Never mind. Ignatieff's main point seems to be that ethnicity "is not a skin, but a mask, constantly repainted." Yet he quickly modifies this obvious truth, and claims that only brothers are merely masked and painted into difference; outside the family, others are much otherer. The modern universalizing ethic--the belief in one similar being under the mask--is a "liberal fiction." "It requires a self-conscious screening-out of certain empirical realities... judge and jury are supposed to ignore [defendants'] visible identities--as men, women, black, white, rich, poor--and construe them as if they were simple equal units."

Why a fiction? (Why liberal, for that matter--don't radical democrats take this idea much more seriously? Maybe it's just a fiction for liberals?) Are those differences "major" instead of "minor," and if they're minor, is it pure literary convention to dismiss them? If these particular differences are not mere masks, we deserve to hear the reason. Why be so quick to make an "ethics based on supposed facts of human nature, especially our universal susceptibility to pain and cruelty," a matter of pure myth? Has Ignatieff heard of ethnicities immune to pain? Shouldn't the biologists be told?

What's so annoying about Ignatieff's orotund riffs on myth and morality is that he can leap from them into precise, evocative reporting that captures all the ambiguities turned elsewhere into mere rhetoric. In a chapter based on a 1995 essay, "The Seductiveness of Moral Disgust," he follows Boutros Boutros-Ghali in Africa at the moment Srebrenica falls. In Rwanda, Boutros-Ghali is led to latrines where corpses are being dug up a year after a massacre. "The secretary-general peers into the stinking darkness, then steps away to draw breath. The expression on his face is of a man withdrawing as deep into himself as he can."

In Angola, Boutros-Ghali hugs Jonas Savimbi and "smiles his knowing smile." In Zaire, he thinks he has persuaded Mobutu not to expel Rwandan Hutu refugees (among them, doubtless, many guilty of anti-Tutsi atrocities); Mobutu expels them anyway. Boutros-Ghali negotiates patiently with one leader after another who has "blood on his hands." Ignatieff, watching CNN, hears that "Bosnian Serb soldiers have lured civilians out of hiding in the woods at the edge of town, lined them up, and shot them all. They say the Serbs were wearing blue helmets." Boutros-Ghali is hopelessly compromised; yet he is doing all that he can, given the realities.

"I was witnessing the moment when liberal internationalism reached the end of its tether," writes Ignatieff. The West won't take strong action because it's cramped by fear of neocolonialism (only cramped when it comes to things it doesn't want to do, I'd think) and prone to moral disgust, "an objective reaction to events, to the year-by-year incapacity of elites and societies to help themselves" (a disgust not evident when it comes to subsidizing those elites if their economies head toward disaster). Ignatieff doesn't address the way disgust with elites--and at neocolonialism--can itself fuel moral action and humanitarian intervention. Most of the field workers I've met doing dangerous and often apparently hopeless jobs in the refugee camps or human rights organizations of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia were moved by rage at the amorality of power. And by their very existence they showed how societies help themselves.

Ignatieff is in a quandary. He is racked by ambivalence, hostile to leftist analysis, a compassionate person in danger of moral disgust, searching for a sustaining myth. In "The Warrior's Honor," published in 1997, he finds one. This is the chapter that--after a long and fascinating history of the International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.)--finally takes up a point made in his introduction: Savage postmodern wars are fought by irregulars who don't share our universalist, rights-oriented ethic. If our ends are humanitarian, it's "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."

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