Virtual War Kosovo and Beyond [Paperback]

For a decade, Michael Ignatieff has provided eyewitness accounts and penetrating analyses from the world's battle zones.In Virtual War, he offers an analysis of the conflict in Kosovo and what it means for the future of warfare. He describes the latest phase in modern combat: war fought by remote control. In real war, nations are mobilized, soldiers fight and die, victories are won. In virtual war, however, there is often no formal declaration of hostilities, the combatants are strike pilots and computer programmers, the nation enlists as a TV audience, and instead of defeat and victory there is only an uncertain endgame.

Kosovo was such a virtual war, a war in which U.S. and NATO forces did the fighting but only Kosovars and Serbs did the dying. Ignatieff examines the conflict through the eyes of key players--politicians, diplomats, and generals--and through the experience of the victims, the refugees and civilians who suffered. As unrest continues in the Balkans, East Timor, and other places around the world, Ignatieff raises the troubling possibility that virtual wars, so much easier to fight, could become the way superpowers impose their will in the century ahead.

Ignatieff has produced a work that is both intellectually unflinching and genuinely open-minded. Ostensibly a consideration on the moral and political implications of the West's military intervention in Kosovo, the book is in fact the best exploration of both the operational and moral dilemmas of humanitarian war that has yet been written . . . A considerable achievement. David Rieff, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Arresting . . . Helps combat many of the cliched images we have of the Balkans, and explain how the world's most powerful military alliance had its credibility put to the test in a long-neglected corner of Europe. Michael Dobbs, The Washington Post Book World

A talented and versatile writer, Ignatieff takes up the central moral issues l3—