinton's "international community" is merely the American government's own unilateral decision to do whatever it is it likes. Sound familiar, all you frustrated Canadian negotiators for salmon, soft wood lumber, and beef exports?

It implies of course an American infallibility of perception and judgement which is breathtaking in its arrogance. At least Papal infallibility doesn't come along with yuppie warlords sipping decaf cappuccinos while delivering "precision-guided assets" on the neurological wards of inconveniently located hospitals.

But then it's easy for politicians and TV philosophers, flying at 15,000 feet, to appeal to the highest principles when the cost to them is nil. It's easy to firm up that photogenic jaw, look the camera in the eye, as President Clinton is so fond of doing -- but now minus the telltale finger wagging of course -- and say that he's raining death on Kosovo and Serbia for humanity's sake. Just imagine the majesty of his principles at 25,000 feet.

Unfortunately for the earthbound, in Kosovo, not only is the present rather dark, but the future looks even darker. The Serb action against the Albanians was motivated by crimes against the Serb minority by the Albanian authorities in the 1980s when the province enjoyed an earlier period of autonomy. And those abuses were motivated by earlier uglinesses between the two communities stretching back to World War Two.

Now that NATO has weighed in on the side of the Albanians, conveniently forgetting earlier injustices, the Serbs will be ethnically cleansed from their homes in their turn. And so the cycle will continue. Perhaps NATO has no memory, but real people do. And it is often long and complicated. But at 15,000 feet the TV philosopher and NATO politicians only deal in memory-less abstractions, not real human beings.

The first and most important condition then for waging humanitarian war is systemic amnesia. If last year Madeleine Albright was calling the KLA a bunch of murdering terrorists, she must now insist, just as believably, that they are our noble allies in the fight for multi-ethnic democracy. So international relations begins to resemble the theatre of the absurd in which the characters in Act 2 don't remember what they did or said in Act 1.

Every conqueror who has marched into the Balkans for the last 600 years has had a perfectly plausible version of Ignatieff-ism to justify, on moral or religious grounds, the bringing to heel of small nations for the purposes of controlling and exploiting them. And the sweet talk about humanitarian bombing and the new moral order is just the latest words to an old tune.

And each of the conquerors who has come has had a local chorus of friends and a counter-chorus of enemies. Yesterday it was the Serb partisans who were our partners in vanquishing Nazism. Today the Albanians provide a jubilant army of refugees for Madeleine Albright's photo ops. And tomorrow? Funny how high above the clouds, it all looks so rosy.

(John Xiros Cooper teaches at U.B.C. and is an authority on Balkan culture.)