The time he spent with the I.C.R.C. in Afghanistan taught Ignatieff "to rethink my antiwar culture" and convinced him that effective humanitarianism "means accepting a moral pact with the devil of war, seeking to use its flames to burn a path to peace." The I.C.R.C., unlike aid organizations oriented to human-rights activism, is neutral. Part of its job is to enforce the Geneva conventions. Thus, in order to help P.O.W.s effectively, it needs the cooperation of the military, so it doesn't share information with war crimes tribunals for fear of losing that cooperation. Ignatieff's description of the I.C.R.C.'s work shows a powerful, compromising but brave and inspiring organization full of internal conflicts, failures, half-successes. A true-enough sounding picture. There is, however, no attempt to show that the I.C.R.C. is more effective or helps more people than, say, Médecins sans Frontières or the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Instead, Ignatieff leaps from this complex description into a vision. "In most traditional societies, honor is associated with restraint, and virility with discipline. In the manly bearing of many old Afghan warriors...there is a martial order that is also a proud vision of male identity." He never elaborates on the meaning of this identity, so I won't either. But it's not a subtext to ignore. When the I.C.R.C. refuses to join other relief agencies in protesting a Taliban decree suspending Afghan women from their agency jobs, he asks the Kabul director "whether he considered women's rights a humanitarian issue. 'Of course not,' he replied briskly. I was beginning to understand that the laws of war are one thing and human rights quite another. The I.C.R.C. enforces the laws of war.... Its legitimacy depends on its working with warriors and warlords."

The I.C.R.C.'s Web site says it's happy to report that Afghan women are working with the agency again, so please note that this proud male vision is more Ignatieff's than the Red Cross's, part of his slippage between "warrior" and "soldier." The very word warrior is a form of nostalgia. Warriors are medieval figments. Soldiers are real, and Ignatieff believes in soldiers as if they were warriors.

"More than development, more than aid or emergency relief, more than peacekeepers," he says, nations at risk in the post-cold war world need "professional armies under the command of trained leaders." Think about professional armies for a moment. Japanese in Nanking, Russians in Berlin or Chechnya, ourselves in Vietnam, Iranians and Iraqis in their mutual war, us again in the Gulf, most any military at any time in Latin America. Doesn't bombing count? Haven't there been wars in which irregulars--partisans, guerrillas--behaved better than regular armies? Isn't faith in the military one of the foundations of the nationalism that fuels the wars Ignatieff deplores?

The Angolan civil war lasted thirty years, he notes, and the Afghan war has gone on since 1979, but "in times past, war observed its own ecological limits." What about the war in Germany that lasted thirty years, and that cut Germany's population by a third before it ended in 1648? His yearning for the good old wars is deeply berserk. Bosnia itself is evidence against him. Isn't career officer Ratko Mladic an even more eminent war criminal than poet-psychiatrist Karadzic? Yugoslavia maintained an absurdly large army, which overwhelmingly supported Milosevic's rise to power. Its quite professional tanks suppressed the March 1991 Belgrade demonstrations; it armed and supported both Croatian and Bosnian Serbs; it was directly involved in war crimes.

After thinking about the honor of those warriors on whom Ignatieff rests his only hopes, it is difficult to read with any sympathy what he says about truth and reconciliation commissions and war crimes trials. I kept seeing Pinochet, that professional (and in his own eyes honorable) warrior, trying to slither into a Chilean Senate seat so he won't be called to account. And no matter how elegant many of Ignatieff's formulations are, how nicely he writes about James Joyce, how good his point is about, say, the way Russia hasn't come to terms with its Soviet past--the soldiers, his warriors, get in the way. Not to mention that some Russians have set up a Gulag Museum.

The entire book is geared toward creating a "modern conscience" that relies on some sort of Real-Ethik, a parallel to Realpolitik. Realpolitik isn't the politics of realism, or of reality--certainly not reality seen from below, from the point of view of the dead farmer in the line of fire rather than the warrior aiming at another warrior. It is the politics of things as they are and power as it is. An ethics that mirrors such a politics is useless. It is the result of a completely understandable despair, but that doesn't make it true. The warrior's honor has gotten us where we are; now it's time to celebrate the citizen's honor.

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